As we do every year in Digital Response, we want to reflect on the key elements that will lead the Email Marketing field this coming year.
However, this time, we do it alongside prominent professionals who also want to share their point of view with you.
In 2020 we saw how the Covid-19 crisis accelerated the digitalization of many aspects of society by having primarily analogic activities joining the digital wave (in the US, during the first three months of the crisis, 250 million students went from attending class to having online classes), or by increasing the mass of online users of many businesses (Diney+ accomplished in 5 months what took Netflix 7 years in terms of users)¹.
In such a context, I believe Email Marketing teams will have to optimize campaign production processes if they want to be efficient. With short times and a high level of demand (both quantitative and qualitative) from marketing management, Email Marketing teams will find themselves forced to implement agile management models and exploit the full potential of the current project management, team collaboration, and digital assets management tools. Furthermore, the need to justify marketing technologies’ ROI will push Email Marketing teams to delve deeper into content personalization, segmentation, and automation.
¹ Fabius,Victor; Sajal, Kohli; Timelin, Björn; Moulvad, Sofia. (2020). Meet the next-normal consumer. McKinsey & Company. Recuperado de: https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/marketing-and-sales/our-insights/meet-the-next-normal-consumer
CEO – Digital Response
n the last 9 months of 2020 COVID accelerated the speed in which people were buying online by as much as 5 times. And of those there is a wide variation between purchasing Online (Ecommerce) v’s a Mobile device (Mcommerce), and Ecommerce businesses, usually the larger ones, have capitalised on Mcommerce by enhancing the user experience with mobile apps, leveraging mobile push messaging as the main channel to grab consumer attention and drive deeper levels of engagement. However, as Ecommerce takes a giant leap forward many companies will rely on Email Marketing as the lowest cost and highest return on investment channel-of-choice to enhance the customer experience and improve Customer Lifetime Value. And as MarTech become easier to use, capabilities increase, and as MarTech prices fall, there’s no excuse for not orchestrating your Customer Journeys across email and any other channel your customer engages with your brand on.
The real challenge for marketers facing a whirlwind of chaos in 2021, is to execute the activities that’ll deliver the most consistent growth!
Managing Director – MKTGmanago
2020 forced us to telework to remain effective. In 2021 we will have to do things even better, with a very high level of quality, in order to be able to compete and stand out. This, applied to Email Marketing, entails that small errors that perhaps, until now, were not a big deal are now going to penalize us. Email Marketing will have to become even more relevant for consumers and, to accomplish that, we will have to become experts on segmentation, personalization, and automation. We will have to send each person only that which could actually be attractive to them and make the inbox a helpful place, instead of a waste of time for the consumer.
Salesforce Marketing Champion – Cloud Coachers
My Email Prediction for 2021 is the adoption of AI-Powered Prediction technologies. 2020 taught brands communicating in a personal way with individual consumers via digital channels isn’t “nice to have”, it’s imperative. The biggest challenge here is that scalable predictions & personalization in this manner is really hard to achieve. AI-Powered Prediction technologies lift this burden. They help marketers quickly create personalized email experiences that take in more data i.e. CRM & live website interactions and provide improved results beyond what they alone can achieve.In 2021, these technologies have matured. The prescriptive “Black Box” AI tech of the past slowed adoption, but they’ve now been replaced by easy to use and quick to implement solutions. There are challenges that come with new tech adoption, however, compared to the potential benefits and time savings, the time to start is now!
Sales Manager – Kickdynamic
For years we heard that saying, “Email is dead… long live email.” However, 2020 speeded up companies’ digital transformation process, and Email Marketing became one of the most relevant channels for many of them.
More email campaigns were sent than ever before (25% more than before Covid-19) but, at the same time, trying to be as relevant as possible.
Email Marketing has dramatically evolved during these last few years, incorporating different technologies and trends that we will see in 2021:
- Artificial Intelligence (AI) will continue developing, optimizing Send Times, analyzing segments, content, etcetera.
- Hyper-personalization will need to be better and more precise, given that the global volume of email is increasing. Understanding, standing out, inspiring the consumer… will become a great challenge for us all.
- Interactive Design will become a trend that allows implementing content such as videos, surveys, or interactive CTAs directly in emails, bringing more creativity to companies and better capturing their consumers’ attention.
After many years, Email Marketing keeps on being a highly relevant channel, and it has had a surprising 2020. This 2021 will also be very interesting.
Marketing Cloud Sales Lead – Oracle
When I started working on Email Marketing campaigns, I never imagined its potential. I thought that its effectiveness was ephemeral and that, over the years, it would become obsolete. This has not been the case. In fact, we have been surprised by a digital revolution in which emails have been involved more than ever, and their part in the great gameboard has been decisive.
This 2020 has shown us we must be cautious.
We must maintain a close and constant relationship with our clients through an organized and foresightful Email Marketing plan, focusing on segmentation and creating engaging content that helps us build customer loyalty in the face of incipient competition and, above all, understanding and caring for our database to create communications in line with their interests.
In short, a complete focus on Customer Centricity.
Head of CRM & Customer Care – Merkal
2021 is going to be a big year for the Email Marketing Industry. Data consumption emerges as a long-term solution for companies’ loyalty strategies or, also, to accompany the data in its Lead Journey. To that end, it will be essential that the data, the XXI Century petroleum, is actionable. That is, to enable users to draw conclusions from the information received to make useful decisions intuitively. The new high will be to not only have a fair amount of data, but also capable people and the necessary tools to get the most out of it.
CEO – CoRegistros.com
It isn’t a secret that many companies have accelerated their digital transformation in the wake of the pandemic. For many industries, in light of a 2021 in which the demand’s behavior is uncertain, this has led to an injection of resources to support the two departments responsible for a company’s growth: marketing and sales.
As a result, marketing automation tools such as Hubspot are becoming more common in organizations.
Having this kind of software will immediately force marketing teams to revise their knowledge of Email Marketing anew:
- They will be forced to explore new email copywriting formulas since, more often than not, campaigns will go from being one-off actions answering to an occasional objective in time to being sent in a permanent and automated way based on scorings and gradually being optimized.
- Given this greater possibility of optimization, concepts such as readability (making emails easier to read) will become popular since the betterment of our campaign’s results will depend on it.
- The moment companies establish automated email chains (or any other kind of communication), they will need to understand which KPIs govern the success of these types of marketing techniques and learn to design new data dashboards to facilitate analysis.
CEO y Cofundador – InboundCycle
These are the opinions and predictions of the experts on the future of Email Marketing this 2021. What are your thoughts? Do you agree? What other trends will we see?
