Email marketing is a powerful behavioral tool and also the important communication channel. Although we use only a small part of the technology by itself, it can be expanded more. Email marketing with the power of AI, machine learning, deep learning has the potential to change the whole ball game.
A study by TMR reports that email marketing technology represents one-third of the overall marketing budget in more than 50% of the companies.
Email is a backbone of both technological and marketing structure of any organization. It is more important than ever and is evolving every day. Forget what it used to be, take charge of the technology behind tomorrows email marketing. Here we have listed 5 Epic Tech Trends that Email Marketers should be aware of.
1. Email Segmentation:
Segmentation as the name describes, it is the division of email subscribers into smaller segments based on the set of pre-defined criteria. It directly impacts the performance results and the customer satisfaction.
As per the survey by AgileOne, 80% of the US customers said that they expect some personalization while offering them with any online discounts, special offers, pop up offers. Segmentation in email marketing will lead to better personalization. It is primarily based on customer’s data. Some of the major categories of email segmentation include:
Demographic segmentation: It is one of the simplest and the widest type which divides the subscribers based on their age, gender, income, occupation, religion, race and nationality.
Behavioral segmentation: It is a form that differentiates different group of customers according to their attitude towards the products or the service usage rate, response, loyalty status, knowledge and more.
Psychographic segmentation: It describes the human characteristics of the customer by their personalities, values, powers, attitude, lifestyle, interests, opinion and more.
Geographic segmentation: This is the most basic form of market segmentation, wherein companies approach a restricted geographical area.
For example: When the business divides its market on the basis of client’s location / certain countries.
2. Artificial Intelligence:
From robots to hyper-personalization Artificial intelligence is used everywhere, and email marketing is no exception. It is changing the world for the better.
In email marketing, AI has the potential to optimize many areas like:
Email Content: With data all over, AI is now capable of creating content more efficiently and quickly. As a marketer, this is not a thing to worry if you know how to best use the tools available in the market.
Today there are variety of tools offered by MailChimp and HubSpot which will help you create subject lines, blog post title, headings and many more.
Send times and Frequency: All you have is less than 6 seconds to catch the attention of your subscriber to open-click your email. You can’t risk your chance by sending the right mail at the wrong time at irregular intervals. With the AI-powered tool, you can decide the best time and frequency to send an email with the help of the behavioral data, open and click rates at a particular time. There may also be a day when AI will replace sales and marketing teams with Robots.
3. CRM Integration:
Email marketing and CRM systems are more like sales and marketing team, each with a defined role and a shared component in the organization. With their integration, the impact on marketing results can be substantial. They are significantly advanced by becoming more intelligent and intuitive.
Integration on CRM tools with email marketing software will measure, track and optimize campaign success in a bi-directional way. Connecting email marketing services with CRM technology will help you gain a better understanding and increase customer engagement and leads many benefits as listed below:
It produces comprehensive Return on Investment: This allows marketers to determine the real ROI of a marketing campaign. Working together, all the process that starts from the first touch to the final sale is tracked under the unified platform.
Improves sales visibility: By having a real-time insight of the customer behavior, the sales rep can measure the click through and open rates which equips them with prolific data and be prepared of prospect interests before they make any sales call.
Data integrity: A salesperson not only records the necessary data that is needed at one point of time, but also discovers additional information like demographics, pain point and update records in real-time to ensure that the data always remains fresh and up-to-date.
Improves responsiveness: Integrating CRM with emails reduces the response time and ultimately improves customer satisfaction.
4. Marketing Automation:
Most of the marketing companies today use marketing automation in their campaign to gain a better understanding of their insights and strategies. Called merely as email marketing automation, it is an eco-system of mechanisms and tools that automate ongoing conversions with customers and maintains delivery of personalized content.
Automation allows users not just to send mass email blasts and tracks open rates, but this is also helps determine the scalability. With marketing automation, users can have access to various feature like lead scoring, multi-step campaigns, and analytics, which makes your email tactics more strategic.
Marketing Automation process offers endless opportunities for marketers who aspire to take advantage of technology as a part of their email strategy.
Let’s have a look at the example below to see how automation can make life easy.
Say you are an e-commerce company and would want to send an email when they sign up on your account. This email will welcome them to your webpage and show them how to get started with shopping. It would be time-consuming to manually send an email every time a user registers on your site. Instead, you could set up an automated welcome email to be sent to every new user when he or she signs up.
That’s the beauty of marketing automation. You can set up an email once, and the automation tool will continue to meet the trigger that you have defined.
5. Internet Of Things:
Internet of things is the technology that allows interconnection of computing devices to send and receive data via the internet. It is a network of physical devices, home appliances, vehicles and other items embedded with electronics, sensors, and software devices to connect and exchange data.
Today technology has the power to connect people with the things they need via internet connected objects like phone, tablet, TV’s, wearables, smart appliances, toys, smart speakers and more. It is also the head of digital trend discussions and shaping the digital marketing landscape in many different ways. Email service providers today are changing their services to better match up new communication expectations and influences from IoT and programmatic marketing strategies. IoT with the help of programmatic strategy will help marketers to potentially to create more personalized email delivery based on the customer behavior from ranging interactions with the support of IoT devices.
IoT has a profound impact and the predictions by Forrester report that B2B e-commerce would grow up from $800 Billion (in 2018) to 1.13$ Trillion (in 2020).
It is also essential for the sales team to improve and adapt to the new techniques that come along with IoT to stay in the game. With the help of IoT, sellers can improve their sales by overviewing the search trends, customers online browsing, previous purchases and the use of smartphones.
Iot has the power to change the buyer’s behavior and the way a seller works which further affects e-commerce and retail.
As IoT devices are on the verge of becoming mainstream, it is going to be the best attribution starting point for digital and email marketers.
