email marketing trends 2018 · ones who put the basics in place first. so, ... we offer a powerful,...

Email Marketing Trends 201816 Email marketing experts give their views and

examples of the future of e-mail marketing

Author: Kim Greenop-Gadsby

Part of the Email Marketing and Marketing Automation Toolkit

https://www.smartinsights.com/improve/email-marketing-toolkit/

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© Smart Insights (Marketing Intelligence) Limited. Please go to www.smartinsights.com to feedback or access our other guides.

Email Marketing Trends 2018

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16 Email marketing experts give their views and examples of the future of e-mail marketing

Contents

Foreword: From Pure360 .......................................................................3

Introduction: Email marketing: still worth taking seriously ............... 5How is this guide structured? ................................................................................................5A Big ‘Thank you’ to our contributors ....................................................................................6About the Author ...................................................................................................................7

TREND ONE: Increased Regulation ......................................................8

TREND TWO: Email Rendering ........................................................... 11

TREND THREE: Device Friendly .........................................................17

TREND FOUR: Intelligent Personalization .........................................18

TREND FIVE: Sophisticated segmentation ........................................23

TREND SIX: Subject Line Effectiveness.............................................24

TREND SEVEN: Writing for Emails .....................................................35

TREND EIGHT: Deliverability ...............................................................43

TREND NINE: Code like it’s 2018 ........................................................45

TREND TEN: Marketing Automation ...................................................49

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ForewordFrom Pure360As 2017 draws to a close, we start to reflect on which channels worked the hardest for us. As marketers, this helps guide where we focus our efforts in the year to come.

Drilling down into your own data, and analysing it as a team, can help you get to grips with what you need to refine in 2018. But, sometimes, you need to take a breather from all that analysis, and get some fresh perspectives.

In this email marketing trends guide, you can get just that. Unique insights from some of the UK’s leading industry experts. Experienced views that will help you refocus your strategy and kick-start your planning.

So, why is the focus of this guide email marketing and not the wider marketing mix? Put simply, its because in most cases email delivers the best ROI of any marketing channel.

And yet, it is one of the channels we often neglect.

Email is a tried-and-tested channel, that some marketers may find a little unsexy. Some - mistakenly - consider it too mature and fear it is no longer able to cut through the noise.

But, this couldn’t be further from the truth. Despite being such a well-known channel, email is an untapped resource for many businesses.

Email is at the core of customer experience, customer lifecycle management, and omnichannel personalisation.

Many businesses rely on email to respond to customer behaviour. But, not many have started using email to predict - and shape - how customers behave.

And yet, the technology to do just this exists - and is way more accessible than many imagine.

With the right technology in place, email is a powerful behavioural marketing tool that can totally alter the relationship a brand has with consumers. Personalized recommendations and other automations can a turn a customers fleeting flirtation with a brand, to a lucrative, long-term buying pattern.

Developments in machine learning have made email a more powerful tool than ever before. This technology has allowed us to lift the lid on consumer behaviour. The data we have gives us the power to predict and influence what the customer does next.

The creative, nuanced, and personalised journeys we are able to create as a result take customer experience to the next level. With email at the core, we’re able to strengthen the bond between the brand and the customer at every available touchpoint.

The impact this has on revenue is game changing. Email is alive and kicking in 2018.

Expect to see successful brands implementing:

þ easy-to-understand consent confirmation campaigns

þ innovations in email rendering and email features

þ device friendly emails

þ intelligent personalization

þ sophisticated segmentation

þ more effective subject lines

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þ better customer experiences

þ advances in the way emails are coded

The brands who do this well - and take advantage of email in the year to come - will be the ones who put the basics in place first.

So, before you jump on these trends, test and learn from the cohorts who are opening and clicking. Understand why others aren’t.

Embed an agile approach into everything you do. Don’t stop experimenting, analysing, and enhancing.

To set your intentions—and excel with email in 2018—read on to learn from those who know the channel inside out.

About Pure360 – the report sponsorsPure360 is a marketing technology company that provides behavioural targeting and personalisa-tion tools to help retail and travel companies make more money from their eCommerce websites.

We offer a powerful, data-driven marketing automation suite and an industry-leading email maturity model. Everything we do is focused on accelerating customer results across email, mobile, web, and social.

We deliver best in class results for over 1,400 customers including Tetley, innocent, Park Holidays, Blue Bay, Ultimo and Financial Times.

Our maturity model is delivered through our best practice framework and account managers. It is proven to take brands through a marketing maturity journey; helping them to improve customer lifetime value, enhance their customer experiences, and drive deeper brand engagement.

With the Pure360 Marketing Suite eCommerce marketers are fully equipped to:

þ Easily build stunning and responsive campaigns with a cutting edge Drag & Drop Editor

þ Deliver multi-channel dynamic email and SMS campaigns

þ Increase revenue and recapture lost revenue with the PureTargeting module

þ Deliver intelligent real time personalised content

þ Accelerate results by integrating with third party systems including Faststats, Magento, Salesforce and more

þ Grow databases with competitions through social media with the PurePromotions module

þ Gain a 360 view of their customer with the PureIntelligence module

The Pure360 team is focused on delivering what really matters: results.

We are committed to putting marketers’ success at the heart of everything we do. In doing so, we help marketers to put their customers at the heart of their digital marketing.

Pure360. Improving results together. Be part of the journey.

Komal Helyer, Marketing Director, Pure360 LinkedIn | Twitter

http://www.pure360.com/email-maturity-model/

http://www.pure360.com/

https://www.linkedin.com/company/pure360

https://twitter.com/komal_helyer

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IntroductionEmail marketing: still worth taking seriouslyThe aim of this guide is to showcase some of the latest Email marketing and marketing automation techniques deployed by brands to engage their subscribers and develop purchase intent. It pays to keep up-to-date with the latest approaches to email marketing techniques given its importance to all types of business.

In 2018, Email Marketing is one the most effective techniques for digital marketers, so keeping up-to-date with the latest trends in the industry is super important. Our recent research on the State of Email marketing in 2017 with partners GetResponse showed that marketers rate email marketing one of the most effective digital media channels

Email competes with organic and paid search amongst the main channels driving orders. Email marketing delivers far higher volumes than PPC (9%) or display (8%).

Given the ongoing importance of Email marketing for customer acquisition and retention in most organisations, understanding and testing the latest email options and techniques we cover in this guide is essential for businesses to stay engaging and competitive ‘in the inbox’.

But, we should also take care to get the fundamentals right. Strategy is very important, but if you don’t have a solid foundation of email techniques and best practices, there is very little point in having a strategy.

How is this guide structured?We selected some of the key success factors in email marketing as we see them, and then asked email marketing specialists to give examples of these and other trends. We have 10 trends in total, varying from “Increased Regulation” to “Code like it’s 2018”. Our contributors have been a big help in creating this guide. Thank you to them! There are some fresh-faced specialists who normally work behind the scenes and keep their secrets well guarded. A rather eclectic mix this year – we hope you gain valuable insight.

Recommended resources for Smart Insights Premium members r GDPR briefing

r Email Marketing Strategy Guide

https://www.getresponse.com/resources/reports/email-marketing-and-marketing-automation-excellence-2017.html?lang=en

http://www.getresponse.co.uk/

https://www.smartinsights.com/guides/gdpr-briefing/?utm_medium=pdf&utm_source=cp-resource-pure360&utm_campaign=emailtrends

https://www.smartinsights.com/guides/email-marketing-7-steps-guide/?utm_medium=pdf&utm_source=cp-resource-pure360&utm_campaign=emailtrends

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Jen Capstraw, Freelance Consultant & Strategist and President & Co-Founder, Women of Email

Jenna Tiffany, Founder & Strategy Director at Let’s Talk Strategy

Joolz Joseph M IDM, Strategic Email Marketing Consultant and Marketing Mentor at The Virtual Marketeer

Jordie van Rijn, Email Influencer and Founder of Email Vendor Selection

Kath Pay, CEO at Holistic Email Marketing

Komal Helyer, Marketing Director at Pure360

Steve Henderson, UK, Data protection officer (GDPR, e-Privacy, ISO27001) at Communicator

Tim Watson, Email Marketing Consultant at Zettasphere

A Big ‘Thank you’ to our contributorsCreating this report would not have been possible without the generous time of the contributors to give their examples and guidance. Many thanks to all of the email marketing experts from different countries and expertise areas.

Alex Ilhan, Senior Email Developer at Email on Acid

April Mullen, Director of Consumer-First Marketing at Selligent and Co-Founder, Women of Email

Ben Harrington, Email Marketing Consultant, TruffleShuffle Media

Catherine Loftus, Senior Marketing Manager at Trust-edHousesitters

Chad S. White, Research Director at Litmus and author of Email Marketing Rules

Dela Quist, Founder & CEO - Touchstone Intelligent Marketing | CEO - Alchemy Worx

Elliot Ross, CEO at Taxi for Email

Heidi Olsen, Senior Developer at eROI

https://www.linkedin.com/in/jencapstraw/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennatiffany/

http://letstalkstrategy.co.uk/

http://letstalkstrategy.co.uk/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/joolzjoseph/

http://www.thevirtualmarketeer.co.uk/

http://www.thevirtualmarketeer.co.uk/

https://www.emailmonday.com/email-marketing-consultant/

http://www.emailvendorselection.com/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/kathpay/

https://www.holisticemailmarketing.com/

https://www.holisticemailmarketing.com/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/komalhelyer/

https://www.pure360.com/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/stevehenderson74/

https://www.communicatorcorp.com/

https://www.zettasphere.com/


https://www.linkedin.com/in/alex-ilhan-48259651/

https://www.emailonacid.com/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/aprildmullen/

http://www.selligent.com/

https://womenofemail.org/

https://womenofemail.org/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/harringtonben/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/catherine-loftus/

https://www.trustedhousesitters.com/

https://www.trustedhousesitters.com/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/chadswhite

https://litmus.com/

https://www.amazon.com/Email-Marketing-Rules-Checklists-Frameworks/dp/1546910638

https://www.amazon.com/Email-Marketing-Rules-Checklists-Frameworks/dp/1546910638

https://www.linkedin.com/in/delaquist/

http://www.touchstonetests.io/

http://www.touchstonetests.io/

http://www.alchemyworx.com/

http://www.alchemyworx.com/

http://taxiforemail.com/



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About the AuthorKim Greenop-Gadsby is the Email Marketing Manager for Smart Insights. She manages all Smart Insights’ email marketing and automation platform. She gets very excited about all things email because she’s an #EmailGeekUK. She was born and bred in South Africa and has over 16 years experience in web development and digital marketing. When she is not being an email geek, she is spending her time with her husband, two sons and menagerie of pets.

About Smart InsightsWe’re a publisher and learning platform that helps our members plan, manage and optimize their marketing using our downloadable planning templates, guides and interactive learning tools.

We help individuals improve their personal digital marketing skills and businesses of all sizes increase their leads and sales by creating action plans to transform their use of digital media, technology and data. We’re proud to share the exciting potential of digital marketing with our 150,000 active members across 100 countries and a monthly website readership of ½ million.

Get started with a free Smart Insights membership and you can download our sample guides and templates from our members area and take our digital skills assessment to get recom-mendations on how to improve your digital marketing knowledge.

Our premium member resources help managers and teams who are responsible for managing digital transformation create and implement a roadmap to increase the business contribution of integrating digital media and technology into their business. Premium members range from SMBs to many mid-sized companies to the largest global brands. All use our actionable resources to create strategies, roadmaps and campaign plans to increase leads and sales from digital channels.

Learn more about the benefits of individual membership and business membership.

https://www.smartinsights.com/?utm_medium=pdf&utm_source=cp-resource-pure360&utm_campaign=emailtrends

https://twitter.com/emailgeekuk

https://www.smartinsights.com/membership/basic-letter/?utm_medium=pdf&utm_source=cp-resource-pure360&utm_campaign=emailtrends

https://www.smartinsights.com/personalized-learning-plan/?utm_medium=pdf&utm_source=cp-resource-pure360&utm_campaign=emailtrends

https://www.smartinsights.com/membership/e-membership/?utm_medium=pdf&utm_source=cp-resource-pure360&utm_campaign=emailtrends

https://www.smartinsights.com/membership/team-membership-enquiry/?utm_medium=pdf&utm_source=cp-resource-pure360&utm_campaign=emailtrends

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TREND ONEIncreased RegulationThere has been an increased focus on legal regulations within the email marketing world. Marketers are currently in a frenzy with the upcoming General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) because of the worry of fines. It is important to remember that this regulation is being created to protect consumers and help marketers to stay within the law. Ethical marketers will agree this is a good thing since we are responding to consumer concerns and this should improve brand perceptions.

Steve Henderson, Data protection officer at Communicator CorpBack in 2013, while the GDPR was still in the early stages of planning, review and rewrites, the then Vice-President of the European Commission, Viviane Reding spoke of her ambition for the GDPR to become the international gold standard for data protection. Part of this vision included1 using a harmonised approach between the EU and U.S. to set models for others to follow. While that harmony may not have progressed as anticipated, Jan Philipp Albrecht is continuing this rhetoric, holding the GDPR up to serve as the “global gold standard for every new innovation, for consumer trust in digital technologies and for an entry point to the growth opportunities of an emerging digital market.”

Lack of trust in digital economyThis year / 2017 saw a new wave of fake news, data breaches, ransomware attacks and an increase in online identity theft. Study after study2 show that consumer trust just isn’t there.

When looking specifically at email, the latest 2017 DMA “Marketer email tracking study” showed that trust is the most important factor in getting people to sign up in the first place, but that email marketers are abusing that trust “with fewer than one in 10 marketers (9%) saying all their emails are relevant to their customers and more worryingly, only two in five (42%) say that at best ‘some’ of their emails are relevant”.

Rachel Aldighieri, MD at the DMA, summed this up perfectly: “If email is to continue to grow and thrive as a channel, then marketers need to heed consumer concerns and give them what they want.”

Marketers need data to make sure emails continue to be welcome in the inbox. Consumers want an enhanced, but safe online experience. Trust is going to determine whether both marketers and consumers get what they want.

We know that 2018 will see the GDPR coming into force, but is this going to change anything and will it be the promised gold standard?

Enforcement in the UKLast year the ICO appointed a new Information Commissioner to lead the ICO as the GDPR comes into force. And Ms Denham has hit the ground running, saying “Sanctions for bad actors are necessary and healthy for a digital economy”. Within the first ten weeks of the new leadership, the ICO had launched investigations into Yahoo and Facebook. Since then we’ve seen record fines for breaches of marketing and data protection regulations. This year we’ve

1 Towards a more dynamic transatlantic area of growth and investment2 ICO survey shows most UK citizens don’t trust organisations with their data

https://www.linkedin.com/in/stevehenderson74/

http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_SPEECH-13-514_en.htm

https://edpl.lexxion.eu/article/edpl/2016/3/4/display/html

https://www.cifas.org.uk/newsroom/identity-fraud-soars-to-new-levels

https://dma.org.uk/uploads/misc/589c5b9eaaca9-marketer-email-tracking-report-2017_589c5b9eaabde.pdf

http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_SPEECH-13-867_en.htm

https://ico.org.uk/about-the-ico/news-and-events/news-and-blogs/2017/11/ico-survey-shows-most-uk-citizens-don-t-trust-organisations-with-their-data/

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1seen what I believe are the first significant fines in the UK for email, with Flybe, Honda and Moneysupermarket.com falling foul of what could be seen as the ICO gearing-up for a new enforcement regime.

This is what the ICO published on Twitter one year before the GDPR:

The language is gentle, but the message is very clear. Earlier this year “Spam emails” was added by the ICO as an option on their “Nuisance calls and messages” complaints page

And the ICO has lobbied for funds to hire 200 more lawyers, analysts and investigators.3

It would be easy to read these headlines and be worried, but Ms Denham has also stated that the ICO would continue to be a “proportionate, rational regulator”, and that “[Companies] don’t want to be fined by the regulator, they don’t want an enforcement notice, they don’t want the publicity.” And the numbers back her up, with only 16 out of 17,000 concluded cases resulting in fines.4

3 UK watchdog to hire hundreds as it prepares for country to adopt a ‘once in a generation’ crackdown on data misuse4 GDPR – sorting the fact from the fiction

https://www.smartinsights.com/marketplace-analysis/digital-marketing-laws/flybe-honda-fined-83000-breaking-data-rules/

https://twitter.com/ICOnews/status/867657570055487488

https://ico.org.uk/concerns/nuisance-calls-and-messages/

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2017/03/12/uk-watchdog-hire-hundreds-data-crackdown/

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2017/03/12/uk-watchdog-hire-hundreds-data-crackdown/

https://iconewsblog.org.uk/2017/08/09/gdpr-sorting-the-fact-from-the-fiction/

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1Consumer educationThere’s been a surprising lack of consumer education. Individual companies run campaigns to educate their own customers, but with almost 2 million cyber-related fraud incidents a year in the UK alone, there should be more.

However, we already make it known when we don’t like something, as Spotify found out. In the run-up to the GDPR coming into force, consumers will be exposed to more headlines, re-engagement campaigns and items popping up in their social feeds. Awareness of rights and obligations will increase. Our customers and subscribers will know more, ask more and demand more. Expectations will increase and it will be your job to meet them.

Consent confirmation campaignsIn the 2014 run-up to CASL (Canadian Anti-Spam Law) we saw organisations across Canada and the U.S. sending high numbers of re-engagement emails. I expected to see the same in the UK, but high-profile fines in 2017 has made organisations think twice before sending mass emails to existing mailing lists to confirm subscriptions and re-validate data. The ICO has confirmed that sending out emails asking for consent re-confirmation IS marketing, so to send those emails you need to have evidence of consent. Because there’s no clear guidance on how to validate data and upgrade consent while avoiding fines, this work has stalled.

This work still has to be done. Only intelligently. 2018 will see more firms tentatively reaching out to customers and subscribers and we’ll start seeing examples of language, design and techniques which we can showcase and copy. If we can learn from what happened with CASL, consumers will quickly understand accept that many or most of the brands they use will be sending emails of this type and they’ll be happy enough to click through and confirm details for the brands they still want to hear from.

Innovation, not enforcement which drives international reformIt’s not just in (re)confirmation emails where we’ll see innovation, but anonymous and guest online purchase processes, better sign-up forms, privacy policies that you can actually read and understand, online marketing and third-party data. The early adopters and innovators coming up with the best processes, the best language and the best products will benefit. Others will copy.

I’ve already mentioned that consumer expectations will rise. But this will not be because of the GDPR. Regulations are our minimum standard and while it’s true that these standards are rising, your customers will expect more from you than the legal minimum. As one brand sets a new standard others will have to follow or lose customers.

And this is why I feel innovation, rather an enforcement, is what will start to realise Viviane Reding and Jan Philipp Albrecht’s vision. In the UK and across the EU the trend we’ll notice in 2018 is consumer trust driving success in the digital economy. And outside the EU, if the GDPR is seen as the Gold Standard, it will be these successes, rather than the fines which others seek to emulate.

https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/crimeandjustice/bulletins/crimeinenglandandwales/june2017

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/aug/21/spotify-faces-user-backlash-over-new-privacy-policy

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TREND TWOEmail RenderingWhen an email is dispatched from your email system, it’s then sent to the customers on your dispatch list. All these customers have different desktop, webmail and mobile clients. Not to mention different versions of these too. And the marketing email you sent will display differently on each of them. This is because each email client has its own way of interpreting HTML and CSS.

Heidi Olsen, Senior Developer at eROIWith dozens of popular email clients, each of which has its own quirks, it can be overwhelming to build an email that looks good and works well. To allow time to create dynamic emails, it’s important for your team to create efficiencies in your workflow.

Frameworks like MJML and HEML have emerged to help automate your email builds. Using their own markup language, these frameworks help save time, provide less room for error and most importantly helps establish a system to ensure your emails render consistently across all major clients.

MJML Syntax

These frameworks require basic knowledge of the command line and Node.js. The documentation is thorough and both have an active community to help you participate and extend the functionality of the frameworks to fit into your own designs.

Depending on your needs, a more DIY-approach might be more your speed. Victoria Purgh outlines a Gulp-approach to automating your workflow that will give you full control over how your emails render. This approach is perfect for email developers who cannot leverage the functionality of a sophisticated ESP for modules and dynamic content. By storing data in JSON files, she was able to generate numerous personalized emails without having to create each one by hand.


https://mjml.io/

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Dynamic Content stored in JSON files

Once a system is established, you could create a Graphical User Interface (GUI) to allow other team members or clients to create their own emails.

Tim Watson, Email Marketing Consultant at ZettasphereI’m seeing a growing interest in the use of interactive email features. The number of brands experimenting with them and number of emails arriving at my inbox has notably increased in 2017.

Examples of interactive features are drop-down menus, carousels or hide/reveal content sections. Things that customers can touch to interact with the email content, without leaving the inbox.

The big vision for interactive emails is to have a complete website in an email, so customers never need to leave the email.

That’s a very big vision and it won’t be happening in the foreseeable future, it may not even be desirable.

However, there are more specific use cases that make more sense. Such as running a feedback survey or quiz within an email. Why take someone to a website for a simple activity and when there is no wish to let the customer explore all web content.

In a Litmus survey, 10% of designers said they have used an interactive feature and plan on creating interactive emails again. In the same survey, Litmus asked the question to find out which interactive email elements are the most popular.


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Here’s an example of an email using a hamburger menu from Net-A-Porter.

But how smart is that? Nielsen reported that hamburger menus negatively affect discoverabil-ity, increase task time and perceived difficulty of the tasks.

For example, in the Net-A-Porter email a conventional horizontal menu bar may be a better choice, reminding customers of the range of products available, that they might not see otherwise.

There is a clear need to understand what interactive concepts are useful and what are not.

Virgin Trains East Coast used an interactive feature to hidden content on mobile devices. This allows quick scannable headlines and for customers to read more about the areas that interested them.

The screenshot shows the ‘Great Problem Solver’ headline expanded. Each of the other headlines similarly expanded with an image, copy and call to action button.

https://www.smartinsights.com/digital-marketing-strategy/are-hamburger-menus-hidden-navigation-good-for-ux/

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First Direct took a similar approach for mobile readers when sending information about changes to their terms and conditions.

As with the Virgin email, clicking the down arrow expanded the section to (copious) information about the exact detail of the change.

The approach is smart because customers select what’s of interest. Not got an ISA, fine skip that section in a few pixels.

The GDPR and forthcoming EU ePrivacy regulation expect brands to better inform customers. This needs to be done in a way that doesn’t overload but allows customers to consume the information. Having a summary with drill down allows a scan read and more detailed information. A good solution.

A clever interactive feature might impress your boss but unless it gets the results it’s your own goal.

There are three barriers to using interactive emails.

1. Email client support is limited. It needs HTML5 compatible email clients, which means Apple and mostly other mobile email clients. Based on average market share stats that means about half of users. Fall-back strategies for the email content for other clients are needed.

2. The difficulty of coding them. They need to be hand-coded currently. As adoption spreads we can expect to see more email solutions supporting and making interactive features easier to deploy with drag and drop interfaces.

3. Interactive features can reduce click rate. customers might determine from the additional information provided in the email that they aren’t interested in an offer. Thus, never clicking through. Conversion measurement is needed to compare static against interactive emails.

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Rebelmail have developed methods to make interactive feature usage measurable. A somewhat hackier solution is to use the Google Analytics measurement protocol. Not for the faint-hearted and the preserve of expert developers currently.

In summary, think carefully about making an interactive email. Do it with a purpose, to solve a customer experience problem.

þ Use User interface (UI) designs in the email that customers will be familiar with from websites or Apps. Enabling readers to immediately understand how to use the interactive feature.

þ Only hide content that is secondary to the main message. If the content is needed to overcome friction to click through then hiding it will damage results.

þ Only add interactivity that improves the customer experience. Just because you can do it doesn’t mean you should do it.

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TREND THREEDevice FriendlyDevice friendly emails or mobile-friendly emails have been steadily increasing in dominance, over the other email client market share. The reasons for this, is simple. We are adapting our working hours and how we work. Shouldn’t our emails too? Litmus shared in June 2017 the market share had mobile at 50%, webmail is second at 30%, while desktop is 20%.

Something to remember is that if clients are reading your email on different devices, you cannot continue to send the long text-based emails as before.

Elliot Ross, CEO - Taxi for EmailNow that Gmail supports responsive design, there is no excuse for not considering mobile email design. Serving up an optimal experience for almost all mobile users is now within our grasp, so marketers should work with their design teams and agencies to achieve this. For the very small remainder of email clients where responsive design isn’t supported, we can still layer on hybrid and fluid design techniques to deliver an improved experience.

Many brands have been sending mobile email for a number of years, and we’re now seeing third or fourth iterations of their mobile approaches. With mobile audiences topping 80% for some brands, it’s not surprising that organisations are taking a strong mobile-first approach - almost to the detriment of the experience on desktop. Now we’ve got an idea of the basics (short-yet-punchy copy, easily tappable buttons, high impact imagery), we’re seeing brands explore the minutiae of mobile optimisation.

It’s important to consider that mobile email sits alongside social apps on the phone, and it’s worth considering how users consume content in a mobile context. Brands are crafting their email content into smaller, more easily digestible chunks, so they’re easier for users to consume.

https://litmus.com/blog/email-client-market-share-trends-1h-2017


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TREND FOURIntelligent PersonalizationEmail personalization is one of those trends that has been awhile, but hasn’t been utilised as much as it should have. If you don’t personalize your email, what do you have? An email that will get lost in your clients inbox.

Intelligent personalization has moved much further on than simply saying “Hi Kim”. Projects like building personas and behaviour triggers should be high priority for anyone who wants to take personalization seriously.

Jordie van Rijn, Email Influencer and Founder of Email Vendor Selection

Sticky engagement makes its way into emailFor apps and social networks engagement is an important measure of success. They try to become more sticky, keep you engaged and get you to return to the site. But brands are not very different. Being top-of-mind and promoting email marketing engagement your subscribers is either a true goal (if you have an advertising business model) or a step towards conversion and loyalty.

Sending email alerts and reminders is a common practice for social networks and apps. In-app and on your phone these are highlighted by the red notification dot. The dot is now making its way into email.

Linkedin, for instance, has brought the notification into a live updating element of their emails showing the number of notifications that are still open. It makes a lot of sense as a form of “flowvertising”, where you experience brand interactions in flow across multiple devices and media.

Many brands can use this mechanism, even if they don’t have their own app. Think about highlighting the number of items in (abandoned) shopping carts for instance or steps to complete in a registration process.

Humans have the instinct baked-in to pay attention to the new, act on the urgent and want things complete. Combined with a little “reward” each time we complete the task, makes those notification Dots simply irresistible. I predict we will see more of these small sticky engagement elements in email in the period to come.

https://www.emailmonday.com/email-marketing-consultant/

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Predictive content personalizationOne personalization mega-trend that has been the bedrock of successful email are product recommendations. If your email program includes products / offers, there are always product recommendations, even if manually picked or segmented by hand.

But automation of product recommendations is the real trend. A product recommendation engine will take all the data it has available from the subscriber and others and make a prediction which products and content are most likely to be interesting for this user. A recommendation engine will win over gut feeling or the HIPPO (Highest Paid person’s opinion) every time.

Source: Recommendation Engines for Email Marketing

Doing product recommendations and predictions has had several practical problems in the past, for instance to have the product data available in a parse-able format when there wasn’t enough sales data to base predictions on. But a smart private site crawler can now index, tag and segment all of your site inventory for you. Or catching site behaviour to base the recom-mendations on, these are now covered by Customer Data Platforms (or capture is built-in in the recommendation engine). Making this an automation for email marketing content.

http://www.emailvendorselection.com/recommendation-engines-for-email-marketing/

https://www.smartinsights.com/email-marketing/behavioural-email-marketing/trend-nobody-talking-yet-email-content-automation/

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Although many of these prediction engines might not strictly speaking be self-learning, but rather rule based, in the form of “people that liked X also like Y”, The attention surrounding A.I. and wish for intelligent automation is likely to give this another push in the coming year.

Jenna Tiffany, Founder & Strategy Director - Let’s Talk StrategyProviding the right content in the right context remains king in the digital experience with 75% consumers more likely to buy from retailers that provide personalization5.

But the truth is that many brands are still playing catch-up – with emails being sent without including the very basics of a first name and website pages littered with products which are already bought or completely irrelevant to the consumer. Personalization has to be smart and more intuitive if it is to fit seamlessly into the digital journey to be truly effective.

Intelligent personalisation is all about engaging your subscriber and remembering that even if you send a message to your entire customer base, you will always only be speaking to a single human at any given time.

One of the most effective digital marketing channels for creating Personalized campaigns is email marketing, yet 59% of consumers are stating they are receiving irrelevant emails on a regular basis6.

Personalized conversations bring people together in the real world, and the same can be replicated through email marketing. However, the majority of marketing emails don’t include the first name. The first thing we do when we meet someone new is to introduce ourselves with our names. Forgetting someone’s first name or not acknowledging it, isn’t really relationship building.

Show the customer that you want to start a valued relationship by addressing them by their first name. This will start to build a relationship with your customer. The more they engage with you, the more personalized the content should be within your email campaigns.

5 Accenture: Personalisation Pulse Check Survey 20166 DMA Consumer Tracker report 2017


https://www.accenture.com/t20161011T222718__w__/us-en/_acnmedia/PDF-34/Accenture-Pulse-Check-Dive-Key-Findings-Personalized-Experiences.pdf

https://dma.org.uk/uploads/misc/589c5b9eaaca9-marketer-email-tracking-report-2017_589c5b9eaabde.pdf

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Ben Harrington, Email Marketing Consultant, TruffleShuffle Media Without question, 2018 will be the year of Intelligent Personalization.

It is forecasted that more and more businesses will take intelligent personalization on-board, and see the benefits of making their communications more data-driven and personal.

Personalization itself is nothing new, being around since the beginning of time and marketing–or at least so it seems.

When I started using personalization in emails, it included just a simple name in the subject line, the usual “Hi Ben” in the content, and was sent afterwards to the most basic of segments. Skip five years, and we have workflows set up here and there that are all running from data that is being dragged from Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems, websites and all sorts of software.

Everything is now integrated into one big email marketing lifecycle.

With that in mind, over the past year or so, I have come across businesses that still hit the send button to their entire subscriber list and wonder “why are my open and click through rates so low?” without doing any personalization whatsoever. Personalization can be as simple and basic as a business wants it to be, but without constant tweaking, it will only be able to provide subpar results.

Using the technology available now–with plenty of choices nowadays–the possibilities are endless in regard to what you are able to do with data, and how you can manipulate it to create a personalized customer journey.

Ecommerce powerhouses are a perfect example of a productive customer journey. They are able to target their prospect in relation to how they interact with the website, sometimes even the physical store, and use behavioural triggers that send relevant content at a relevant time to their subscribers.

Obviously, not every business has the budget, time, or know-how when it comes to implementing such a strategy, yet every modern business does hold relevant data about their customers. Though scattered and disorganized, it is still a good starting point.

As GDPR gets closer (May 2018) there may be no better time to begin sorting out that data, and devise a personalized strategy to take a business to the next level.

Commercial entities can use their data gathered to build behavioural triggers and customer personas/profiling. This will also prove helpful with lead scoring, which in turn will facilitate the creation of personalized emails that gather an increase in engagement, sales and interaction.

Given the premises that intelligent personalization will most certainly be one of the key developments for all email marketing in the near future, one must also keep in mind that subscribers are quite fond of their privacy. It all depends on how far a business wants to go, but while the brevity is the soul of wit, the same applies to the business environment, where subtlety is the trademark of proficient marketing.

To conclude, intelligent personalization works and works well, but as with every tool out there, it’s how you use it that matters most.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/harringtonben/

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Komal Helyer, Marketing Director - Pure360Personalization has been more than just inserting a name (or any other demographic) for a long time. These tactics are now not enough to drive better results. There are a plethora of contextual personalization tactics that brands can use. These include anything from product recommendations, personalized landing pages, intelligent real-time content that changes depending on geography—or even weather—to campaigns predicting what the consumer will do next. As marketers have a wealth of technology available to easily implement these, we will see these intelligent personalizations feature in the successful campaigns of 2018.

Jen Capstraw, Freelance Consultant & Strategist and President & Co-Founder, Women of EmailDebbie Downer here. Skimming my own inbox on Black Friday and Cyber Monday, I’m disappointed with the state of personalization in email. My clients tell me often they *want* to be more personalized—they’ve heard the message loud and clear that personalization delivers greater engagement and conversions—but when it comes to the business-as-usual campaigns that fill our inboxes, marketers are largely missing the mark. They’re beholden to editorial calendars, status quos, and inefficient processes. Personalization at scale is incredibly hard, and significant transformation—and investment—is necessary to realize it. Because even mediocre email marketing performs well enough, we’re not seeing radical change, save for a handful of trail blazers. Sadly, this will continue in 2018. On the upside though, greater attention is being paid to behaviour-based triggers. Marketers are exploring creative ways to harness email, website and app engagement to deliver highly targeted campaigns. While this type of messaging makes up a mere sliver of the email ecosphere, behavioural email is tops when it comes to ROI, and the accessibility and affordability of solutions that integrate easily with most environments is driving wide adoption.


https://www.linkedin.com/in/jencapstraw/

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TREND FIVESophisticated segmentationDo you market to your whole database? Unfortunately, marketing this way, you will experience subscriber fatigue, loss of revenue and an increasing spam score to mention a few. You will be sending another blast email - the phrase that strikes fear into every email marketer.

Segmentation allows you to treat your clients differently. More personalization means an increase in conversions because it will help you to keep relevant with your lists ever-changing needs.

Elliot Ross, CEO - Taxi for EmailThe idea of the hyper-personalized segment-of-one has long been the holy grail of email marketers. However, there have always been challenges achieving this - one is that the signals historically haven’t been strong enough for us to accurately tailor messaging. Another has been that physically creating many versions of content has been cost and/or time prohibitive. Developments in technology, from smarter content management apps to products that harness Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning, are beginning to enable marketers in this aim.


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TREND SIXSubject Line EffectivenessSince the beginning of marketing emails, there has been much debate over what makes a good subject line. Does it need to be short, long or do you use emojis to entice your clients to open your email? However, what worked 10 years ago or 10 days ago may not work for you or your subscriber base. Once you understand your subscribers and have a testing plan in place, you are halfway there.

April Mullen, Director of Consumer-First Marketing at Selligent and Co-Founder, Women of EmailAfter your “from” name which has a lot of brand equity with your customers, the subject line (along with the pre-header), has the biggest impact on your email opens. While it’s a simpler task in the email production process, it’s one of the most important given that it drives the first of micro-conversions that is required to reach the end conversion. Here are my predictions for subject lines in 2018:

r Given that mobile opens consistently hover above 50%, it’s no surprise that subject lines are getting shorter and will likely continue to do so. A recent study7 claims that subject line character counts that hover between 1 and 20 characters have a higher open rate, click rate and click-to-open rate (CTOR).

r Emojis will continue to be used to grab attention in the inbox. A recent study8 showed inconclusive results, but my Black Friday and Cyber Monday-filled inbox shows that marketers love using them. They’re easy, they help keep character counts low and they’re informal/conversational.

r Speaking of conversational, subject lines are getting increasingly casual. The use of conversational language, humor and puns will be a hit in 2018, as marketers embrace less formality in their brand image.

r Lastly, subject line testing is the most common type of email test because it is easy to create several versions without having to touch HTML assets. In 2018, subject line testing will grow up a bit, due to advancements in artificial intelligence. What used to be a test that marketers would have to plan in advance, will become a fluid and dynamic process that self-optimizes across all send using intelligence technologies like Phrasee, Persado or even ESP/marketing cloud AI testing capabilities.

Joolz Joseph M IDM, Strategic Email Marketing Consultant | Marketing Mentor at The Virtual MarketeerWith the use of folders now commonplace in popular email clients, many recipients simply glance through their promotional emails every few days, meaning it’s more challenging than ever to make an impression.

There are a number of tools out there to help improve your subject lines and these tools will get smarter and their use will become more prevalent. Two such examples include Adobe

7 Email Client Market Share Trends for 20178 Email Subject Line Length: Is Brevity Better?

https://www.linkedin.com/in/aprildmullen/




https://www.marketingprofs.com/charts/2017/32600/email-subject-line-length-is-brevity-better

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Campaign (which uses AI to suggest the best subject lines for an email) and Alchemy Worx Touchstone (which is designed to identify the best performing subject line from options you provide).

One of the biggest trends which I think will continue, is the use of emoji’s, which are increasingly prevalent in our inboxes. Whilst they can increase opens, overuse will make your email look like spam, so it is important to get the balance right.

Ensure your use of emoji is in line with both the email’s content and your brand. With over 2,000 emoji to choose from, you should be able to find one or two that are relevant!

Whilst it can be great to use a series of emoji’s to tell a story, if appropriate to your audience, make sure you do your research on your recipient email clients. If their browser, email client, or mobile device doesn’t support the emoji you use, it will be replaced with a generic square or question mark ?. A subject line with a lot of emoji can look empty or pointless in these clients.

One company that uses emoji really well is Mo You London and they couple them with capital letters to make their emails stand out in the inbox.

Alongside subject lines is the pre-header text and I don’t believe one can be mentioned without the other. Once almost always filled with the words ‘Click to view in your browser’, smart senders are using pre-header text effectively to extend their subject line or complement it. I love emails which elaborate on the subject more or tease me about the content in the pre-header.

Another trend which I have been using for many years, but which I have noticed a lot more of recently, is a 2nd send of the same email several days later, with a different subject line. This is a smart way to maximize opens for smaller companies who don’t have the budget for larger automated, optimizing campaigns.

Dela Quist, Founder & CEO - Touchstone Intelligent Marketing | CEO - Alchemy Worx

“The truth knocks on the door and you say, “Go away, I’m looking for the truth,” and so it goes away. Puzzling.”

When it comes to email few would argue with that the subject is, one of if not THE, single most important part of an email. Here’s why. Average open rates are between 15% and

https://www.linkedin.com/in/delaquist/

http://bit.ly/2BfS8S9

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25% range depending on industry, so for the 75% to 85% of recipients who do not open any given email they receive, the Subject line IS the email. Everyone with an email address is exposed to multiple subject lines on a daily basis. According to the latest research by the Radicati Group, an astounding 3.7 billion people have an email address. This year 269 billion emails will be sent to - and by, those people. Globally, each address gets an average of 72.5 emails every day. That’s a LOT of subject lines! No wonder “How do I improve my Subject lines?” is the No.1 FAQ of all time. I am here to answer that question. It’s deceptively simple TEST!

Why you need to TestTo help you understand the impact of testing I would like to share some data taken from Touchstone a virtual test platform for subject lines (SL’S). What we found surprising was when it comes top testing effectively A/B is not enough.

Performance Curve – No test

This bell curve taken from the campaign data held with Touchstone shows the distribution of open rates for every SL in the database. All open rates are computed relative to the sender’s average open rate, so an open rate of +20% here means that it performed 20% above average.

Let’s start with how many SL’s you should test to ensure you get a significant lift. The term A/B test would imply that two is ok, but the data would suggest otherwise. The data shows us that any given SL has roughly 1 chance out of 3 of performing at least 20% above average. In other words, to be sure to get a 20% lift in your open rate, you should test at least 3 SL’s on every single campaign.

We can also see what happens if you don’t test, or test too little. If you use only one subject line, there is a 1/3 chance that it will underperform the average by at least 20% and a 1/10 chance that it will perform 42% below average. So if you select only two subject lines in your test, then each has a 1/3 chance of underperforming by >20%. In other words, there is a 1/9 chance that both will be 20% or more below average. SL “A” is bad, “B” is worse – bad beats worse, but they are both crap!

The more SL’s you test the greater the chance that at least one of them will be one of those great SL’s to the right of this chart, and reduce the chances that you’ll send one of the less effective SL’s on the left.

http://bit.ly/2n8yJQI

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As you will see from the next 3 charts every incremental SL you test improves your chances of getting a lift.

Predicted Performance from 2 Subject Line (AB) test

Predicted Performance from 3 Subject Line test

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Predicted Performance from 4 Subject Line test

The same is true whether you decide to optimize for Click Rate or Click-to-open (CTO) rate as this handy chart taken from the data demonstrates.

Predicted Gain

Variations Open % Click % CTO %

2 3% 0% 0%

3 21% 42% 25%

4 33% 79% 47%

5 44% 111% 65%

6 53% 141% 80%

7 60% 169% 94%

8 68% 194% 106%

9 74% 220% 117%

10 81% 242% 128%

So if you test 3 SL’s the chances are you can expect a 21% improvement in your open rate, 42% in click rate and 25% improvement in your CTO. The need to test is something that even the AI language generating services such as Persado or Phrasee cannot sidestep. Both services promise/deliver an uplift – but require you to test between 10 and 20 SL’s. So it doesn’t matter who or what writes your subject lines you MUST test to guarantee a lift.

What to optimise “We take a handful of sand from the endless landscape of awareness around us and call that handful of sand the world.”

Email marketing practitioners (and the people they report to) tend to see the SL as the primary way to get someone to open an email, and opening an email is seen as the primary

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thing we want subscribers to do. So the theory goes: write a good SL, get more people to open – gets more clicks – gets more conversions; write a bad subject line - fewer people open the email – get fewer clicks get fewer conversions. Armed with this highly simplistic view, they then set about trying to optimize their subject lines.

The reality could not be further from the truth!

As the chart below shows, the number of actions and decisions that an SL influences for better or worse is exponentially more complicated than Open Yes or No? If Yes – Click, If NO delete/mark spam. Click Yes or No? If Yes – Convert If NO delete.

If you think that is complicated you need to remember that every one of those actions is influenced by the emails and SL’s you have already sent and will influence those you are yet to send.

E.G: someone gets an email from GAP saying “Great deals on leggings in store and online”. They do NOT open the email, but happen to be walking past a GAP store that day. They pop in to take a look at them and work out the best size as they don’t have enough time to make the purchase. Two days later another email arrives from GAP repeating the message or reminding them the offer is about to expire. The person opens that email then clicks and buys. Throw in things like what device each SL was viewed on, whether they “read” or just “skimmed” the email content and you will see what I mean.

So it’s not only possible, but quite likely that an email with a very high open rate will generate fewer sales (if you take other channels into account) than one with a very low open rate that “nudged” thousands of people who did not open but went into the store or direct to your site. For further evidence of the nudge effect of email SL’s you need go no further than the 2016 DMA Consumer Tracking Report.

http://bit.ly/2ABN5PG

http://bit.ly/2ABN5PG

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As you can see from the chart, at least 4 and arguably 5 of the 6 most likely actions taken by the consumers surveyed, as a result of receiving a marketing email do not involve a click. If the SL is informative enough the email may not even have been opened!

So if you really are serious about optimising your SL’s you have to look beyond the opens and clicks immediately generated by your subject line and THAT requires you to (re)consider your attribution model for email.

“You look at where you’re going and where you are and it never makes sense, but then you look back at where you’ve been and a pattern seems to emerge.”

AttributionIf you truly want to optimise your SL’s you have to measure and understand the effects of an email, and my first recommendation is to reconsider where you place the cut-off point for attribution.

TimingWhen do you stop counting opens or clicks generated by the email? Do you stop attributing after a day, week or when the next email is going out? The reason that it is important goes back to the first chart. Even straight forward and very measurable actions like an open or a click come with a sting in the tail. Open Later Click Later or Buy Later, which begs the question. How late is later? The chart below is taken from an attribution audit conducted by Alchemy Worx for a large retailer. We analysed every campaign sent over a 3 month period, with no cut-off for email attribution and compared it with a 7 day cut-off the existing attribution model being used.

We found that after 7 days the existing cut-off for email attribution was 95% of the final total for Opens and 96% of total for Clicks had occurred. But crucially 49% of revenue generated by those emails failed to make the cut.

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To better understand what was going on we zoomed in on sales. Both lines here represent average daily sales attributed to their campaigns. The darker line represents average sales per day post-deployment and the lighter line represents average sales per day from last click. The difference is startling. While 20.76% of sales happen within a day of the email being deployed, 45.48% of sales happen within a day of the last click. This attribution gap highlighted by the red arrow is caused by people clicking and in some cases opening an email a day or more after it was sent. If that doesn’t make you sit up then consider this, around 25% of sales came 21 days or more after the email was sent.

“Is it hard?’

Not if you have the right attitudes. Its having the right attitudes that’s hard.”

In order to truly optimize your SL’s you need to measure and understand its impact even when there was no open or click – what we call the halo effect.

Firstly, it’s important to understand the most common attribution models (that determine how sales and conversion are determined) email marketers are using. Typically, the following three measurement criteria are considered.

The type of action – opens, clicks or conversion.

The time frame – do you cut-off after days, weeks, or months from send.

Touch – first touch, last touch or any touch.

Most email marketers will choose some combination of the three depending on what works best for their business, typically in relation to its sales cycle, but the popular approach is to focus on tracking conversions via last click.

However, the truth is a click doesn’t necessarily tell a marketer anything. Not everyone that clicks through from an email will actually go on further and make an immediate purchase. It also doesn’t account for the likelihood the clicker might go on to purchase via another channel at a later date. Clearly, there is value to a SL that is not being taken into

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consideration, if you just focus on clicks or opens for that matter. The question then becomes, how can we measure this?

My initial advice is to run an analysis of revenue from all channels as a starting point. Then deduct the email specific revenue as you currently attribute it (opens and clicks, first or last touch) and break down this new number into days when emails to the majority of your list, were and weren’t sent out. We have done this for a number of clients. The results consistently show the average daily revenue on days in which email was sent to more than 30% of the list was higher for the non-email channels too. We then looked at the source of the lift in revenue, where the lift was most marked based on last touch and first touch. Email had an impact on every other channel search, both natural and paid, affiliate programs, even social.

So what does this all mean? Essentially, our main conclusion was that email SL’s are certainly driving sales in other channels and this is one way to prove it. I must, admittedly caution marketers from defining email and the halo effect too broadly and overstating the revenue generated by email or defining it too narrowly and underestimating. However, if marketers can find the right balance and look at email as part of the bigger picture, they’ll quickly see that it can work in a capacity similar to broadcast and drive additional revenue in other channels.

This brings us back to the importance of attribution models. If email SL’s are driving sales in other channels on and offline, then marketers need to consider that fact and look for a model that takes this into account. If marketers are able to look beyond simple click-based attribution, and make sure they are tracking and analysing sales holistically both online and offline, they will find demonstrating the true value of their email marketing and getting additional funding for testing will become much easier.

“For every fact there is an infinity of hypotheses.”

What to Test: The golden rule and top 10 tipsThe golden rule is to plan ahead.

In my view every SL that goes out the door should be tested. Ideally it will be an ABCD (or more) test and never less than ABC. The only way to do that is to have a good sense what you want to test and plan ahead. More variables = Better results. A plan that lays out the variables you want to test and when you test them will not only save you time when it comes to writing your subject line – you’ll already know your content and how you’re going to approach it, it will give you better results.

So what variables should you test?

1. Test extreme lengthsA lot of advice tells you SL’s should aim to be around 35 characters and unfortunately most people – whether they know it or not seem be following that advice. Looking at the data we found 63% of subject lines that are sent are between 20 and 65 characters in length. What may come as a surprise to you is SL’s of that length tend to underperform!

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So if your idea of short is 25 characters and long 65 characters your SL length tests will give you no joy.

2. Test CTA’sAlthough one of the key aspects of successful copywriting is telling readers what they need to do, this is often overlooked in SL’s, where your focus is often trying to catch attention rather than drive action. We found for one client that telling subscribers what to do by including a direct CTA helped to boost engagement. So rather than just saying ‘Summer Sale’ it became ‘Summer Sale – take a look at the latest offers in store and online’.

3. Test questionsUsing a question instantly makes your SL look and feel very different in the inbox. It also helps you come up with completely new ways of promoting your email content. For example, you might go from ‘Save 50% today’ to ‘New favourite dress? Save 50% today’ – a jump that would have been hard to make without the framework of a question.

4. Test original wordsWe’ve written before that using original words in subject lines can boost click rate by 34%, yet less than a third of subject lines feature original words. Try using a thesaurus or taking inspiration from the dictionary definition to change some of your most-used words.

5. Test personalizationWhile first name personalization is very common now, it can still have an effect if you don’t overuse it. Look at available data fields to see what other personalization you can include in the SL – such as surnames, recent purchases or locations including a city name can perform well, for example.

6. Take inspiration from elsewhereWe find that being reactive and riding on the back of current events is a great way of boosting response but the lift often doesn’t last for long because other brands jump on the bandwagon. The email itself doesn’t have to be themed, as long as your SL makes sense and doesn’t mislead. For example it could be as simple as sending ‘Bored of the tennis? Escape with top 10 weekend breaks’ during Wimbledon.

7. Test emoji strategicallyEmoji can be used in 3 different ways syntactic (as punctuation), lexical (to replace a word) and illustrative (as a decorative or design element). It’s a useful framework that can help you test them effectively and strategically.

http://bit.ly/2y2oA8v

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8. Test toneWithin a brand voice there is still a lot of room for variation in tone – for example in the difference between a promotional email and a service email. Try mixing them up where appropriate – so rather than ‘Hurry - check out our latest events’ you might use ‘we wanted to let you know’. But remember it’s about subtly changing the tone, not misleading customers.

9. Test pronounsOne of the first things you learn about copywriting is to use ‘you’ more than ‘we’. But ‘we’ and ‘our’ can be effective if your customer trusts your brand and sees you as an authority. Try positioning your subject line from both points of view and see which is more effective, for example instead of ‘Top picks for you’ you might try ‘Top picks from our team’.

10. Keep testing and optimizingOur subject line tool Touchstone lets you test and optimise hundreds or iterations of your subject line. So once you know your approach, you can continue to edit and improve it before you send a single email.

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TREND SEVENWriting for EmailsWriting for emails is a art in itself and one that few get right. Email is a medium completely different from websites or books. You need to ask yourself, “what is the purpose of the email?” Is it to get the customer to your landing page? But then why include text that is already on the landing page. You are enticing your client. Don’t give away the ending before they even click.

Kath Pay, CEO, Holistic Email MarketingHistorically, because email is a push channel, we marketers have used it to ‘push’ our message out about how awesome we are, how wonderful our products and services are, with little or no thought of the person and their needs at the receiving end.

However, customers are now savvier and less tolerant of these brand-centric messages and are demanding more meaningful, relevant and personalized experiences from we email marketers. This means that brands need to become customer-focused - not only in their approach and doing what’s easiest and best for the customer, but also in their messaging throughout the customer journey and lifecycle.

Customer ExperienceCustomer experience marketing is the new trend, and I can’t see it going away anytime soon. The people have spoken loudly with their opens, clicks and conversions – ignoring brands who are still writing from a brand-centric approach instead of a customer-centric approach. In fact, I predict that we will soon be competing as much on delivering a satisfying online customer experience (of which email marketing is an essential contributor) as on price. If you don’t offer an easy, pleasant customer experience the first time, you very likely won’t get a second chance, as they’ll turn to your competitor who is giving the consumer the experience they desire.

Douglas van Praet, author of Unconscious Branding states:

“A general “law of least effort” applies to cognitive as well as physical exertion. The law asserts that if there are several ways of achieving the same goal, people will eventually gravitate to the least demanding course of action. ……Laziness is built deep into our nature”

In other words, we need to make it easy for the customer and deliver the benefits rather than features. If we only deliver the features within our copy, we’re then expecting the customer to convert these features into benefits. As a marketer, this is what we should be doing.

Hilton Hhonors has a great example below of customer-centric copy – focusing nicely on the customer and using lots of lovely persuasive trigger words.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/kathpay/

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Customer-Centric CalculatorA good way to determine whether your copy is brand-centric or customer-centric is to calculate the ratio of ‘our’, ‘we’, ‘us’ etc. against ‘you’, ‘your’ etc. The below email from tails.com is a lovely example of customer-centric copy with 6:2 ratio of being customer-centric, or in other words, it’s 75% customer-centric.

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Use Stylised Alt-textStyling your alt-text was featured heavily in the email community more than a few years ago now, and marketers still need to be taking more advantage of them – especially those who have emails with minimal live text within them. These stylised alt-text can be persuasive and informative and even act as a Call-To-Action, as seen in the example from Dunelm. Too often, with many retailers, this is a huge missed opportunity and I would like to see this trend increase. By not only adding alt-text, but stylising them with different fonts and sizes, we are helping our customers, which in turn, helps us.

Increasing use of Rule of 3One of my favourite tactics, I’ve been applying and teaching about this for many, many years. The number 3 resonates with we humans. We learn from patterns and 3 is the first pattern you can create. Comedians, photographers, script writers, authors, all live by the rule of three. If we want something to be easily consumed, remembered or actioned, then package it up in 3’s, as seen in this lovely Boden example.

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AI devised Subject LinesAI has made its way into Subject Lines with providers such as Phrasee and Persado offering machine-learning services to write your winning subject lines for you.

Note though, whilst they do the hard work of writing the subject line for you, these still need to be tested to determine which will give you the best response. An easy (and accurate) way of doing this is by using a tool such as Touchstone, which will allow you to virtually test up to 10 subject lines at once.

Creative Call-to-actionsThink out of the box when it comes to call-to-actions. Call-to-actions in emails have one job – and that is to incentivie the reader (through colour/shape/copy) to click through the email onto the landing page/website. All too many CTA’s though, are dry and boring, with very little thought going into these important and necessary ‘fixtures’ and simply using the traditional ‘Read more’ and ’Shop now’. This is another opportunity to provide value to the reader and to provide either attention-grabbing or persuasive, relevant CTA’s, as seen here in the Holistic Insights newsletter.

http://touchstonetests.io/

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Catherine Loftus, Senior Marketing Manager at TrustedHousesitters

Persona, not personalitiesAlong with many brands, we’ll be focusing on developing a distinct brand persona that will inform the way we write and speak. This applies not just within email, but across all touchpoints including other marketing channels, website and 121 contact with customer service teams.

The brand persona roots your way of writing to the way a specific person, or type of person, would speak, such as a chef or a teacher. This persona governs voice, visuals and behaviour to create one consistent and memorable experience.

The ultimate goal is to create a visual and verbal identity that is so distinct and so consistent, you could cover the logo on an email or webpage and still know which brand it belongs to. Internally, you should not be able to tell which team member wrote the copy, as you write as the persona, not as individuals.

Consistency is key in creating the brand persona, starting with fundamental writing principles, including use of abbreviations, acronyms, capitalization and numbers. This then develops out to more complex and personalized messaging that considers the different types of customer and different lifecycle stages, whilst always retaining the persona principles.

Some brands are already leading the way in beautifully consistent, instantly recognisable communications. This example of a seasonal style email from fashion retailer New Look uses snappy headlines, product-focused animated gifs and category terms, for an output that seamlessly matches the online and in-store shopping experience:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/catherine-loftus/

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Writing for the customer, not the channelBrands are looking beyond marketing channels in isolation and are instead bringing the focus back on the customer. Besides, customers don’t look at channels in isolation, they want useful communications relevant to their point in the lifecycle.

Of course, there will always be specific ways of writing for email. Transactional, acquisition and winback communications have their own necessary style. But while the voice, messaging and style is tailored to different types of customer at different stages of the journey or lifecycle, this should always be underpinned by consistent elements.

When writing for email, the cross-channel experience must always be considered, now more than ever. Is the purpose to enlighten, attract, inspire, reassure or congratulate? Is this a first-time contact or are you communicating with a loyal repeat customer?

Airbnb have really nailed this consistent experience. This example of a booking confirmation email is not a standalone piece, but a perfect continuation of the online and on-app booking experience.

From browsing…

…to booking

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And now my trip is booked, they reach out to upsell me to becoming a host. I already know exactly what ‘becoming a host’ means because of the consistency with which the term has been used throughout the journey, meaning the copy in this email can focus fully on the benefits.

Develop and test using emailFast response times, segmentation and multi-variants make email the perfect place starting point for testing new copy and tone of voice. Best performing variants can then played out across many channels. For example, your acquisition email subject lines tests could inform your PPC ad copy; CTAs and imagery could inform social media messaging.

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TREND EIGHTDeliverabilityIf our marketing email arrives in the subscribers’ inbox, that is a successful delivery. However many things could affect our emails deliverability, like Internet Service Providers (ISPs), bounces, spam issues to name a few.

You need to monitor your deliverability. For example, if you are having high bounce rates, it could mean your domain is on a blacklist somewhere. And ISPs take notice of reputable blacklists like SpamCop.

With deliverability, you don’t want to be complacent. Even if you monitor it once a month in a report, its better than nothing. Just remember this is your reputation at stake.

Chad S. White, Research Director at Litmus and author of Email Marketing Rules2018 will be a year of carrots and sticks for email deliverability. The carrot will be in the form of the emerging Brand Indicators for Message Identification (BIMI) standard. It will display senders’ logos next to properly authenticated messages.

Email authentication protects your brand from being spoofed and boosts your deliverability. Yet, despite those benefits, only 39.7% of brands use all three authentication standards - Sender Policy Framework (SPF), DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM), and the newest standard, Domain Message Authentication Reporting & Conformance (DMARC) - according to Litmus’ 2017 State of Email Deliverability report. BIMI will give brands a powerful, visible reason to embrace authentication. In doing so, they’ll improve their deliverability.

The stick will be the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the European Union’s new privacy law. Going into effect on May 25, 2018, GDPR raises the bar on email permission practices and covers any emails sent to EU residents. Under the law, affirmative consent will be required, which means passive opt-in methods like pre-checked boxes will be a violation subject to massive fines. Plus, brands will need to collect and save records of email consents.

While the tightening of email permission requirements will constrain list growth, it will increase list quality and boost subscriber engagement. Most major inbox providers now pay close attention to what percentage of your subscribers are opening and engaging with your emails and use that to determine inbox placement. So having more engaged subscribers should increase deliverability rates.

Together, BIMI and GDPR will spur brands to make deliverability improvements they wouldn’t have otherwise made.

https://www.spamcop.net/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/chadswhite

https://litmus.com/blog/dmarc-what-it-is-how-it-helps-protect-your-brand-against-email-fraud

https://litmus.com/blog/2017-state-of-email-deliverability-the-behaviors-that-help-and-hurt-marketers-reach-the-inbox-ebook?utm_source=emrblog&utm_medium=blog

https://litmus.com/blog/gdpr-what-europes-new-privacy-law-means-for-email-marketers

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TREND NINECode like it’s 2018Keeping abreast on the latest updates from email clients is a task in its own. A slight change from Gmail for example could mean that your email that displayed correctly one day, won’t the next. But that type of coding is from last year.

There is more to this trend than just keeping up with code changes. It’s using the knowledge that is out there to stand out from the crowd in your subscribers inboxes.

Heidi Olsen, Senior Developer at eROIWith mobile subscribers on the rise, email design is shifting its focus to smaller screens. That means an increasing interest in card-based layout, an organizational pattern that works well with responsive design because card sizes and grids can restructure themselves to fit any screen size.

In response, brands experimenting with CSS Grid, a CSS-based layout method, to implement a masonry-style framework that features cards structured in a grid of equal spacing. This makes the content both easy to digest and scan.

CSS Grid is only supported in Apple Mail 10.3+, AOL (Firefox/Chrome), Freenet.de (Firefox/Chrome) and Outlook 2016 for Mac. Using progressive enhancement developers can still ensure that all subscribers will receive the intended message, even if it doesn’t visually look consistent.

So far I’ve only seen companies like Action Rocket and Litmus implement CSS Grid for aggregated content in their newsletters. This is a great audience for such experiments since the subscribers are more likely to be forgiving for any rendering issues and excited to see the progression that is made.

EmailWeekly by Action Rocket


http://actionrocket.cmail19.com/t/ViewEmail/j/A2D6E8EDF6372D872540EF23F30FEDED/DB69A03C4724599E7F4E5A579FEBB2E9

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Progressive enhancement continues to be a great strategy when it comes to email design. Progressive enhancement provides a stable, accessible experience for all subscribers and increasingly adds more functionality to provide the best experience possible for clients that support it.

This approach also allows developers to use CSS animations in place of animated GIFs. CSS animations have various benefits including that they are lightweight and fast to load, render smoother than a rasterized GIF, and look great on retina-display.

When done well, animation can create a level of feeling and perception close to what a person experiences when interacting with a physical object in real life. A popular use case is to animate call-to-action to visually confirm that the button is clickable. CSS animations can also be used to provide a hint to the user that an element is interactive, like a tooltip.

eROI Dare to Be Campaign

Another favorite use case is to animate backgrounds. Rarely is it worth it to use a large animated GIF for a decorative background, so CSS animations provide a great alternative. The clients that do not support CSS animation will still receive the marketing message, but those who do will have a better branded experience.

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Taco Bell Holiday Email

CSS animation can also provide a lightweight, more accessible alternative to video in email. Kristian Robinson developed a “faux-video” technique that uses image sprites and CSS animation keyframes to give the effect of a video. Him and his team at CACI Email Studio created emails that leveraged this technique for the UEFA Women’s Euro 2017 tournament. They also went a few steps further to update the CSS stylesheet in order to update the score as the game progressed. Not only is it impressive technology, the end use case provides actual value to the subscriber.

UEFA Women’s Euro 2017 — Channel 4.

http://reallygoodemails.com/wp-content/uploads/happy-holidays-we-made-you-a-game-want-to-play.html

https://medium.com/@ka.robinson82/uefa-womens-euro-2017-email-channel-4-67ad51467aab

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One large downside to leveraging CSS animations is that it requires knowledge to know how to create and troubleshoot, especially since it will require testing in live devices. Currently CSS animations work great in iOS, Apple Mail, Android Native, Outlook for Mac, AOL, and Thunderbird.

Alex Ilhan, Senior Email Developer at Email on AcidNew trends are always at the lips of email geeks around the world. We all want to know what the next hot trend will be and we want to be early adopters.

It’s very easy when asked this questions about what the future will hold for email development to say interactive email will be the big thing in 2018, or to say that we’ll switch to using fun new development techniques like CSS grid, finally ridding ourselves of the dreaded HTML table.

I think we can look a little closer to home to answer this. The one thing I want to see everyone doing, and I truly hope becomes a trend, is better email accessibility.

It’s amazing to hear these extra voices reaching out to discuss accessibility. We were blown away by the support we received whilst hosting an email accessibility webinar and, at Email on Acid, we’re really putting research into learning how folks who are affected by accessibility issues not only interact with their email, but how they interact with the devices they use to consume email.

I believe we are only just scratching the surface with accessibility. The changes we already suggest make such a huge impact on email consumption for those with disabilities that it makes me excited to see what changes we can make next.

As we move into 2018, I believe we can work toward an industry-wide minimum accessibility specification that helps email developers, designers and marketers make positive changes to their email accessibility with a minimal amount of effort.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/alex-ilhan-48259651/

https://www.emailonacid.com/blog/article/email-marketing/accessibility-in-email-webinar-recap



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TREND TENMarketing AutomationAutomation by definition is where you introduce systems that will generate actions due to certain triggers that you set up. Applying this to email marketing, it means that once a customer subscribes to a certain email journey, they will automatically receive your emails without you having to do anything else.

This is a brilliant function for you, an email marketer, as it means once you’ve set these up – they can run themselves and you can spend your time on other tasks.

Komal Helyer, Marketing Director - Pure360Marketing automation will grow in significance in 2018. New low-cost, easy-to-integrate technology will enter the market and marketers’ capabilities to use the tech available to them will grow. The need for marketing automation businesses to offer more guidance—and support brands through their growth in sophistication—will also become essential.

Joolz Joseph M IDM, Strategic Email Marketing Consultant | Marketing Mentor - The Virtual MarketeerAccording to Forrester, trigger-based marketing can generate 4x the revenue of standard communications, so automation is no longer a should, it’s a must. Almost every Email Service Provide (even many free offerings) offer some form of automation within their service, making it accessible for everyone.

The customer journey is increasingly complex. With so many touchpoints, email is becoming more thoroughly integrated with other channels. That means more responsive, automated communications that build on conversations started elsewhere and solidify relationships.

Because it is a win-win, improving both efficiencies and the effectiveness, automation is also being increasingly adopted by smaller retailers looking to maximise revenue from the channel and compete with the bigger players who already embrace it.

At one end of the scale is a simple welcome email. A fundamental communication which should be central to the strategy of every email marketer and has been for some time.

At the next level, responsive drip campaigns are being widely used and as they have proven themselves, more sophisticated workflows that educate, inform and persuade throughout the sales process are coming into play. Understanding common pain points and sales blocks, you are able to send content that is highly effective in nudging subscribers along the sales funnel based on previous behaviour.

More recently, I have noticed clients asking for automated onboarding and client nurturing campaigns. These are effective at reducing churn as well as increasing revenues and also reviews which are increasingly important for social proof. ‘How To’ videos ensure news clients can use products effectively, personalised replenishment reminders can be triggered on likely behaviour in even very simple systems and there are often a number of predictable cross and upselling opportunities to be capitalised on.

Two companies that do beautiful, simple but effective automated comms are Dropbox and Uber. Dropbox inject personality into their emails but keep the messaging straight to



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the point. Uber have a great welcome email which tells you how the service works with a beautifully laid out communication.

Predictive Intelligence can be used to suggest products or offers likely to be effective based on profiles and behaviour. It is important to remember that when GDPR comes into place, profiling can only take place with the appropriate consent and to get that in place today.

The future, and true automation lies in the application of Artificial Intelligence to analyse and predict user behaviour – truly sending the right email with the best content at the right time. With AI, the machine teaches itself (rather than the marketer setting the rules) based on previous recipient behaviour. Self-optimising content, better subject lines and predictive, personalised recommendations are being effectively utilised by the largest e-commerce brands right now. This is true for 1-to-1 marketing and will become increasingly prevalent as we seek to optimise the channel even further and use the Big Data that we collect.

Jenna Tiffany, Founder & Strategy Director - Let’s Talk StrategyYour subscribers are more than an email address - they are real people. Humans relate to other humans so don’t let your email marketing become robotic, or impersonal - even with automated journeys.

We as email marketers want to wow our subscribers with relevancy. The best place to start is to personalise the customers experience throughout the five stages in a consumer’s decision making process (John Dewey, 1910). The more expensive the item, the longer this process typically takes. We all go through this process subconsciously even when buying a bar of chocolate but don’t take very long deliberating over it before deciding because the value is low. This can be referred to as an impulse purchase.

Think about this in the context of where a customer is on their decision-making process with you. Brands that continue to struggle to provide any form of personalisation are going to switch consumers off with irrelevant messaging.

Email marketing brand will appear over several stages to influence a consumer’s decision, so it may be at the stage where a consumer has a problem. For example, when a subscriber is looking for a hotel. Rather than trying to guess the location that they are looking for, Travelodge help them in providing a quick and easy their search field in their email:


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In this email the subscriber can add their airport name directly into the email and then select ‘search’ and the subscriber is then taken to a web page with only the hotels that are relevant to what the subscriber is looking for.

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Defining your email marketing strategy is key to incorporating intelligent personalisation within your email campaigns. This is because your strategy should identify the objective and goals you are aiming to achieve. One brand that had a clearly defined strategy and goal was EasyJet with their 20-year anniversary email campaign. The key objective was to drive an emotional response. Easyjet could have just sent a campaign that patted themselves on the back for flying for 20 years. Instead the brand utilised all of the purchase data they had about subscribers to send over 12.4 million unique emails. The content included interesting facts related to the distance their customers had flown, other destinations they could have visited and how kms they had flown since they have been a customer with Easyjet. Did this achieve their objective of driving an emotional response? It sure did! This email campaign used personalisation effectively and engaged subscribers across multiple channels such as social media with 78% of subscribers used the words ‘love’ on social media to describe the campaign. Across social media alone the campaign had an estimated reach of 685,000 people and achieved more than 1.1 million impressions (Campaignlive, 2017).

This single email campaign demonstrates the true value of personalisation which doesn’t just have to be focused on including the first name, but can also be used to drive emotional responses to engage an audience.

Time targeted personalisation enables you to always send email content that is relevant, as the content automatically updates within the inbox. Sporting matches are prime examples of how email content can be updated automatically, here in the form of a live score with game statistics (Kickdynamic, 2017).

The first email is sent before the match and is updated throughout the course of the game with the scores changing to reflect the actual score of the game. Detroit Pistons saw increases in their click through from the email as well as overall engagement time spent reading the email because subscribers knew that the content would contain the latest match information.

Personalisation isn’t just effective for B2C brands, it is also incredibly effective in enhancing the experience for B2B subscribers too.

Wave is a cloud accountancy service that provides a weekly newsletter detailing that customers ‘week in numbers’. As a business owner, monitoring the financial numbers on a regular basis is crucial and Wave are providing that sense check automatically each week in the inbox. The summary of the week is personalised to the individual business, without a need for that subscriber to log into the system.

http://www.campaignlive.co.uk/article/easyjet-transformed-customer-data-emotional-anniversary-stories/1414488#CVHEsmTBkC7sPId6.99

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Example online quote – automation that enhances the customers experienceAutomation is incredibly effective for closing the online and offline gap in a customers experience with a brand. Hiscox Insurance are a brilliant example of effective automation that doesn’t interrupt the customers experience, but enhances it. Their automated email instantly provides all the key information from the customers sales journey to date with Hiscox – providing a seamless and effortless multichannel customer experience.

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Email 1Email 1 is sent to subscribers straight away after completing an online quote, containing all the information about the product that would be most suitable for the customers need. This quote is bespoke based on the information the customer has provided.

To complete the purchase a customer has to then telephone the contact centre. This could be a huge barrier to conversions for most brands, but Hiscox overcome this by recognising a customer as soon as they answer the call as the reference number is provided using the keypad before being connected to an advisor.

Email 2Following purchasing the insurance on the phone, email 3 is then sent with all of the policy details straight away following the call.

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Email 3Monthly emails are then sent to new customers (who have opted in to receive them) with content focused on insurance news and latest updates that are all relevant to the service that Hiscox is providing the customer.

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Recommended Smart Insights resources from our Email marketing toolkit r GDPR briefing

r Design a welcome email journey Quick Win

r Email sequence contact strategy template

r Email marketing platform RFP template checklist

r Marketing Automation Best Practices Guide

r Email Marketing and Marketing Automation toolkit Find all of our Email Marketing and Marketing Automation resources in our toolkit, from our strategy guide to helpful templates, research reports and much more.

https://www.smartinsights.com/guides/gdpr-briefing/?utm_medium=pdf&utm_source=cp-resource-pure360&utm_campaign=emailtrends

https://www.smartinsights.com/quick-wins/email-welcome-journey/?utm_medium=pdf&utm_source=cp-resource-pure360&utm_campaign=emailtrends

https://www.smartinsights.com/guides/email-sequence-contact-strategy-template/?utm_medium=pdf&utm_source=cp-resource-pure360&utm_campaign=emailtrends

https://www.smartinsights.com/guides/email-platform-rfp-template-checklist/?utm_medium=pdf&utm_source=cp-resource-pure360&utm_campaign=emailtrends

https://www.smartinsights.com/guides/marketing-automation-best-practices-guide/?utm_medium=pdf&utm_source=cp-resource-pure360&utm_campaign=emailtrends

https://www.smartinsights.com/improve/email-marketing-toolkit/?utm_medium=pdf&utm_source=cp-resource-pure360&utm_campaign=emailtrends

email marketing trends 2018 · ones who put the basics in place first. so, ... we offer a powerful,...

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