A Few Things For Email Marketers To Take Note Of In 2011
I’ve been involved in email marketing for many years and have seen it evolve from a mass media channel of one to many, into a highly targeted & sophisticated (when done right!) tool, and, in my opinion, an essential practice for any brand. I have a real passion for email and believe it has even more to offer brands that invest in best practices and embrace new trends.
2011 looks set to be an exciting year for email marketing, as brands are starting to wake up. Rather than just seeing it as a revenue driving exercise they are now seeing the value in using it to drive brand awareness and treat it more as a way to develop and nurture relationships with their customers and prospects. The overall emphasis still remains - marketers should continue to focus on subscriber engagement, relevancy, timing and best practice.
Prioritization of messages in your inbox
It will be interesting to see what impact Gmail’s Priority Inbox and Hotmail’s improved inbox control will have on the delivery and engagement of brands emails to their databases. Gmail’s Priority Inbox gets better over time at predicting what’s important to the recipient based on what emails they read and reply to. It will automatically separate out the important messages, potentially leaving your brands message lower down the priority and potentially out of sight.
Hotmail’s inbox control allows the recipient to cut through the clutter in their inbox by selecting which type of mail they wish to view. There is an option to view all mail from contacts, or all social network updates (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn etc), or mail from group mailing lists that they belong to.
Marketers will need to work closely with their ESP’s to identify any change in response trends; in particular engagement metrics, such as CTR overtime, and find ways to address this.
Social integration
Facebook are still on track to launch heir new ‘Messages’ service at some point in 2011. It will give users an ‘@facebook.com’ email address and an inbox that unifies email and Facebook messages. It will cleverly collate all of the users SMS messages, emails and IM’s of each of their contacts in one place. This will undoubtedly change the customer experience and how brands interact with their base. It’s a big step change in bringing together email and social and definitely an exciting development to watch!
We’ll see an increase of brands combining their social media marketing and email marketing efforts through integrated campaigns. And, forward thinking email marketers will learn that social media efforts provide their audience with instant information on their terms, which in turn can be put to practice through following up subscribers immediately with relevant and targeted content via email. It’s important to note that not all your social media followers will be email subscribers and vice versa. Yes they do want to communicate with you, but in different ways. Supplement your email marketing tactics with a strategy that includes a blog and maybe a Twitter feed; where ever they tend to congregate online. You can then use email to grow your social media audience and vice versa, use your social media tactics to grow your email list.
The emergence of mobile
For many brands the impact of mobile on their email marketing strategy is probably not on the priority list. However, I would challenge everyone to sit up and start to take notice of this up and coming channel.
“There are more than 150 million active users currently accessing Facebook through their mobile devices. People that use Facebook on their mobile devices are twice more active on Facebook than non-mobile users.” – Facebook official statistics (August, 2010).
Granted, that’s a global figure but still significant! In June 2010 I read a report through the eConsultancy blog (can’t remember source!) that stated 24% of the UK have accessed their email via the phone (work or personal – in fact, counter- intuitively, higher % for personal (12m) than work(6m).
Marketers need to ensure all their email messages sent are rendered with a mobile email client. More and more users are purchasing through their mobile phones, and brands are rolling out mobile versions of their websites. With the launch of iPad and other tablets emerging onto the market, 2011 is going to be a very interesting year to see how purchasing habits change.
Video email marketing
With the development of HTML 5 we will be sure to see marketers experimenting within video included within email. Major ISPs are now allowing videos to be played directly within an email. It’s clearly going to have a significant impact on us and surely tempt more of our subscribers to click through and find out more. Remember though, video content needs to be relevant and you need to ensure you have a good reason to include it. I would also strongly recommend testing this to a segment within your audience before fully rolling it out.
Guest post by: Sarah is an internet marketer working for a company that sell spy gadgets so naturally the interest in other marketing sources is there.
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