4 Key Email Marketing Trends of 2021 to Implement Now
For years now, businesses have identified email as a top generator of return on investment. Even throughout the unprecedented year of 2020, email continued to prove its worth as a consistent marketing channel performer as businesses chose the platform to reach their customers.
Currently accounting for 3.9 billion daily users with an expected rise to 4.3 billion by 2023, it’s no surprise that email will continue to remain far and away one of the biggest ROI drivers.
Notably, email generates $42 for every $1 spent, which is an astounding 4,200% ROI, making it one of the most effective options available for any business.
However, to extract the channel’s lucrative value, businesses need to do more than just send emails; they need to optimize their email marketing campaigns.
To gain those extraordinary results from your 2021 email marketing plan, we have identified four trends to help inform your strategy.
Enhanced Personalization
The findings show that personalized emails drive 6x times more transactions than generic ones.
But just because emails with personalized subject lines are 26% more likely to be opened, you need to do more than just add your recipient’s name in an email subject line and message to sway consumers in 2021.
If you cannot provide recipients with the hyper-personalized content relevant to them, you lose them. In fact, 20% of people unsubscribe from a newsletter if the content or promotions don’t match their interests.
That’s a significant loss to your email marketing list.
Luckily, you can start sending hyper-personalized content by using segmentation.
On average, segmented campaigns result in 23% higher open rates and 49% higher click-through rates than unsegmented campaigns.
By grouping email subscribers into smaller segments based on a specific criterion like location, purchase history, interests, behavior, etc., you can create content that is specific for each segment instead of sending the same message to everyone.
Starbucks, resulting in a 2X increase in email conversions, stepped up their personalization game with AI, using real-time data to send over 400,000 variants of hyper-personalized messages to users. Every offer is unique to each user’s preferences, based on their past activity on the app:
Vibrant Colorful Designs
Over time, we have seen how successful email campaigns focus on the message and keep the design straightforward. But the problem arises when you try to retrofit your message in an existing template over a having more-effective layout.
With 93% of consumers finding color most important when making a purchase, and 85% of shoppers say color is the primary reason they buy a product, it’s obvious to see how visual appearance is a critical component not to be overlooked.
A popular A/B test measured how a button’s color impacted the click rates in an email—the red proving to gain 21% more clicks than a green button.
Having such a significant impact, color psychology plays an influential role in how your consumers act.
Using strong and vibrant colors in your email marketing advances brand awareness, product purchases and even increase your click-through rates
driving both engagement and conversions.
Warby Parker emailed a report on the most popular styles of the glasses with various shades of blue that brighten on the stats to inspire credibility.
Automation
Although newsletters and one-off campaigns should always have a place in your email marketing strategy, businesses are finding added success by setting up automatic campaigns built on consumers’ actions.
Setting up an email once with a defined trigger and having it continue to send as more users meet the trigger provides the time-saving benefits marketers dream about and limitless creative options.
Here are a few recommended automation tactics to include:
Welcome emails help to onboard your new subscribers, set expectations, and increase engagement.
Personalized discount/special offer emails boost your revenue. There is no greater way to make someone feel important than to remember an important occasion like an anniversary or birthday. A celebratory email lets them know that you’re thinking about them and how important they are to you.
Transactional emails (confirmation messages sent after consumer action) boost engagement, having open rates up to 8X higher than any other email
To help, several email marketing automation tools can integrate with your website to trigger email campaigns depending on your consumer’s actions.
Interactive Emails
Interactive emails with elements such as animated buttons and CTAs, rollover effects, surveys, polls, etc., have proven their worth for a few years now and will continue to grow strong in 2021 due to their ability to boost engagement and increase interaction. In effect, by using GIFs in emails, senders can see a 6% increase in open rate and a 109% increase in revenue.
Check out the animated email invite we created for Altice’s Small Talks Webinar series to help the event capture more attention and engage more interest through movement.
Let us know if you need help implementing any of these trends into your email marketing campaigns to improve your campaign performances.
