ShareWhen you think of the most cost-effective way of acquiring new customers and retaining existing ones, which strategy comes to mind?
Running a solid PPC campaign with remarketing, dynamic and regular campaigns? Creating a strong social media presence and marketing to your audience on there? Having a robust SEO and content strategy which could boost your rankings for relevant keywords?
These are all valid approaches, but they don’t even come close to email marketing in terms of ROI, time management and customer retention. By all means, utilise those strategies, but do so in conjunction with email to really see some solid results.
According to The Data and Marketing Association, for every £1 you spend on your email marketing campaigns, you can expect a return of £32 on average. This is obviously dependant on your list size, your niche, your product or the special offer you’re running.
So without further ado, let’s dive in and talk about how you can get the most out of email in 2020.
2019 Email Marketing Stats you’ll need to Know
Email is old news, I hear you say? I beg to differ…
It’s statistically proven that more and more people are opening, sending and receiving emails as each year goes by. In 2017, 269 billion emails were sent and received. In 2018, the number rose to 281 billion. This year, it’s expected to hit 293 billion! And by 2023, it’s projected to escalate to around 350 billion emails, showing 30% growth in just 6 years! (Statista, 2019)
Another interesting statistic is that in 2017, global email users amounted to 3.7 billion users. This figure is set to grow to 4.3 billion users in 2022, which will be a 16.2% increase. In other words, more than half of the world’s population will be checking and sending emails!(Statista, 2019)
Statista have done research into the ideal number of emails consumers would like to receive from their favourite shops or brands:
49% of consumers said that they would like to receive promotional emails from their favourite brands on a weekly basis.
Think about this before bombarding your list with unwanted emails, or you will suffer with high unsubscribe rates and low click through rates, bringing the quality of your account down.
As you can see from the infographic below, 70% of people believe that email will still be relevant in 10 years, which was more than every other channel in the survey! The younger generation are the biggest advocates for the survival of email, which is a great sign of its longevity.
Email Marketing Tips for 2020
Here are some of our top tips for utilising email in 2020.
Welcome Emails
We all love a welcome email, right? Well, 82% of us do according to GetResponse, as that was the average open rate for this type of email.
We can utilise this massively high open rate by getting users to carry out more actions. Whether we try promoting a specific product, telling them about your blog, or even offering an incentive to make their first or next purchase, it’s always worth adding more bulk to your welcome emails.
Following up with emails to users who have only signed up to your mailing list (and not purchased) is another great way of nurturing that warm lead.
Remember not to be spammy, but to instead offer great information showcasing your services, or even further incentives which they wouldn’t get anywhere else apart from the email they’re reading.
Interactive Emails
Try to include as much ‘clickable’ media within your outreach. These interactive emails prove to be far more effective at getting clicks from your user.
Think about using videos, gifs, pictures, polls, buttons etc. But be aware that using too much interactive content within your emails can cause them to be bulky and slower to load, which can cause users to not interact at all and possibly even unsubscribe.
Look to optimise these interactive emails for desktop and mobile. According to the information powerhouse IBM, 49% of all emails are opened on mobile devices, so making sure that users can see your email correctly, and all buttons, pictures and videos are embedded properly is paramount.
Cross-channel Email Marketing
Consumers now subconsciously expect extremely smart and seamless cross-channel marketing. You need to be able to come at your audience from all angles by uploading your email list to various other channels.
Once you master the art of remarketing across many channels, your customers will find it much harder to resist visiting your site and potentially making a purchase.
You’ll need to use Facebook Custom Audiences and Google Customer Match to engage with your existing customers and market to them on multiple channels.
Personalised Emails
Personalised emails are known to have up to a 50% increase in open rates than when compared to nondescript impersonal ones. It’s always worth testing this on your specific audience by split-testing though, as results can vary.
The types of things you can personalise are getting much more sophisticated too. It’s not just including their name in the subject line or sending special offer emails to users on their birthday anymore…
Email Service Providers are now able to acquire a host of new information which can be used for email personalisation and segmentation. You can now send emails based on a user’s device, location or because of a specific customer action. This gives email marketers much more scope in order to give the user a uniquely personal experience.
Email List Segmentation
Having a ‘Send to all’ list is a little bit old fashioned nowadays, and I suspect that more and more email marketers will be sending their emails to a wide range of segments within their database come 2020.
Be creative and think outside the box when creating your segments. It takes a little bit more time and effort, but the results are almost always better. You can send emails to people who viewed a specific page on your website, but left and never came back. Or when someone puts a product in their cart but abandons before purchasing.
These types of segments offer you the ability to get much higher open, click though and conversion rates. This is because they’re super relevant, and they often carry some sort of incentive to help with conversion too. According to Omnisend, sending 3 abandoned cart emails results in 69% more orders than just 1 email.
Email & Voice Assistant Technology
According to TechCrunch, it is projected that smart speakers are going to be in 55% of US homes by 2022. And research from Google says that 52% of smart speaker owners want to get information on deals. The implications of this for all marketing channels, including email marketing, is certainly worth preparing for.
To understand how this will impact us as email marketers, first of all we need to understand how Alexa actually reads your emails. When choosing an ESP and creating emails, we need to make sure we use the correct semantic HTML mark-up, as this will ensure that smart devices are able to read them. It is also worth noting that voice assistants for emails will be vital for the future of online accessibility.
Finally, I would suggest that creating emails that endorse a conversational tone will be much more effective and consumable for these users.
How we can help
Coast Digital have a wealth of knowledge and experience when it comes to a wide variety of Email Service Providers (ESPs), with know-how in both B2B and B2C emails. We can and will ensure all of the above is implemented into your new email marketing strategy.
We’ll also ensure that your email activity is GDPR and PECR (Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations) compliant. If you would like our team of email marketing gurus to assess your strategy and process, please get in touch today.
