Top 5 Email Trends to Incorporate in Your Digital Strategy

What haven’t millennials ruined? It seems like that tricky generation is responsible for the demise of everything from Hooters to fabric softener, according to a spate of recent clickbait articles. Thankfully, one online platform has been around so long, it’s cool again–and millennials are embracing it in a whole new way. For all age groups, email generated 30x return on investment for brands in 2017, with 95 percent of enterprises considering it a key portion of their marketing strategy. And since the majority of consumers are now millennials, it’s vital that companies market to their increasing reliance on email. What’s different with this generation is a higher preference for quality over quantity, and an expectation that email is the primary way to interact with brands. The issue isn’t actually millennials themselves, but rather the ability to send emails that stand out from the crowd in a meaningful way, (which, by the way, should be the goal no matter what generation you’re talking to).

Our top 5 email trends reflect the growing emphasis on emails that create valuable, thoughtful customer experiences, with an eye on everything from content to code.

Trend 1: Multi-Channel Experiences

While consumers are more plugged into email than ever, that doesn’t mean social media and other channels are falling off the map. Instead, brands are trending towards removing each channel from its respective silo to become part of a holistic conversation. The focus here is on customer experience. By approaching email as just one portion of your customer’s overall brand experience, you can deliver seamless interactions that lead to organic movement through the marketing funnel. At minimum, this involves using a cohesive brand strategy throughout both email and social, and at maximum, it can involve creating highly interactive emails that fit smoothly with social or in-person experiences.

Trend 2: Microsites or Interactive Emails

One major way you can deliver premium customer experiences is by creating emails that allow customers to stay within their inbox. We’ve seen an uptick in brands building emails as microsites, allowing recipients to do everything from watching videos to completing surveys without ever clicking out of an email. This creates increased opportunities for users to interact with an email while decreasing the amount of friction involved in doing so, and the results are astounding. Embedding a video in an email led to views up to 100 percent higher than when users were asked to click through to watch. Even small tweaks like embedding gifs and including navigation bars can improve time spent engaging with emails.

It’s important to note that creating interactive emails like this can actually lead to negative changes in traditional performance metrics. If interactions are happening within the email, then tracking things like click-through rates doesn’t actually give you any insight into how successful a campaign is. Redefine what success looks like for you and your interactive email campaign so that you can get accurate visibility into how people engage with your emails.

Trend 3: Increasingly Personal Tone

Consumers are tired of reading brands’ monologues, and brands are noticing. By reframing email content as a personable conversation instead of an impersonal ad, you can create something that’s more likely to have user needs in mind instead of just hawking your latest product line. While tone is a big part of this, length and layout are factors too. Don’t force a certain character limit on your content just because it’s ‘best practice’; do what works for your brand and the email topic. In addition, you should offer opportunities for readers to interact with and respond to each email, whether that’s with CTAs, responsive email reply addresses, or whatever else works well with the content.

Trend 4: Targeting Segments Vs. Targeting Individuals

The recent backlash against the use of personal data in websites and emails has left marketers and users alike nervous about overly personalized messaging. While at one point it was trendy to use smart tags to populate email content with names, job titles or any number of fields, it’s becoming increasingly unpopular. Ironically, using [insert name here] type content can feel canned and impersonal, not to mention create suspicion about the data your company has collected. Instead, 2018 has seen a growing momentum towards relying on highly segmented audiences to personalize email campaigns instead of personalizing emails to individuals. Doing so can create more work on the front end, but leads to higher email performance as well as a more sustainable strategy in the long run.

Trend 5: Plain Text Emails

We’d be lying if we said we saw this one coming. But this year has seen a huge uptick in the number of plaintext emails coming through our inboxes. It turns out that for all the growth towards newer and more complex email strategies, sometimes simplest is best. Sending a plain text email can be a great way to cut through inbox clutter and position yourself as a personal friend or coworker, feeding right into the conversational tone we talked about earlier. And since the majority of companies who rely on email marketing are SMBs, sending plain text emails can be a budget-friendly way to communicate important information.

For everything from microsites to plain text emails, Pyxl has the experience to help you not just seize the latest trend, but to create a thoughtful email marketing strategy that can outlive millennials’ best efforts to ruin it. Contact us if you’re curious how!

Updated: Apr 13, 2022