2016 Email Marketing Trends You Need to Be Aware of

While the open rates might not be as high as they were in 1990’s, email marketing is still growing. And companies, as it turns out, are willing to spend more time and money on it.

According to the recent survey by Email on Acid, 71.8% of participants (out of 3,556 total) are spending more time on email marketing in 2016, and 86.7% of respondents are spending more money. Usually, our budgets are being applied to taking the advantage of the growing list of technology and tools and growing our lists, but even as much as one-third of the dollars is being allocated to development and design.

Up to 5 Hours Spent on Developing an Email Campaign

Companies surveyed by Email on Acid usually spend 1-5 hours on an email campaign, and they plan to increase that amount by an additional 20+ hours a month. Why? Well, in order to provide a more contextually relevant experience and improve the content in general. And for that, they’re turning to interactive features, fluid hybrid design, contextual relevance, and personalization.

Remember About Dynamic Content Elements

When we break down expectations for the current year, it turns out that the majority of marketers plan to focus on dynamic content elements of an email campaign. You can include a single element, or go all the way – just scroll down a bit until you reach the paragraph on interactive emails.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p9FPrwTwIXU

It’s not a new thing. For example, its most common application is merging a tag in the ESP to pull the first name of our readers into the message. The functionalities, though, are far more advanced. Products such as Cordial, MailChimp, Act-on, Avari, or Salesforce Pardot make it much easier to take control and craft the kind of content you might need.

Animation!

This appeared in our first newsletter. And yes, you can see here some of Brand24 employees.

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We're not.

While video works best for grabbing the attention of Facebook users, animations are becoming a hit for emails. You can easily create and add GIF files to emails and not worry about them being properly opened; both Gmail and Outlook can deal with such formats easily.

Be warned, though: limit the file size as much as possible. You don’t want your mobile users to open a 3 MB file. wait for the graphics to load and then have them send you a bill (not really) for depleting their data plan.

Law

Make sure that you’re compliant with law! There are some key regulations for email marketing to consider. Tutplus compiled a nice list for:

• European Union;
• Australia;
• Canada.

To gain and keep your readers, remember to tell them where the email is coming from. Honesty works well for everyone here, not only for the “From” and “To” fields but also for subject lines.

There are several other factors that you might (or should) include in your mailings. Get to know them before pressing Send.

Interactivity is a Huge Thing

Elevating the experience through interactivity allows you to go beyond GIFs. Increasing click-through rates can be achieved by creating a CSS menu or content elements, or implementing a video, which is now supported by more than a half of email clients. Email Monks prepared a great list of interactive email features, so feel free to check them out.

And There’s Also the Obvious Stuff

An aesthetic, friendly and uncluttered design is a must-have for 2016. Use the help of your graphics department and craft something that attracts as much attention as possible. Let them choose the fonts, the colors, and the images.

HubSpot prepared a list of newsletters we all love to receive. Get inspired!

Or, if you don’t have a budget for an original project, go ahead and look for templates (Moka is nice, isn’t it?). Or modular templates.

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• The golden rules of PR crisis management