Email marketing is the tried and tested way of reaching your business’ current audience. From your loyal subscribers to your first-time shoppers, creating a strong email marketing campaign strategy can play a huge part in maintaining your brand and securing returning consumers.
In this guide, we’ll be taking a look at the latest developments in email marketing including how to optimise your current marketing strategies to meet the new industry standards allowing you to achieve better, more long-term results. We’ll be guiding you through how to use email marketing for your business and what new trends in email marketing you should be looking out for in 2023.
What is email marketing?
As the name suggests, email marketing is a powerful digital marketing tool which uses email as a way to target new audiences and promote a business’ brand and services. This can include anything from service promotion emails to insights into the company itself. With over 5.5 billion email accounts being used worldwide, email marketing is a pivotal means of expanding one’s digital reach and not one to shy away from.
There are various styles of email a business can use to engage with its customers to leave a lasting impression on them. Here are a few examples of emails you should be including in your email marketing campaign strategy.
The classic welcome email – when a new client has signed up for your emails it is important you introduce yourself and your services to create a familiarity and desirability about your brand. You want to make an impact and leave a lasting impression of your business to keep engagement high with future emails in mind.
The weekly promotion – as with all forms of digital marketing, it’s important to stay relevant and keep your customers regularly informed of your most recent news. Use this opportunity to promote your new products, sales and push services to your customers to ensure you are always at the forefront of their email inboxes.
Long-form newsletters – it’s your time to show your consumers who you really are. A monthly newsletter is essential for displaying your business, product promotions and updating customers on company news. It can be personal, humorous and informative all at once – but it should always be focused on building your brand. Think of it as your company’s story, you want to tell your customers how your business is evolving and engage with them in a way that makes them want to come back for an update each and every month.
Why use email marketing in 2023?
Let’s be honest, checking your email inbox has become as regular as scrolling through social media. No one likes those pesky email notification numbers racking up, so a good clear-up in the morning has become a part of people’s daily routines.
That’s where email marketing comes in – having your brand and recent news in a person’s inbox is the perfect opportunity to cement yourself in that person’s brain.
Imagine you’re a travel company wanting to promote your latest holidays. By simply blasting a few promotional emails of your latest tours and offers, you’re putting your brand out there ready to snap up a customer that is either ready to purchase as well as any customers who are currently searching around. Anyone thinking about going on holiday will instantly be drawn to snappy, eye-catching titles on an email specifically tailored to meet their current desires, especially if it’s from a brand they’ve trusted in the past.
Email marketing can help with lead generation, building brand awareness and keeping consumers engaged as you build up a personal relationship with them between purchases.
With so much opportunity at your fingertips, creating a well-structured email marketing campaign strategy is important to achieve all of this and more. That’s where we come in!
How to effectively implement email marketing for your business
Having a reliable team behind you who understands email marketing and how to use it effectively to meet your business goals is essential.
As with all forms of marketing, knowing your audience is the first step to achieving a successful email marketing campaign. We can help you create the ideal image of your target audience and strategise a plan that focuses your marketing efforts in the right direction.
From building your mailing list to creating a design that effectively displays your brand, we will be the team you need to successfully implement email marketing into your business. So if you’re finding that time is restricting you from creating those important weekly emails, using an email marketing agency may just be the answer you’re seeking – and we know just the right people for the job…
Using email marketing in cohesion with other digital marketing strategies
Using a digital marketing agency with a firm understanding of all digital channels at your disposal enables your email marketing strategy to truly thrive. Email marketing is a great way to connect all of your digital marketing efforts in one place.
Do you have a digital sale you want to promote? Or perhaps a blog you would like to shout about? Or maybe you’re looking to drive more traffic to your social accounts? All of this can be achieved through effective email marketing.
When you start an email marketing campaign, it’s important you know how it fits in with your overall marketing goals, as it can easily become the best tool for connecting your different digital marketing campaigns. By outsourcing your digital marketing to an agency you can see all of these efforts naturally slot into place.
Our 5 tips for a good email marketing campaign:
Make a plan – this may seem obvious, but without a clear direction of what you want to achieve and how you are going to achieve it, your campaign will come across as unorganised, unclear and ultimately ineffective. You want to tell a story, so how are you going to do that?
Design a different email for every goal you want to achieve – for instance, your newsletters should look different to your promotional emails but each one should be created with consistent brand presentation firmly at the forefront of your mind.
Always test your emails – by doing this you can put yourself in the customer’s shoes. Ask yourself, ‘would this email make me buy this product?’, ‘do I trust this brand?’, ‘what is this email trying to convey?’. It is also a great way to iron out any layout errors before the email is sent out into the big wide world and all control is lost.
Try scheduling your emails – by scheduling emails, you can stay more organised and effectively create a plan for the future emails to come. Batching emails in advance is a great way to give yourself time to make amends and edit the emails with the most current news up until the time for which the email is scheduled to send.
Measure your success – always review your statistics after each email to see what works well and what can be improved. Understanding this data is a great way to improve your future email marketing efforts. Don’t worry if this doesn’t make sense initially, it can take a while to gather enough data to make the results meaningful.
The future… What to expect from email marketing in 2023?
There are always new trends in email marketing popping up, as we live in a digital age where technology is constantly evolving before our eyes. As a marketing agency, we ensure we are always up-to-date with the current trends and find ways of implementing these into our client’s campaign strategies.
So what are some of the new trends in email marketing you should be aware of for 2023?
Creating interactive emails
A trend that we’ve noticed in recent years that has been gaining more and more traction is the use of interactive content marketing in emails. By implementing this style into emails you can expect higher click-through rates and emails that encourage customers to absorb the content in fun and visual ways.
Some examples of this are the use of animation to bring pictures to life with rollover effects, animated buttons and calls to action. We have seen a higher use of picture galleries with swiping features and the use of polls, quizzes and wheel deciders where customers can test their luck for deals to use within the brand.
This type of content looks to ‘gamify’ the consumer journey, creating a more enjoyable experience. This 2023 email marketing trend is ultimately customer-focused and encourages businesses to show their fun and informal side of the brand whilst still putting across their main marketing message.
The rise of augmented reality
Another form of interactive and customer-focused content appearing more in emails is the use of augmented reality. We have already seen this boom in the use of apps such as Pokemon Go and lifestyle and beauty websites such as Ikea and Sephora to help customers view their products in situ.
Social media marketing has already started to adopt augmented reality with filters and 3D animations becoming a staple as social media evolves into a more interactive, video-based form of content. Although this is definitely on the rise, it may still take some time to be fully implemented in mainstream email marketing. Currently, augmented reality in email marketing is mostly available for mobile users. As most people are using their mobiles to check emails, this is a great way to be ahead of the game and target this rising trend.
Personalising your emails
We said it before and we’ll say it again – marketing is about building relationships with your customers. And one of the easiest ways to do so is by personalising your emails for your audience. Gone are the days when you would send mass emails to your entire mailing list.
In Twilio’s State of Personalization report, it was found that 49% of consumers would become repeat customers if they received a personal experience from their emails. That’s almost half of your audience you could be losing if you are not implementing personalisation into your email marketing campaign strategy.
Another 62% of consumers went further to say that they expect personalisation in their emails, – a further signifier that personalised emails have been quickly on the rise. But as customers receive hundreds of emails from various brands throughout the day, how can you make yourself stand out?
It’s all about knowing your consumer – who they are, their purchasing habits, and what they are currently interested in before targeting those specific areas. Hyper-personalisation is the email marketing trend of 2023 that caters to this essential strategy.
To achieve this, you want to implement audience segmentation in your emails, create personalised subject lines and set up trigger emails based on visitors’ specific behaviours. It’s important you tailor your emails to include specific products and services that your audience is currently looking for. The great thing is, we can help you achieve this and more!
Customer-made content
To help create brand loyalty you must show examples of customers’ loyalty to your brand. Influencers and collaborative reviews have been paving a new way in social media marketing.
By displaying user-generated content (UGC) on your channels, such as user-made videos, pictures, audio, etc. you can show a wider audience how your current audience is reacting to your service or products. As a byproduct of this, you can begin to target similar demographics.
Just as many social media accounts are pushing towards customer-made content, it is a trend we are going to witness popping up more in email marketing next year. Let’s face it, everyone is more likely to purchase something they hear good things about online – so that’s what you want to show in your emails this year!
In fact, around 92% of consumers see UGC as more reliable than traditional advertising methods. By showing people that are happy with your product you are more likely to achieve a higher conversion number.
For instance, if we return to our travel company example, with our exclusive tour operators looking to enhance their travel marketing efforts. By adding testimonials to your emails and creating travel content using customers’ videos and photos (taken on their tours), you’re showing other customers a more down-to-earth perception of your service. It makes your product feel more obtainable as the consumer can see the end result and therefore, picture themselves achieving and experiencing it too.
Implementing email marketing for your business
As a London-based marketing agency, we work with various clients across a range of different industries to build efficient email marketing campaigns. If you want to take your email marketing to the next level this year, get in touch with us today. We will work with you to create an efficient email marketing campaign in line with your business objectives.
We know 2023 is going to see more rising marketing trends and complex changes to technology, so make sure your brand stands out from the crowd by employing the help of an agency like us here at Signify Digital to help optimise your strategy and improve overall results! From SEO strategies to incredible PPC management, we offer a range of marketing services that can help your business grow.
