4 Email Marketing Trends To Follow In 2022
Email marketing as it stands today, is still an essential component of any digital marketing campaign or strategy. With the numerous platforms and existence of social media, EDM (electronic direct mail) still has its own place in the marketing industry. Whether it’s keeping customers up to date with your business, launching new campaigns or broadening your client demographic, EDM campaigns can be the perfect way to consistently and effectively market your business. Even if you’re a smaller business, a comprehensive study on email marketing (2020) showed that 66% of small businesses relied on email marketing to generate engagement and revenue.
But given the oversaturation of marketing tools available in this day and age, it’s important to adapt your email marketing strategy, to stand out from the crowd whilst maintaining success long-term. So we’ve picked five innovative email marketing trends you should follow in 2022, if you’re looking to boost engagement from potential customers and improve conversion rates.
1. User Experience
There’s nothing more frustrating as a consumer than actually being interested in the preview text of a marketing email and then not being able to access the hero content. Whether it’s a poorly designed layout, ill-fitting images or dead-end links, all of this can impact someone's decision to further engage with your company. If someone’s first, or even second impression feels disruptive and unsatisfactory, it’s unlikely they’ll believe your company to be any different. Meaning accessibility of all kinds, should be your reference point when planning your marketing emails and implementing the use of UX design (user experience) is a great way to get started.
2. Digital Accessibility
Touching on the significance of UX design in our first point, it also plays a role in optimising your content for a much broader demographic. This can be summarised in a few key areas, whether your email is easy to navigate, read time efficiency relevant to your target audience and if your images are being used to their fullest potential. Again, much like user experience, if your average consumer is struggling to find the hero content of your email, anyone requiring additional levels of accessibility is even more likely to not bother. The same goes for time efficient wording, legible font styles/sizes, alt-text and an effective use of imagery as well.
“In your email real estate, give priority to images over text, as they have 94% more views compared to the mails without images.” - Ragan Insider
The majority of smartphone users receiving your emails don’t have the patience or time to absorb lengthy emails with little to no visual elements. Use the real estate you have with EDM imagery to your advantage. Put statistics and technical information in easy to digest graphics that the everyday consumer can understand without wasting time and don’t forget to provide alt-text on all images. Alt-text can remove the barrier for consumers who need voice assistance tools to access information online, without this you could be disregarding what could be your next loyal customer. Consider that most people read left to right, maybe most of your consumers have to read your emails on a phone screen, all important considerations for accessible design.
3. Brand Guidelines
As much as you want to stay relevant by adopting the latest email template that went viral online, there’s a reason successful companies abide by a brand story or guide. This includes establishing your brand fonts, colour palette and hero images and ensuring they translate across EDM marketing designs. With an estimated 85% of consumers identifying colour as something significant when considering a purchase, understanding colour theory in relation to your businesses pre-existing palette is worthwhile. Many people use the 60-30-10 rule for email marketing design. Simplified, it means allowing 90% for your background, 30% for text and reserving 10% for your CTA (call to action) featured at the end of your email. This is both referring to the layout and percentage of colour visible on your marketing emails. It’s a good baseline to refer to if you feel like your email is looking a little overwhelming or incohesive to your overall company brand. An experienced creative agency can guide you through the ideal design process, so reach out if necessary.
4. Brand Personality
It’s painfully obvious when a company shuffles their marketing team around, mainly because the tonality of writing is often completely different. This can even occur when your team is inspired by new media or adopts an interest in refining their skillset. So the safest bet is to establish what kind of personality your brand has when it comes to marketing content. Another great time to reflect on your mission statement, products and or services and target audience. Do you want to come across as professional and sterile, vibrant and relaxed? The list goes on and on… Ultimately this choice should present across all marketing channels within your company, but people often forget when it comes to email marketing. For general update emails, stick to your brand's standard personality when writing, for special occasions it doesn’t hurt to add some emotional elements to your choice of words. As long as it’s authentic, you don't want to end up in the spam folder!
Conclusion
Email marketing is still just as important as all the other new platforms and media you use to share information with your customers. These four EDM trends give you some great ways to incorporate 2022’s take on digital marketing into your next email copy to stay up to date with your audience. If you’re still not sure how to set up the best email marketing strategy for your business, just call our digital agency Melbourne team and book a consultation with us today!.
