Let’s talk about email marketing and why your company should consider this digital marketing strategy.
Email marketing uses email to promote your company’s products and services. This digital marketing strategy is a form of direct marketing and can be a highly effective way to communicate with customers. Approximately 3.9 billion people worldwide use email every day for communication. Before social media marketing, email marketing was the way to reach audiences online.
I am sure you are familiar with newsletters and promotional emails in your inbox from various businesses and subscription services. Have you noted which ones you engage with and which ones get deleted?
Forbes Communication Council has predicted what will and what won’t become of email marketing in 2022, let’s take a look at what we should expect.
What Will Happen
Email Marketing Will Continue To Grow
Email experienced a bit of a renaissance over the past two years, as marketers turned to the time-tested channel when their entire marketing strategies were disrupted by the pandemic.
While digital marketing overall took on a larger role for many companies as offline marketing channels were dramatically impacted, not every channel could easily absorb a higher budget allocation and maintain performance and a positive return on investment. It’s not always as simple as adding more budget to a search engine marketing campaign, social media, display, or digital video advertising. Increasing budgets in these channels typically involve expanding keyword lists and social target audiences or placing display/video ads that didn’t make the cut in your original strategy. However, email marketing can increase campaign volume while continuing to deliver results with either increased email frequency or by expanding to use third parties in your email program.
As 2022 continues, there is no reason to expect this trend to change. Email has once again proven its value and, even with a brighter spotlight on it in recent years, it did not fail to step up. While we all hope the world gets back to a new normal that resembles pre-pandemic times, marketers have now shifted their focus heavily toward digital options, accelerating a trend that was already established since the inception of the internet. So, while marketing budgets will certainly be allocated toward traditional channels as they become viable again, we can expect digital channels like email to maintain the growth it was already experiencing. Successful marketers put their efforts and budgets toward what works, and email continues to justify its place as an ROI champion.
Marketers Will Focus On Better Metrics
The launch of Apple’s iOS 15 and the Mail Privacy Protection feature has been well documented since mid-2021. However, it appears to not be having quite as significant an impact on email open rate tracking as was anticipated. Still, the metric has been deprioritized by many marketers, but this is actually great news for email marketers.
While there are strong arguments for tracking email engagement metrics other than just conversions — especially where longer-term customer relationships are part of a company’s business strategy — at the end of the day, marketers still need to deliver clicks and conversions. Those are the metrics that not only prove the channel’s ultimate value but also shape where marketing budgets are allocated.
When marketers spend more time analyzing and optimizing data that is actually directly connected to desired audience actions (leads, sales, etc.) they naturally create more effective campaigns. Real results continue to drive home email’s value to senior executives, which leads to more attention and budget to keep the channel growing and evolving. It’s a virtuous circle that starts with marketers keeping their eyes on the prize.
What Won’t Happen
New Privacy Regulation Won’t Dramatically Impact Email
First off, we can definitely expect more privacy regulation at the state level in 2022. We’ve been seeing more states pass laws in recent years — like the two-part California Consumer Privacy Act — and that isn’t likely to slow down. We may even see something specific at the federal level, although it’s unlikely we’ll see sweeping data privacy legislation. Regardless, marketers will be impacted by these new laws, and email won’t be excluded. However, email marketing is uniquely positioned to weather the storm of many types of data privacy regulation, due in part to the fact that it relies on arguably the most valuable piece of first-party data: the email address.
While various marketing channels may be disrupted by a renewed focus on behavioral targeting or the use of various types of third-party data, email marketing is less likely to be as heavily impacted. It also helps that email marketing already has the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 in place, which created a very specific set of guidelines for email marketers to follow in their campaigns. With that law in place for so long, email marketers already have plenty of experience in operating within a set of rules and regulations and doing it successfully, whereas, for other channels, this is somewhat new territory to navigate.
Email Inboxing Won’t Get Any Easier
I’m not sure anyone would predict that deliverability would get easier, but just in case you might be thinking that I’m here to tell you it won’t. Between the constantly intensifying battle for attention in the inbox (Statista predicted that daily emails sent would grow from 306 billion in 2020 to 320 billion in 2021) and constant improvements in spam filters by the major email providers, getting your message into a recipient’s inbox will only become more challenging in 2022.
Achieving high email campaign deliverability is a never-ending project. If you think you have it dialed in and stop optimizing, you are almost certain to see your deliverability drop over time. So, despite all the well-deserved focus on conversions, don’t ignore deliverability in your email program strategy.
Source: Forbes Communications Council
Essentially, we are all competing for attention in our inboxes, so how can your company stand out? According to engine mailer, some popular email marketing trends to consider for 2022 are personalization, mobile optimization, crisp designs, and interactivity.
We can anticipate what consumers will respond to, but it is important to listen to your target audience and adapt.
Are you interested in constructing an email marketing strategy for your business or is your current email marketing strategy not delivering exceptional results? Crescere Digital is here to help, let’s connect!
