Email Marketing Trends 2022: Are You Abreast With The Progression?

Remember the 90s era when you used to email your long-distance friend and then wait for their reply? That time is passé. You hardly rely on emails for personal communications these days. Instead, it has emerged as a top marketing channel extensively used by marketers to promote their products and services.

Emails have seen tremendous transformation in the past few years as they have grown beyond plain text emails. In 2022 and the years to come, marketers will witness some incredible advancements in the world of email. 

Let’s see how email is set to turn over a new leaf in the future. 

1. Email marketing jobs will get more demanding

Gone are the days when a single email marketing professional was responsible for the entire email template production workflow starting from copywriting to the final deployment. In the coming days, hiring managers will also look for basic HTML and CSS coding expertise in their email marketing professionals. They should be able to make minor customizations to the emails in the ESP or automation tool. Job descriptions will get more exhaustive than before.

2. Marketers will heavily rely on automation

Automated emails help to conform to the marketing triad and send the right message to the right person at the right time. In the coming years, email automation will get even more advanced with predictive analytics. CRM tools like Marketo and Salesforce have already started incorporating advanced AI features that help to score the leads and create relevant communications. It will reduce the workload and let the marketers focus on important tasks that facilitate business growth.

3. Privacy settings will be more advanced

iOS has launched advanced mail privacy protection that will hinder open rate tracking. The subscriber will be able to hide their email address and location through these settings. 

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Moreover, as ransomware attacks are expected to increase, spam filters will get more alert while scanning emails. Owing to strict anti-spam guidelines, marketers will have to make sure that their emails do not trigger any spam filters. Machine learning functionality and multiple-factor authentication will be used to enhance email security. 

4. Emails will be used in sync with other marketing channels

Marketers counting exclusively on emails will have to reset their strategy and consider social media, SMS, and push notifications too in their marketing plan. By combining the power of all these platforms, you will be able to take your business to the next level while imparting a superior experience to the subscribers.

5. Subscribers will see more interactive emails in their inboxes

According to a research by Zembula, interactive emails perform a lot better than static emails. 

These emails boast of a higher engagement rate, more conversions, and improved brand reputation. As such emails are more likely to get shared, they will increase brand visibility and ultimately contribute to customer acquisition. Interactivity in emails goes beyond countdown timers and GIFs. They are features like polls, surveys, quizzes, forms, and hover effects that allow the user to take action from the email itself. As they eliminate the need to be redirected to a landing page, the subscribers are keener to take action when compared to traditional emails.

6. Maintaining an empathetic tone will be of paramount importance

As the world is going through tough times with changing political dynamics and pandemic situation, tone-deaf emails will just mean another spam communication. To make sure your emails get opened and clicked through, you must draft empathetic emails. They must reflect consideration for the readers and show them that you value their association with your brand.

7. Agile marketing operations will get more popular

You have to depend on marketing operations to create audiences, validate links, send tests, add tracking codes, convert PSD into HTML documents, and write query codes for smooth execution of the personalization rules and dynamic content work. As the complexity of these operations will increase, marketers will have to adopt agile management systems. Through agile methodology, you will be able to reduce the template production time and eliminate errors. It will eventually contribute to a higher conversion rate by boosting the email campaign performance.

8. Focus on “1%”

Last but not the least, I would like to highlight the importance of “1%” of your data. Marketers often make the mistake of thinking that 100% of their email list make 100% of revenue. As a matter of fact, 90% of the email revenue comes from 1% of the data (barring some exceptions). Therefore, marketers should pay attention to cleaning. Do not shy away from removing subscribers who are lying dormant in your email list. Stop mailing people who have not engaged with your recent emails. You should, rather, focus on the people who open and click-through your emails. Having a small list of engaged subscribers is better than building a huge list that hardly brings results. 

Wrapping Up

If we compare all the marketing channels, email has been the most consistent one free from the challenges of changing algorithms. Just incorporate these trends and continue to harvest the fruits from your email marketing strategy. 

Still, looking for more insights into the topic?

Head to the interactive infographic created by the folks at Email Uplers: 41 Email Experts on Email Marketing Trends to Look Out For In 2022