3 Email Marketing Trends for 2017

Email marketing continues to demonstrate its value year upon year, delivering one of the highest returns on investment compared with any other marketing channel and driving billions in retail sales.

Evidently, email has grown into an established marketing channel that helps marketers to deliver exceptional customer conversations and achieve fantastic results. Thanks to the evolution of technology, marketers are becoming increasingly sophisticated and can now learn so much about their customers, including their backgrounds, their buying habits and much more.

This acquisition of such in-depth information now enables marketers to predict future trends and behaviour, and then use email in line with those predictions to really appeal to their specific target market. This intense availability of information has turned email into a very powerful tool indeed and combined with the evolution of technology, emails have now become aesthetically appealing, beautifully crafted entities designed to improve customer relationships and drive sales.

With all of the above in mind, email marketing is without doubt worth taking seriously for any business out there. And since email clearly isn’t going anywhere, we thought we’d take the opportunity to bring you some email marketing trends we predict are going to take place throughout 2017:

1. Interactivity and Animations

Interactivity is one trend that experts believe will be big news for 2017. It allows email subscribers to open the email and click inside it, thus bringing up new content or enabling them to take other action within the email. From quizzes to search bars, menus and everything else in between, the opportunities are endless. And while these emails can be fun and attention-grabbing, they can also give users deeper insight into available products, which makes the purchasing journey more seamless.

2. Using video in email

HTML5 now enables videos to play within email, and as of November 2016, more than 53% of emails were opened in Apple email apps. However video in email can only be implemented for subscribers whose devices support HTML5, so it’s important to have a backup for those who don’t support this feature. A number of brands have been building out their video content capabilities in recent years, although there are more examples of brands using animated GIFs than video to date, as these are still considered more reliable than video.

3. Responsive Design

Responsive emails are designed to alter their layout content in line with the device they are being viewed on. Emails should absolutely, absolutely be optimised for mobile. Nowadays, it’s not a question of IF you are optimising your emails for mobile, but HOW, because so many consumers now read their emails via smartphone or tablet. By focusing on how an emails looks when opened on a particular device, we can implement features such as CSS animation, live content and much more.

Clearly, email is becoming more of a fully integrated, conversational tool used by businesses to develop more creative, exciting brand experiences.

Are you using email to its full advantage?

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