Email marketing has been around for two decades — and it's showing no
signs of dying any time soon. In spite of newer, cooler-sounding
channels like social media and mobile marketing, email marketing has
proved to be one of the most effective and sustainable ways to reach
customers and grow a small business.
Thanks to technology, email marketing is continuously evolving. From
laboriously managing lists and manually sending text-only emails, a
plethora of email marketing solutions
now offer advanced systems that let you send automated, beautifully
designed rich-media messages that convert and deliver a decent return on
investment (ROI). And there is so much more to come.
To help you stay ahead of the tech curve and gain an edge on
competitors, here are five tools that are changing email marketing and
how you can use them for your small business. [The Future of Email Marketing]
1. E-commerce: Transactional email
What: Transactional emails can change the way online stores
cross- or up-sell their products and services. Considered as one of the
hidden opportunities in email marketing, transactional emails like
order confirmations, delivery notifications, receipts, password
reminders and other transaction-related messages are almost guaranteed
to be delivered and read by customers. For this reason, transactional
emails are an excellent way to suggest additional items customers might
like and add to their orders, distribute promotions and coupon codes,
and announce future sales and special events.
Solution: Check out Campaigner.
Its new SMTP Relay feature helps businesses harness the power of
transactional emails to build relationships with customers. The service
guarantees increased open rates and delivery to help businesses boost
revenue from customers already interested in their products and
services.
2. Mobile: Responsive email templates
What: Responsive email templates can change the way your emails are opened, viewed and acted on by customers. Just like responsive Web design,
responsive email templates ensure that your emails are seen the way
they are meant to be seen. They automatically adjust to a customer's
device — desktop, tablet or mobile — for the most optimized view based
on screen size.
Moreover, data from the U.S. Consumer Device Preference Report revealed
that 65 percent of emails are being opened on smartphones, making it
more important than ever to use an email marketing service that offers
this feature. Because if a customer can't read your email properly the
first time, or if they have to bother with zooming and endless scrolling
on a small screen, it will likely be trashed and future emails will
probably be ignored.
Solution: Check out Campaign Monitor,
which specializes in optimizing emails across all devices. The service
lets you create your own template, which you can easily design using
drag-and-drop elements — no coding skills required. It also gives you
the option of choosing from pre-made, mobile-ready templates so you can
get started right away. If you are a little more tech-savvy or you have a
Web programmer on your team, Campaign Monitor lets you edit templates
using open language CSS and HTML.
[For a side-by-side comparison of the best email marketing services, visit our sister site Top Ten Reviews.]
3. Engagement: Video emails
What: Adding videos to your emails can change the way
customers engage with your brand. It's a growing trend that few
businesses have yet to master, but those who have mastered video email
gain an edge over their competitors. A 2013 study revealedthat
55 percent of marketers who used video email marketing saw higher
click-through rates, while 44 percent saw an increase in how long
customers viewed emails; 41 percent also experienced more shares and
forwards.
This year, KISSmetrics, an analytics company, predicted
that video marketing will continue to grow, as it delivers more of an
impact to consumers, saves time getting your message across, and offers
the potential to go viral. Additionally, videos can be repurposed
throughout other marketing channels and social media, giving businesses a
boost in search engine optimization.
Solution: Check out MailChimp,
which offers several ways to include video codes in your email
marketing campaigns. Most email providers don't support video players in
emails, but MailChimp provides three work-arounds.
These include auto-converting embedded videos that you've already
posted on your website or blog, manually linking to your videos with
screenshots and video merge tags for YouTube, Vimeo and other online
video-streaming services.
4. List management: Big data and predictive analytics
What: Big Data and predictive analytics can change the
way you manage email lists to better segment and target customers for
more successful email marketing campaigns. These advanced reporting
tools can help you discover what's truly working and what isn't — by
revealing key insights such as trends, how customers are interacting
with emails, the ways demographics impact customer behaviors, and how
purchase and Web-browsing histories are predictive of future behaviors —
so you can make wiser data-driven decisions when it comes to your
marketing spend.
Solutions: Check out BlueHornet
email marketing solutions, which aims to increase ROI for small
businesses by offering a wide range of advanced analytics and reporting
tools. The service can help you segment lists based on clicks, as well
as target customers using social media and mobile behaviors. It also
offers features like data visualization, custom reports and email
testing. Additionally, BlueHornet gives you access to delivery
management reports to uncover how emails are treated by customers and
email providers; this includes complaint rates, spam rates, bounce
rates, blacklists and block lists.
Another option is to integrate small business-friendly Big Data solutions and customer relationship management (CRM)
software into your email marketing campaigns. Using these additional
tools, you'll discover even more insights into customer behavior and how
this data can boost your email marketing campaigns.
5. Delivery: Wearable technology
What: Wearable technology — particularly smartwatches —
will change not only the way people communicate, but how they access,
read and act upon emails. Apple Watch is set to arrive in early 2015, and Android Wear
has already claimed its stake with several smartwatches on the market.
Just as email marketers have had to adapt and cater emails to
smartphones and tablets, they'll have to optimize emails for even
smaller screens and thus far unpredictable wearable-based consumer
behavior.
Solutions: There are currently no wearables-friendly
email marketing solutions available, but there are several best
practices that industry analysts have already began to surmise.
Marketing research firm eMarketer reports
that wearables have a much smaller window of opportunity for emails to
convert and that interaction will be limited. Instead, businesses should
focus on touch-based engagement and single-touch responses, not
two-thumb typing and multi-tap browsing, as customers usually would with
other mobile devices.
0 comments:
Post a Comment