Email has proven to be more than just a communication tool for personal and business purposes. It is now 2020 and email remains one of the most effective strategies when it comes to online marketing. In fact, 81% of SMBs use email to acquire more customers, while 80% of these businesses use email to retain their existing customers. Whether it’s to promote a new brand, market new products, grow your target market or to confirm a sale, email is a very handy tool for businesses.
If you are planning to start a business right out of college or you want to increase the number of your customers, email will definitely come in handy. Not sure how to start your email marketing strategy for 2020? Here are five email marketing trends that beginners will definitely find useful.
1. Optimize for mobile users
Nowadays, email messages can be read from different gadgets, apart from your desktop or laptop. Most users read their messages from smartphones, tablets and iPads. Based on a recent study, 75% of smartphone users check their email through their phone. Moreover, 2 out of 3 email messages are being read and opened on smartphones and tablets. And if an email message does not load properly on a mobile device, 70% of consumers delete them immediately, while 51% of them unsubscribe from brands whose email doesn’t display right. If you don’t want to lose subscribers and for your marketing emails to end up in the trash, it’s imperative that you optimize your emails so that they are mobile-friendly. The best way to approach this is to create a responsive email design. This way, your email messages will have a higher clickthrough rate.
2. Simplify your email design and content
Another essential trend any beginner email marketer must practice is the art of simplicity in terms of email design and content. When it comes to email marketing, sometimes less is better. See to it that you don’t overwhelm your email recipients with too much images, media and information. Stick to your purpose of informing your target market about your brand. Be it an email for promotion, about an abandoned cart, a weekly newsletter, a sales confirmation, or just a thank you email to your loyal customers, keep it sweet and simple.
3. Be clear with your call-to-action
Before you send out that marketing email, think about what your end goal is. What do you want your target recipients to do? Do you want them to visit your website? Like your social media pages, watch your promo video or purchase from your online store? Whatever your goal, maybe see to it that your customers know what the purpose of the email is. How do you do that? By providing a clear call to action. Most marketing emails provide buttons or clickable links or media, specifying what an email recipient must do after reading that email. In fact, reports show that anchor text CTAs alone can increase conversion rates by an average of 121%.
4. Automate your marketing emails
When it comes to getting your business out there, there are a variety of marketing strategies that you can take advantage of apart from email marketing. Thus, you should not invest all of your time and efforts just on creating and sending out emails to your target market. Nowadays, most marketing email platforms provide the option of scheduling email messages, so you might want to take advantage of this feature. You can simply segment your email subscribers based on their demographics, create a personalized email for each group, and setup a regular schedule as to when you would want your email messages to send out. That way, you won’t have to do it manually all the time. You can then use your free time to create new marketing strategies and balance your life with your social and business endeavors.
5. Integrate social media to your email marketing
Speaking of other marketing strategies, another effective way of promoting your business is by using social media. And to let you reach out to more consumers, you can integrate your social media with your email marketing strategies. Provide your email recipients with the opportunity to visit and follow your social media account. And if like most businesses, you are also taking advantage of Facebook and Instagram bots, letting your customers know about your social media can also help you improve your communication with your consumers. This can make it easy for you to retain customers and provide them with a good customer experience.
Whether it’s to promote your business, your new products, or just to maintain your relationship with your customers, email marketing will always be a valuable strategy. Moreover, by including these email marketing trends into your business’ promotional efforts, you will soon enough earn some much needed results, be it to increase your sales or to grow your followers.
