The Most Promising Email Marketing Trends for 2022 and Beyond
Once upon a time, email was used for personal communications with long-distance friends and family members. It has metamorphosed beautifully into a versatile marketing channel that brings the highest ROI when compared to all other platforms. Given the dynamic political ecosystem and several other current affairs, your customers are compelled to change their shopping behavior and the way they interact with your marketing communications. All these factors have contributed to the changing email marketing trends. While some trends like Artificial Intelligence and an omnichannel marketing approach will continue to trend in 2022, there have been a couple of new entrants too.
Let’s take a look at the hottest email marketing trends for 2022.
1. Advanced privacy settings
With the launch of Mail Privacy Protection in iOS 15, marketers are left in a fix. The new privacy settings will prevent the correct tracking of open rates as the email will be downloaded in the background even if it is not opened. Therefore, open rate will no longer stay an accurate email analysis metric. Instead, email marketers will have to rely on click-through rate and conversion rate to gauge the email campaign performance.
This screenshot explains how you can change the settings in your Apple device.
Moreover, people will be able to hide their location and email address. As an implication, it will be a matter of great pride if someone signs up and shares their email address.
Check the image below:
As ransomware attacks are expected to increase this year, spam filters algorithms will also get more stringent. They will use advanced machine learning solutions and multiple-factor authentication. So, you must focus on sending personalized emails that do not create any deliverability issues.
2. Emotional messaging
Maintaining an empathetic tone across all marketing channels including emails will be of paramount importance because of the upheaval caused by the pandemic. Your emails must reflect a sense of sensitivity towards the subscribers and let them know that you care for them. Try to tap on the emotional instinct of the readers and add more value to their lives. Let me share a personal experience with you. Recently I received an email with the subject line: ‘Corona clearance sale! Deals up for grabs’.
I found it inconsiderate and hurtful. Make sure you do not make such a mistake in 2022 and beyond.
3.Consolidation of different features
MarTech solutions will integrate different functionalities to impart a seamless experience to the users. It will help to improve the marketer’s focus while saving time. To elaborate, you can integrate Email Verification API and Marketing Automation solutions to enhance email security and provide email verification functionalities.
4.Accessibility in emails
Marketers will strive to make their emails more accessible so that they can reach a larger audience. The email copies will be brief with larger fonts and clear visuals. Also, many readers will go the Dark Mode way so designing Dark Mode compatible emails will become a best practice rather than a trend.
5.Interactive email designs
Interactive emails have been trending for a couple of years now. In 2022, email developers will focus on producing user-friendly interactive designs to include polls, surveys, games, forms, quizzes, and hover effects. Such interactivity will increase the conversion rate by reducing the number of steps required to complete the action. You can create seasonal fun by incorporating interactivity in your Holiday emails.
6.Artificial Intelligence in Emails
It can be conveniently predicted that AI will draft emails in the years to come. Marketing professionals will be able to generate text and receive AI-driven text suggestions in the ESP itself. This technology has already entered the world of landing page builders. It has facilitated the creation of several product pages in a short time. Soon, such software will be used for email marketing too. It will suggest engaging subject lines and help to draft a persuasive email based on the business model and customer’s pain points.
7. Return of plain text emails
With the execution of strict anti-spam guidelines, plain text emails will make a grand comeback. As open rate tracking will become obsolete, marketers will have to try out other formats. These text-based emails will be a welcome change in the inbox amidst the rise of HTML emails.
8. Improved email compatibility
Email clients will continue to get technologically stronger and extend support to advanced features like AMP and Dark Mode. As a result, marketers will be able to experiment with new features and interactive elements in their emails. After all, better support will mean better emails and an enhanced subscriber experience.
9. Omnichannel marketing strategy
Even if your emails are performing well, you must not overlook the other marketing channels. Try to invest in a multichannel marketing strategy by giving enough weightage to social media, push notifications, text messaging, and in-app communications. If we talk in terms of ROI, email brings an ROI of $36 for every dollar spent as suggested by Litmus. On the other hand, push notifications generate up to 2200% ROI. You must combine the power of all these channels and use them to your advantage.
10. Broad job descriptions
There was a time when companies had an email marketer managing all the aspects of email marketing strategy, be it copywriting, designing, coding, or deploying. However, in the coming years, email marketing positions will have lifecycle marketing roles. Recruiters and decision makers will look for skillsets like HTML and CSS so that they can create custom in-app messages and work better with ESPs and automation tools.
Wrapping Up
The competitive bottleneck has made it imperative to acquire customers and retain them. The market is expected to get even more competitive in 2022. Stay abreast with these trends and incorporate them into your email marketing strategy right away to stay ahead of the curve and propel your sales.
