Email marketing is constantly evolving. While older email marketing campaigns were all about blasting basic emails to a wide range of users, modern email marketing campaigns have become more sophisticated—email-marketing campaigns can now be targeted at specific groups of people who opt-in regularly to receive the emails, and the actual emails themselves have become more graphically advanced and interactive.
Over the next few years, we will definitely continue to see email-marketing campaigns become more advanced and specialized. Here are a few trends for email marketing that you can expect to see in the next few years.
1) Optimized for tablet and mobile: Interestingly enough, desktop usage has been declining for the last few years. When it comes to surfing the Internet and checking email, most people use a tablet device or their smart phone. While emails can be read on nearly any device with an internet connection, many emails aren’t optimized for mobile—they’re often designed to be viewed via a large computer screen, and on mobile devices the text and images may not come through clearly. So, as mobile usage continues to increase, you’ll start to see emails that are designed with mobile device usage in mind.
2) More interactive emails: .Gif image files and short videos are especially popular these days, and over the next few years we’ll start to see more emails using image files, short videos and other interactive elements to make emails more entertaining and engaging.
3) Geo-targeted emails: Email-marketing campaigns can already be targeted to geographical regions, but geo-targeting capabilities will only continue to become more advanced and accurate, as email campaigns could potentially be targeted to multiple specific zones at a single given time.
4) Easier design elements: Designing more colorful and interactive emails have only become easier over the last few years. While the average email is still rather basic these days, in the near future, email services will continue to become more advanced, making it even easier to design a truly interactive email. Furthermore, emails will become more customizable for the average person as well, making it simple for a person to create a highly engaging email marketing campaign quickly and easily.
5) More incentives: Currently, websites have this feature where, when a new person visits a site, a prompt usually pops up (in the form of a pop-up box) that encourages the new user to sign up for an email list. Sometimes, the prompt will offer some sort of incentive, such as a discount of products or services if the user signs up immediately. In the near future, we’ll start to see those incentives begin to evolve—while the initial pop-up box with an incentive might still be relevant a few years from now, websites may start to offer incentives to keep their existing followers signed up, such as discounts that are customized to the individual preferences of a user.
Email marketing is an ever-changing field, and it’s exciting to see where it’s going to end up next. From more interactive emails to email services that offer more advanced options for customizing emails, email marketing will continue to become more developed in the near future.
