In 2020, we saw a huge shift in email marketing trends that has now set the tone for user expectations in the new year. Between increasing educational emails and e-commerce offerings, businesses have been busier than ever with their email marketing strategies and platforms. Even with the rise of social media, tried-and-true email marketing continues to have a stable and reliable return on investment.
Here are 5 email marketing automation trends making a big impact on subscriber open rates and engagement in 2021.
- Split Testing
Split testing is becoming more important as we see a big shift in how more subscribers prefer non-promotional emails. Due to this, you should make sure to spend a lot of time strategizing on how to sell your products without coming off as too sales-driven. Testing can help with this by comparing promotional subject lines, call to actions, headlines, and designs to ones that are more educational and conversational.
Even when you think you have your audience figured out, continue split testing and pulling data to ensure you stay relevant with ever-changing cultural, social, and industry preferences.
- SMTP Mailer Plugins
Use a SMTP service or plugin (such as WP Mail SMTP) to make sure your domain address is verified and trusted. This will lessen the chance of bounced emails and spam flags. Not sure how to add plugins? Don’t worry, our email marketing agency can do this for you!
SMTP plugins are crucial to make your email domain legitimate because phishing and scam emails are at an all-time high. A lot of spammers in 2020 used fake COVID-19 and World Health Organization emails as a ploy to gather user information. Last year, Gmail had to block more than 18 million malware emails daily. The more prepared you are on the backend of marketing automation, the more successful your email marketing will be.
- Multimedia
Focus on a varied selection of multimedia in your emails. Subscribers are expecting more than just a mundane block text paragraph. Start using videos, social media posts, GIFs, and beautiful imagery to make your emails stand out. Emails using the word “video” in subject lines have seen an impressive 96% click through rate. In general, videos have a higher engagement and share rate compared to other forms of media. Whether your videos are educational sources or introduce your product and services, you can’t go wrong with having more multimodal aspects in your emails.
- Accelerated Mobile Pages
Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) make email content more dynamic by showing visuals from webpage links directly in the email (such as drop down links, surveys, carousels). This way, viewers don’t have to click and view a separate link embedded in an email.
AMPs help mobile webpages load faster, thus reducing the bounce rate and ranking higher on Google. When comparing AMP plugin pages alongside webpages without the AMP plugin, the AMP plugin web pages nearly always rank better. Although AMP is becoming the next big thing, keep in mind it’s still restricted to Gmail only.
- Virtual Reality & Augmented Reality
Due to the pandemic, more events are going virtual to stay relevant. Such features will be popular in B2B and B2C content to give prospective clients and customers interactive experiences. For example, one of our clients has started marketing virtual trade show events to businesses. Their 3D walkthrough exhibits (complete with Zoom, videos, and embedded links) have increased customer engagement by using virtual reality to their advantage.
Looking for a marketing automation agency to do the work for you? REAS Marketing is a full-service agency that can boost your email marketing influence to a wider audience. REAS is an email marketing agency that supports small businesses looking to grow digitally.
