Email Marketing Now, Then And In The Future

Email marketing has evolved over the years to become a powerful marketing tool. Can we expect it to continue its growth also in the future?

The increase in accessibility of technology has given consumers a free hand to make more choices and increase their bargaining power. It’s left the marketers and sales personnel with no other choice but to work harder to establish the best strategies to acquire more customers.

In this post we’ll move in time to examine the nature of email marketing. I will take you back in time, then move to the present to eventually pave the way into the future of email marketing!

Get in, no time to explain!

Past

Initially, when “email marketing” became a buzzword, it used to aim at reaching huge companies to gain prospects. Sales teams tried every possible way to get emails of a company’s employees. It turned out successfully – on the basis of acquired contacts, they were acquiring humongous lists of prospects. The goal was to gather as many names as possible to expand the database of potential clients.

The next step was to craft an email message. Marketers used to create a one-size-fits-all email template that was sent to every prospect and contained information about company offer, special deals and discounts. There was no proper segmentation of target audience and recipients.

This approach, later known as “spray&pray marketing”, was mediocre and failed in generating a satisfactory number of sales. It resulted in introduction of  some regulations to minimize the amount of spam messages.

Present

The failures of the past have helped salesmen learn a lesson: prospects don’t care about generic messages, they want personalized communication and they want businesses to understand their pain points. Thanks to this lesson, contemporary sales teams plan and strategize their email marketing campaigns. Over the years, tools for email marketing have become automated and more advanced technologically. Now marketers have tools to measure the overall effectiveness of an email. They can see concrete numbers, such as open rate, unsubscribe rate and other data.

In consequence, the lesson of the past gave birth to personalized email marketing. Sales teams have divided their customers into prospects, leads, clients and losts. Email marketing has fortunately taken a new turn and become more about an actual value, storytelling and personalized communication.

Contemporary email marketing is more personalized and automated. Companies such as HubSpot, Marketo and Agile CRM help sales and marketing teams in delivering relevant and personalized content in possibly best time. Value-based approach in marketing has proven to be more effective than spray&pray marketing. Inbound marketing and marketing automation change the landscape of email marketing.

Future

With marketing automation and personalized messaging hitting the home run, the future of email marketing may be full of surprises for sales and marketing teams.

The customer of tomorrow may be even more demanding than the contemporary customer. It would be a Herculean task to keep up with changing market. Getting more customer attention and trust will require more engagement and personalization in social media activities, such as creating personalized posts, replies, videos and messages. Real-time marketing will become more important, as it creates valuable and creative content.

When it comes to the future of email marketing automation mechanism, it’s possible that it will become more personal and able to track customer moods to choose the best part of the day to send an email. Based on a customer’s online actions, it will decide on the right time to approach a customer. Possibly, automation mechanisms will take into account weather and geographical location of a customer.

While it’s hard to make predictions how the future unfolds, email marketing will definitely play a pivotal role in sales. It will serve as a fundamental tool for sales teams during the entire sales cycle – generation, acquisition or retention. Future may take the personalization and email marketing to a completely new level. Marketers will have to base their decisions on data and automation to execute a successful sales strategy.

About the author:
Shreyansh is a Tech blogger who writes primarily on CRM, marketing automation and digital marketing. He has more than 8 years of experience in digital marketing. He presently heads the marketing department at Agile CRM.