As the year begins, businesses and organizations strategize new email campaigns and marketing plans. Along with this, it’s important to note the recent trends to expect in email design and automation.

One of the great things about email marketing is that it is ever-evolving. Marketers never get bored. There are always new trends and new techniques that contribute to a successful email campaign. From data-gathering and segmenting to email deliverability, there’s always something new to look out for.

Last year, email automation remained the dominant marketing channel. Email marketing generated 174% more conversions than social media, and most importantly, email campaigns have a $44 ROI for every dollar spent. How awesome is that?

This 2017, marketers can expect more from email marketing.

10 predictions that can help you create an email campaign that can boost your business profit:

1. Mobile-First

The increasing popularity of smartphones and mobile devices means that more people across various age demographics are checking their emails on their smartphones or iPhones. According to our data, 42% will immediately delete emails that do not display correctly on their phones.

When creating emails, marketers must have a mobile-first mentality to ensure that emails are optimized for any mobile device.

This is currently not an easy feat, as there is a wide variety of devices and screen sizes to consider. Not only that, but email designers also need to consider how various email providers display emails. We can expect more testing tools and responsive features in the coming months.

Read more about Mobile reports

2. Dynamic Automation

The world of marketing is ever-evolving. In 2017, we can expect multi-channel automation to evolve, improve the customer journey, increase leads, and convert them into sales. What does this mean for you? With dynamic automation, you can seamlessly integrate other marketing campaigns like social media and SMS with your email marketing and get comprehensive reports and analytics to help you improve the customer journey.

ActiveTrail makes it easy for its users to launch a combined SMS and email marketing campaign:

You can even create a fully automated campaign and generate the flow directly from your website or landing page!

3. Data-Driven Campaigns

Email marketers are getting smarter with the available testing tools. According to Chad White of Litmus, the “set-it-and-forget-it” solution is dead. Data science and analysis results will drive email campaigns. Marketers will use user behavior and email preference centers to profile their subscribers.

4. Email Personalization

More users have embraced the value that the targeted email content brings them. Generalized content is no longer appreciated. In the past years, users were amazed by how targeted and personalized the content delivered to their inboxes was. Now, they are used to it. Email marketers have realized this and are now more than familiar with list segmentation. Expect to craft emails for more than five groups in your list. Strive to determine what your users want, and create your campaigns accordingly. At ActiveTrail, personalizing your email is made easy. You can give your subscribers the feeling that the email was written primarily for them.

5. Email Content Optimization

Because the demand for responsive emails continues to rise, content optimization will evolve. If we used to limit our email content to text and small images, developers and designers would find ways to optimize other content, such as videos, to fit the size limit.

6. Beyond Click Throughs and Open Rates

According to ActiveTrail’s Ron Rabinowitz, email KPIs will need more than Click Through Rates and Open Rates to measure user behavior and the success of an email campaign. As analytics tools can be integrated with email, marketers can expect more devices to be developed to measure not just the ROI of your email marketing efforts but also the how and why behind the success or failure of it.

7. Email Integration with Social Media

Last year, Facebook added a Sign-Up button for Facebook pages. As consumers and users become more reliant on social media, we can predict that more email marketing integration tools will be available on other social media platforms such as Pinterest, Instagram, or Snapchat.

8. Stricter Anti-Spam Policies

Internet marketers beware — email platforms may make sending to a cold list more difficult. To remove the spammer reputation from email marketing, email software will ensure that subscribers indeed subscribe to your emails. Enforcing stricter anti-spam policies can give marketers, and users enhanced security and prevent data and identity theft. You’ve probably heard this before and will hear it again — don’t buy an email list. Invest your time and effort to build your list. It’s worth it, I promise!

Read more: Anti-Spam Policy

9. Online Shopping Straight from the Inbox

As online shopping and email marketing become more common, it can be predicted that mobile payments within email messages can become possible. Through this, avid fans of online shopping can complete their purchase directly from their inbox.

Payment gateways such as PayPal will allow its subscribers to embed a BUY NOW button to emails that will lead them directly to their accounts and pay for the product or service promoted in the email.

10. More email tools in the market

As email technology evolves, more tools will be developed to aid marketers in their efforts to produce a more personalized approach. Tools and software for design analysis, user behavior analysis, and deliverability testing can be expected.

Currently, online entrepreneurs, companies, and businesses can choose from a lot of email marketing software. As email marketing becomes more competitive, email service providers will step up their game and develop more features and app integrations.

ActiveTrail just kicked off 2017 with a new feature called “Just in Time,” which will automatically send your mailings at the optimal time for each contact!

Final Thoughts:

2017 is indeed an exciting year for email marketers. The trend shows that email is here to stay, but in this day and age where mobile internet use is increasing for various age demographics, it isn’t as easy to draw a user’s attention and keep it. Marketers must employ new tricks and techniques to step up their game and keep the audience interested.

Read more on our blog:

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