Email Marketing Trends of 2015 that Spilled Over to 2016

Predictions are like opinions, everyone has them.  How are the 2016 email marketing trends turning out for you this year?   We at Dundee Internet have found, this year, attention being placed on:
Personalization, which is not limited to just saying “Hello Mr. Brown”.  Marketers are being more personal with:

1. Dates: This includes sending an email for Birthdays, Anniversaries, Congratulations on their 365^th email campaign, Holidays, It’s been 6 months since you purchased your first Motorcycle to sending dated invitations to local events.
2. History: More marketers send triggered emails based on the past actions of the customer: for example, “We are sending you this coupon because you buy our chocolate every Halloween.”
3. Actions: Emails are constantly sent to increase ROI: “Mr. Brown, thank you for your recent purchase, do you need a carrying case for your new tablet?”
4. Localization: Our Marketer’s use segments to send relevant, timely emails, to a specific zip codes, a city or country; or maybe just to people with the last name Brown.   And with built-in automation these emails are sent at specific days and times with attention to geographic location.

Sending one-on-one Emails: We use software that allow our customers to use Conditional Content Commands to insert blocks of text or graphics into their message to create unique, one-to-one emails tailored to the exact needs and interests of your recipients, without having to write (or send) more than one message.

Predictive Sending:  Marketers would like to know what motivates someone to buy and when they will buy again.   Our customers send surveys using our hosted software (Lyris) LM with pointed questions, they study buying patterns and past buying habits to try to predict this to stay one step ahead of their customer and know what will be their next purchase: email campaigns are sent based on their findings.

Embedded Content: More Marketers tend to send out interactive emails, some emails play music or a video when an email loads or show a special image. Some have great success with this, and some do not.  Marketers with recipients that have issues with loading images and other media, are segmented into their own group and sent the same email without embedded content.

Devices on Board: The way email is sent remained the same, however the way the message is read, has slowly adapted to the reading screen of the smart phone, tablet and wearable devices

while remaining desktop and laptop friendly.  All these devices influence the way our marketers send out campaigns, and this influence will continue way past 2016.  Eventually the same email message must be readable and interact with the all the different applications used without too much hassle on the part of the sender.

With Dundee Internet, when our Marketers create a “mobile friendly” email with our HTML editor, our list hosting software automatically creates a text copy:   which allow wearable users to read marketing messages on those little tiny wearable device screens.

Dynamic Content: Our customers can send the HTML content on their website, forms, and landing pages in their emails, so the content changes based on the recipient.  LM uses custom scripting to insert complex, dynamic content into their messages.

Email Quality, that’s totally up to the marketer.  Most ESPs can give you the tools to create, send and deliver your emails, but the content is up to you.

You may have considered these and wondered what will 2017 bring.  We believe in 2017: Personalized emails will become the norm, look for more automation and integrated features.  Also with advanced email marketing tools, there will be more use of analytical data as we believe there will be a greater interest in predict marketing.

We think the process of creating cutting edge emails will get simpler while being more robust and finally,  more companies will develop tools specific to Aurea (Lyris) LM using LM’s API.

What are your email marketing predictions for 2017?