You know the feeling, we’ve all been there, when you achieve something worthwhile, that your efforts have smashed it.

It probably doesn’t matter to anyone else at that precise moment that you did it, but the benefits will roll, now you have found a winning formula, and the relief often palpable, knowing how to perpetuate it.

Digital marketing changes every year, email marketing is and will always remain one of the most effective channels for online marketers, and for a good reason.

According to recent data, each pound spent in this channel (excluding rental of external bases) leads to an average return on investment (ROI) of 4200%.

Whether working in a small business, self-employed without employees or working for a large company, email remains an essential ecommerce digital communication channel for staying in touch with potential and existing customers.

So what is critical for your email marketing success, enough to shout about?

The big email marketing trends 

Email marketing trend #1:  Automation, a trend that never disappoints!

Although the widely used expression “automated email” continues to dominate press articles and blogs, it alone accounting for nearly 32% of all orders generated by the email channel (compared to only 2.4 % of emails sent), it is still just as important to distinguish that automatic can often mean different things.

Automatic need only means that one element can be set to either happen if something else happens (triggered automation) or that you have set up a series of sequences. A far cry from autonomous, which requires zero human interaction whatsoever – yes such things exist.

Autonomous email software is called predictive personalisation software (PPS). It is deadly accurate, using each consumer’s data from them. It delivers phenomenal results, and users are incredulous at how powerful it is. the big boys have been using it for a few years now, and this is beginning to sink into SME too now, in a format suitable to install as a plugin.

Have you noticed when ROI on email marketing is quoted, they rarely include the overheads of staff and their inherent costs? They should be! Some of those deathly-looking returns just took a nose-dive, not so PPS, other than to check on the stats there is so human interface with the system available whatsoever.

Bearing that in mind, we recommend making automation a central part of your email marketing practices.

Email marketing trend #2: User-generated content in marketing emails

Ecommerce retailers often use UGC or User Generated Content on social networks to promote their brands, but it is still not often reused in emails.

However, the interest in the photos and content its customers generate no longer needs to be proven.

More authentic, this content acts as social proof that boosts conversions, so it would be a shame to deprive yourself of it in your email marketing campaigns!

So while most emails should focus on their content, also considering putting forward more customer-generated content is worthwhile, and here’s why.

• It enables you to depart from the typical graphic style and routine.
• It demonstrates to clients your concern for their fulfilment.
• Highlighting photos of happy customers acts as social proof.

Hyper-personalisation software ranks every product you have, by how likely it is for each individual to personally buy it. It then populates a stylesheet, and sends you, to each customer, with their unique choices.

Products offered have been calculated for each customer as those most likely to be bought. It gets another tick – this time UGC. A pattern is emerging.

Email marketing trend #3: Hyper-personalisation

Back in the day, it was common to send a single weekly newsletter to your entire database without any hyper-personalisation whatsoever. But then the industry realised how huge the volumes were and identified it as “spam” and sadly this legacy continues, even though the customers tick the box which says “Yes you may store and use my email”, next to ordering online or subscribing to your newsletter.

Oh what a fickle, malevolent bunch we humans are, when it comes to what we perceive we can’t control.

But that was before.

It is increasingly necessary to hyper-personalise email marketing campaigns to obtain the best results.

Hyper-Personalisation is about:

• Sending the right content – relevancy
• To the right users 
• At the right time

If a customer typically makes purchases around 8 a.m., it’s in your best interest to send them promotional emails at that exact time. But what if we just scratching the surface, what if what was happening, was that that individual only ever bought at 8 a.m. on the day after they had looked at something for more than 3 minutes?

That ability is the exclusive domain of artificial intelligence software, which uses a predictive analytics machine learning algorithm to learn exactly these foibles for each consumer. It annihilates the ROI and illustrates succinctly how bland and erroneous segmentation is in comparison.

Hardly surprising then that Statista, Forrester, Bain and McKinsey research institutions readily tell everyone who’ll listen, that PPS delivers 20x (not 20%) no twenty times the return that email marketing and omnichannel marketing combined. Installing it now for the start of 2023 would deliver such returns, you’d wonder why you didn’t do it before.

You don’t need to tailor emails to each subscriber, PPS does it for you and the more likely they will be interested in your content, reflected in higher basket size – average order value (AOV), and greater customer lifetime value (CLV)!

Email marketing trend #4: Hyper-qualification and enrichment of databases

Of course, it is essential to mention the quality of audience data you initially collect about your customers and prospects.

Collecting more information about its customers, prospects, and users is one of the significant challenges for email marketers in 2023 (and the years to come).

Enriching your email databases is essential for a successful email marketing campaign. This helps you:

• Personalisation scenarios will be advanced and efficient
• Increase response rates
• Improve engagement

PPS, because it runs as a plugin, collects and unitises all the data collected by your platform and more besides. Essential to its performance are impressions. PPS collects data on what products consumers look at as well as buy. This is where the real advantage begins to show.

Further, it captures how often that person comes back to an item, your platform knows it but doesn’t capture that, all of which contributes to the algorithm calculating each individual’s personal history.

You may be interested to read our fascinating articles on how to scale your ecommerce business.

Email marketing trend #5: Responsive and optimisation of campaigns for mobile consumption 

You must make sure that your emails display and work properly on mobile devices due to the move to mobile. Your emails should be responsively designed to adjust to the subscriber’s device.

Additionally, consider the mobile user while designing your emails. Because…

• Today, mobile devices are used to open more than half of all emails.
• 75% of smartphone owners check their inboxes using their devices.
• In 2023, responsive email design should be a priority for all businesses.

In 2017, email marketing generated $4.92 billion in revenue worldwide, which is projected to grow to $10.89 billion by 2023. This reflects that email marketing’s compound annual growth rate (CAGR) is 0.85%.

SwiftERM offers a 30-day free trial of hyper-personalisation for a month, without obligation.

Simply click here to register and install.