Filling your newsletters with meaningful content is way more essential than bombarding the whole customer base with an identical offers. Keeping up with the times and meeting user demands is crucial for any company. Spoiler: articles about trends function a form of checklist. Be sure to apply what you’ve learned after reading — that’s while you’ll see results.
Email Marketing Trends: Content
1.1 UGC in Newsletters
UGC, or user-generated content, is any kind of content created and published by users. Reviews, social media posts, photos, and video reviews are all variations of UGC.
1.2 Advantages of UGC:
- It requires no time or money to create;
- It helps to higher understand the audience, their pains, and desires;
- It meets the demands of the era of “latest sincerity”: it’s a really imperfect, and due to this fact, full of life presentation of the product.
The imperfection of UGC content instills trust in users:
- 79% of buyers say that content created by other users greatly influences their purchasing decision;
- An internet site visitor is six times more likely to buy a product in the event that they see photos of it from other users’ social networks.
According to Shopify data, promoting with UGC receives 4 times more clicks than branded promoting.
(*4*)1.3 Challenges of Working with UGC
To obtain UGC, it’s essential first to motivate users to create it. You can offer a reduction, a promo code, or organize a contest — the approach depends solely in your creative team’s imagination.
An online women’s clothing store, as an illustration, simply asks users to put together outfits, take photos, and tag the account on social media. In return, it guarantees to feature the photos on its website. Judging by the variety of photographs within the “Your Looks” section — it’s quite an efficient strategy.
UGC in email marketing is barely gaining momentum. Soon, even branded promoting and photo shoots may start to mimic it. Therefore, in case your marketing team has not yet utilized user-generated content, it’s advisable to start.
In the case of email, it’s convenient to collect user reviews through AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) emails — newsletters with interactive elements. This tool turns the e-mail right into a mini-website. As a result, users don’t need to leave the e-mail to leave feedback on a services or products. User resistance decreases: it’s easier for patrons to agree to leave a review if it will possibly be done with a single click. Consequently, the corporate is more likely to receive the user-generated content it needs.
However, there’s a catch. AMP emails require a developer and an email service that supports the technology.
AR/VR in Newsletters
AR, or Augmented Reality, and VR, or Virtual Reality, are two modern tools that help brands stand out, entertain users, and concurrently increase conversion while promoting a services or products. AR and VR differ in complexity for each the user and the brand. Developing a VR product is more complex and expensive for an organization. To immerse in virtual reality, users need a special headset.
VR is most frequently utilized by large firms with the budgets and clients who can afford such a gadget. For example, in 2018, Audi introduced their latest Q5 model in a virtual desert — any owner of a virtual reality headset could test drive the automotive before its official release. This case demonstrates how easily VR technologies can showcase a latest product, overcoming resistance. The user gains a digital experience as a substitute of a physical one, leaving them with the impression that they’ve already driven the brand new Audi. All that continues to be is to wait for the automotive’s release and visit the dealership to make a purchase order.
From an implementation standpoint, AR is easier. To access augmented reality, a user only needs a smartphone or tablet. The development of such a product may even cost less compared to VR. Nonetheless, it remains to be quite an expensive endeavor. Firstly, there are usually not many specialists out there able to developing a stable and user-friendly application. Secondly, essentially, a separate application have to be developed for every platform since the languages, navigation, and design for Android and iOS require different approaches.
The AR sector experienced a revolution with the once-popular game Pokémon GO. The developers conceived the concept of “embedding” fictional characters into real-world locations, which caused great excitement amongst the general public. The essence of the sport was easy: walk around town, seek for rare Pokémon through the smartphone screen, catch them, and collect them in your inventory.
Nowadays, this may not surprise many, but back then, Pokémon GO achieved the unattainable and got crowds of teenagers off the couch and outdoors. Museums and academic institutions quickly adopted this experience and proceed to successfully use it to at the present time.
Currently, the implementation of AR in email marketing is restricted by technical capabilities. Apple has been testing AR newsletters for several years, but there is no such thing as a universal solution that might work on any software and in any email client without the necessity to redirect to external applications. However, there are developments on this direction, and the tools are being refined.
We need to be prepared for the indisputable fact that soon products can be integrated into virtual environments and might be promoted through email marketing, amongst other methods. Additionally, annually these tools have gotten cheaper and more accessible to users. Today, VR and AR technologies already allow for standing out amongst competitors and diversifying email campaigns.
In the realms of virtual and augmented realities, so much is occurring straight away. Some brands are organizing meetings with users within the metaverse, while others are releasing their very own NFT collections. How effective all that is stays unknown. However, it’s essential and essential to keep watch over these developments.
Email Marketing Trends: Communication
How do you communicate with potential and current clients to make sure the content achieves its goal? Let’s delve into this below.
Omnichannel in Email Marketing
Omnichannel is a technique that enables for the synchronization of all channels and unifies communication with the client across different platforms. This signifies that a customer who visits the web site, comes into the offline store, and calls support is identified by the business as the identical person. This helps to fine-tune content and offer relevant services or products.
The advantage of omnichannel is seamlessness. A customer visits the web site, adds a product to their favorites, puts it within the cart from the smartphone app, and completes the acquisition in an AMP email. Such an approach makes the user experience cohesive. The fewer obstacles a possible customer encounters on their journey, the more likely they’re to place an order.
For businesses, omnichannel can be crucial because synchronizing data from various channels leads to a greater understanding of users. You know which store the client frequents, what products they consistently view on the web site, whether or not they read newsletters, and which social networks they use. This information allows for the creation of personalized communication. You’re not only offering products — you’re making the user’s life easier. And that’s something people want to come back to.
Hyper-segmentation and Personalization in Email Marketing
Personalization is a requirement of contemporary users. They expect brands to offer useful proposals based on their preferences, tastes, and interests. Instapage reports that 52% of consumers are ready to switch to one other brand in the event that they receive non-personalized emails. This means, in case you’re not personalizing your emails yet, you risk losing every second customer.
This statement is just not without evidence: it’s not directly supported by the Open Rate indicator — the share of recipients who opened the e-mail. According to Instapage, personalized emails have an Open Rate that’s 29% higher than that of non-personalized emails.
To personalize newsletters on a worldwide scale, you wish to:
- Collect data about customers and maintain a database;
- Choose an email service that enables for subscriber segmentation, email personalization, and establishing automated trigger chains.
User information needs to be consistently updated, as preferences change over time. Omnichannel partially solves this issue: when all communication channels are unified, you’ll be able to track the dynamics of consumer behavior. Then, to personalize emails, you wish to segment the database – categorize all users.
Standard audience segmentation involves dividing by gender, age, and geographic location. But even such data allows for organizing content systematically: sending promotions on down jackets to residents of northern regions and promo codes for umbrellas to residents of southern regions.
Large segments is probably not sufficient for quality personalization. This is where hyper-segmentation comes into play – dividing the audience into small and specific segments after detailed and in-depth study.
Here’s how it really works: after conducting segmentation, you have got a category “male, 35 years old”. After hyper-segmentation, you have got a category “male, outdoor enthusiast, 35 years old, Dubai, loyal customer”. Clearly, within the second case, the offers to the user change into more specific and targeted — consequently, it’s more likely that the user will purchase your product.
Modern mailing services support each omnichannel and offer tools for personalized communication. The service allows you to construct trigger chains based on actions or events. And they’re sent routinely. For small businesses that do not need a designer and developer on staff, there’s an option to assemble the e-mail in a block editor — and personalize each individual block for every user there.
You just need to set a goal to master this trend — there are numerous tools in the marketplace to suit your needs and budget. Keep a watch on what’s happening on the earth of promoting, experiment — and you may definitely achieve visible results.
If you have no idea where to start your promotion and the way to increase the profit of what you are promoting, leave a request for a free consultation with the manager of WGG Agency.
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