You might believe that email marketing has become redundant, but as we step into 2023, it remains a crucial part of digital marketing strategies. Emerging technologies have impacted many industries in the 21st century and have also transformed how businesses connect with their consumers using email, helping drive more leads.
Let’s explore the current state of email marketing, the emerging trends, the technologies that will shape the future of email marketing, and the impact of these trends on consumers and businesses.
Email Marketing Today: Trends, Challenges, and Opportunities
With so many different marketing platforms emerging, it’s easy to dismiss email marketing and call it an ancient technology used by traditional marketers. However, surprisingly, email marketing is still an effective and affordable marketing strategy with high ROI and consumer reach compared to other marketing channels.
As a business owner, you can’t afford to ignore the potential benefits of email marketing. Whether you’re talking about startups or large businesses leading their industries, email marketing is a crucial strategy for all businesses.
According to Statista, there were 4.03 billion email users worldwide in 2020, with the number expected to reach 4.59 billion in 2025. These statistics highlight the importance of email marketing and the opportunity available for you to target new consumers and increase your lead generation.
However, as an email marketer or business owner, you must tackle several challenges to have your voice heard.
Firstly, Google moves many emails to the spam folder, making it difficult for you to target new audiences and ensure that your emails are received.
Secondly, you face growing competition in a user’s inbox, and it can be challenging to cut through all the clutter and prompt consumers to read your emails over others. To tackle this issue, personalization, and dynamic content have become increasingly popular, especially in 2023.
Finally, mobile optimization should be a key consideration for you when creating email campaigns. Nowadays, many people read emails on mobile phones. If your email does not have a responsive design, optimized subject lines and preheaders, and concise messaging, you risk losing subscribers.
Emerging Trends in Email Marketing to Drive Leads
The following are some emerging email marketing trends you may want to use to drive engagement, lead generation, and sales.
Personalization and Dynamic Content
We’ve heard the buzzword “personalization” for many years in email marketing, but in 2023, it’s become more relevant. Converting individuals into your customers without personalized experiences and emails becomes more challenging.
You must study your customer list, segment them into groups, and create personalized email campaigns targeting the different groups. Whether you’re looking to include the customer’s name in the email or create an entire product offering based on the customer’s browsing history, personalization has become essential in building strong relationships with your customers.
Dynamic content or hyper-personalization takes personalization to the next level, allowing you to customize the content of an email in real-time based on data such as location or device type.
Interactive Email Experiences
With the average user’s attention span of 8.25 seconds (lower than a goldfish’s), it becomes more critical in 2023 to create fun and interactive experiences for potential customers to help them engage with your brand and emails more.
An example of interactive email experiences includes subscribers interacting with the content within the email rather than clicking a link to the landing page, helping improve user experience and the potential to convert customers.
You can use many tools to add interactive content to your email campaigns, such as fun games, multiple shopping options, and even social media posts.
Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning
Many industries use machine learning and artificial intelligence to automate emails and tailor messages to the intended audience.
According to Kent Lewis, the CEO of Anvil Media, AI will help smaller businesses create major email campaigns without spending large budgets and ensure all the campaigns produced to comply with privacy regulations like GDPR.
With AI, you can reduce the time spent on A/B and multivariate tests and personalize emails based on predictive behavior and demographics.
Although having AI can be alarming for traditional marketers, it doesn’t need to be. AI is there to take over mundane tasks and improve them to ensure efficiency and effectiveness.
Predictive Analytics
Predicting future events is critical to your business and its sales strategy. Predictive analytics can help you anticipate your customer’s needs and behaviors according to different events in the future, allowing you to change your marketing campaigns to target those needs effectively.
When it comes to email marketing, predictive analytics can help you identify potential customers and curate marketing campaigns for them according to their needs. It can help convert readers into customers and improve the business’s ROI.
Cross-channel Integration
Cross-channel integration refers to incorporating multiple marketing channels to create a more cohesive customer journey. To deliver a seamless experience across various platforms, cross-channel integration has become increasingly important.
You can integrate your email campaigns with your social media or SMS marketing campaigns to deliver a more cohesive brand experience and improve your marketing’s effectiveness.
Voice Assistants and Smart Speakers
Smart speakers such as Echo and Google Home and Voice Assistants like Google and Siri have revolutionized how people interact with their devices.
Using the same concept, you can use such technologies to allow customers to interact with their email campaigns using their voice. It makes it convenient for potential customers to interact with your brand and familiarize themselves with your products or services. Voice-activated emails can increase consumer engagement and drive more leads.
Technologies Shaping the Future of Email Marketing
The following technologies are set to shape the future of email marketing.
Blockchain and Encrypted Email
Blockchain is a digitally distributed, decentralized, public ledger on a network that makes it challenging to hack the system or change recorded information. It can revolutionize email marketing by providing a safe, decentralized platform for sending email campaigns.
Email marketing happens on servers vulnerable to hacking, but with blockchain, companies can now provide additional security to their customers during email marketing campaigns.
The added layer of email security with blockchain and encrypted email allows for building trust, which is essential for brand-building and email marketing campaigns.
Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality
Using Augmented Reality (AR), you will be able to create interactive product demos in 3D, allowing customers to see your products from all angles and interact with them before deciding whether they want to purchase them. This engaging and memorable experience can help businesses increase lead generation and sales.
In the future, you may be able to use Virtual Reality (VR) to invite customers via email to virtual events to get exclusive access to product launches, sales, and other benefits. It can also help create a personalized user experience by creating a virtual store with products according to their preferences.
5G technology and Faster Connectivity
With 5G technology and faster connectivity in the future, you may be able to trigger emails according to real-time events such as weather changes, the latest social media trends, and more. For example, if it starts raining, it could trigger a marketing campaign for umbrellas or raincoats and immediately send it to your subscribers so that they can purchase them.
While 5G promises faster connectivity, choosing the right VPN, whether its free vs paid VPN, becomes even more important as real-time triggered emails based on events like weather or social media trends could expose your browsing habits and location.
Faster connectivity and 5G technology will enable you to send high-quality videos, interactive graphics, or multimedia content without bandwidth limitations.
You could also incorporate live chat in the future in your marketing email campaigns allowing your subscribers to receive support in real-time pertaining to the campaign and the products. Instant customer support means higher conversion rates!
Internet of Things (IoT) and Connected Devices
IoT in email marketing can revolutionize how your business targets consumers to increase lead generation and sales in the future. It can make email marketing more engaging and immersive.
For example, a fitness tracker can send data to different companies about individuals’ activity levels, fitness, and other indicators allowing businesses to curate their campaigns according to the consumer’s needs. A healthcare company could use the data to create personalized emails targeting the consumers’ diet or lack of vitamins to promote their products.
Another example is a smart thermostat and the data it collects. You can use that data to effectively launch emails when your subscribers are at home and not busy at work.
Impact of Emerging Trends and Technologies on Email Marketing
Emerging trends and technologies have significantly impacted email marketing, helping businesses create personalized and engaging experiences for the consumer. These technologies have completely transformed the way you interact with your consumers, increasing brand awareness, loyalty, and trust.
For example, you can leverage customer data and use advanced analytics to determine consumer preferences, segment their audience, and curate emails for different groups. Personalized subject lines and product recommendations resonate with the consumers and help improve business sales.
Another example is predictive analytics which allows you to gather relevant information to drive leads. This can include the time your consumers make purchases in the day, what products your consumers prefer the most and other information about customer behavior.
Many are quick to assume that email marketing is dead and used by old-timers. On the contrary, there are technologies in 2023 and the future that have allowed businesses to take their email marketing campaigns to another level and make email marketing more relevant than before.
Conclusion
More personalization and immersive and targeted experience is the future of email marketing, and businesses are investing in technologies such as blockchain, predictive analytics, AR and VR, AI, and many more. These technologies can allow you to reach out to your customers, interact and resonate with them, increase engagement, and drive conversion rates, lead generation, and business revenue.
