Email marketing is more powerful than it’s ever been. The past decade saw a record amount of new technologies emerge, making this one of the most exciting decades for marketers in recent memory. And it’s only getting better.

An explosion of new digital technologies has pushed marketers to evolve. But those same technologies can leave a marketer’s head spinning: What’s the right marketing mix for your company, your products, and your industry? How much should you invest in new channels? Which channel is most effective for acquiring new customers and driving revenue for your business?

Even with the explosion of new technology, marketers keep coming back to email. The reason is clear: For ten years in a row, email has been the channel generating the highest ROI for marketers. For every £1 spent, email marketing generates £45 in ROI.

Email delivers the highest ROI for marketers

When you want to grow your business, acquire new customers, launch a new product, or offer a promotion, you turn to email. Why? Because email delivers better results than any other channel. Email is 40 times more effective at acquiring new customers than Facebook or Twitter.

Email beats social by 40x for customer acquisition

* According to McKinsey, email is 40 times more effective at acquiring new customers than Facebook or Twitter

But email marketing today is far different than it was 10 years ago. The marketing landscape is even different than it was 5 years ago. Technology has forever changed the way customers interact with businesses. Marketers looking to engage customers, differentiate their brand and grow their businesses need to live and breathe these five new rules of email marketing.

Embrace the era of the DIY marketer.

First technology makes things possible then it makes things easy. We’ve hit that point in the marketing technology continuum. Sophisticated technology processes once left to IT professionals can now easily be performed by any marketer, regardless of the size of their business, industry, or region.

Welcome to the era of the DIY Marketer.

Companies like Optimizely for A/B testing, Squarespace for website creation, Unbounce for landing page generation, and Shopify for easy e-commerce lead the DIY revolution. Business-critical activities that used to take weeks (or even months) and an entire IT staff to accomplish can now be done in minutes by a DIY marketer.

And email is no different. Gone are the days of waiting for weeks in “the email queue” while developers code your emails. You can and should own your email destiny.

As brand ambassadors of the business, marketers need to make sure their email is on brand, on message, and pixel-perfect.

With the myriad of DIY tools at your disposal, you can now ensure every customer touchpoint is both engaging and brand-appropriate. Modern email service providers give marketers intuitive, easy-to-use tools to create beautiful emails without any development hassle.

Pre-designed, professional templates

Whether you’re sending a newsletter template, announcement, or promotion, your emails need to be on brand, but who has the time to perfect the layouts and design? When you use pre-designed templates you ensure every email looks professional, and you don’t even have to code.

Sophistication made simple

For marketers who want to customise their email templates, DIY email tools make it easy with drag-and-drop technology, editable layouts, and the ability to specify brand colours and fonts.

Don’t play inbox roulette in a multi-screen world.

It’s a fast-paced, multi-device, multi-screen, mobile world. 60% of online adults in the US and UK use at least two devices each day. Mobile technology is at the epicentre of today’s digital experiences. From 2010 to 2015, email opens on mobile devices increased by 30% and this number only grows as mobile technology continues to evolve⁴.

But this is just part of the bigger story, in which online audiences are constantly moving between devices. 40% of online adults will begin an activity on one device and finish on another.

Email opens on mobile grew by 30 %

In the past, we worried about how our emails looked across several email clients. However, the explosion of devices and email clients has created an insane challenge for marketers.

Do you know what per cent of your subscribers will open your email on a mobile phone versus a tablet versus a desktop? What per cent will open your email on an Android device versus iOS? What per cent will open in Gmail? Yahoo? Hotmail? AOL? What about Apple Mail?

Gmail just hit 1.5 billion users, making it the email standard, but that doesn’t mean you can ignore all other email clients or just assume if your email works in your subscriber’s browser that your work is done.

It’s impossible to ensure your emails look good on every desktop client, web client and device. There just aren’t enough hours in the day to design, code, and test for all those experiences.

An email with a mobile-ready design is no longer nice to have: It’s critical. You need a modern email service provider that takes the hard work out of email design so you can focus on perfecting your message and optimizing your campaign for maximum opens, click-throughs, and conversions across all platforms. Modern email software provides you peace of mind, knowing your emails will look awesome and work well on every possible screen.

There’s no telling where your subscribers will be when they open your emails, but there’s a good chance it will be on a mobile device. After all, mobile can account for up to 77 % of email opens, depending on your target audience, product, and industry.

You need templates that will automatically be optimized for both desktop and mobile email clients. This means you know it will look just as great on an iPhone as it does in Outlook or Gmail or the hundreds of other devices and clients your subscribers are using.

Be relevant or be deleted

If your emails aren’t relevant to your subscribers, they’ll end up in the trash or worse, they’ll end up being marked as spam, bringing down your deliverability and hurting your ROI. The marketing world is buzzing about the ‘Internet of Things,’ but we should be talking about the ‘Internet of Me.’ In the age of personalization and hyper-targeting, consumers expect brands to know who they are and provide them with content they care about. You have to deliver the right message, to the right person, at the right time.

Today’s consumers are bombarded with information, and marketers are constantly looking for ways to cut through the noise to reach their audience. Relevancy is the marketer’s secret weapon and the fastest path to revenue. Emails with personalized subject lines are 26 % more likely to be opened and marketers have found a 760% increase in email revenue from segmented campaigns.

Hyper-personalisation increases open rates

According to Experian, emails with personalised subject lines are 26 % more likely to be opened.

The good news is that personalizing email campaigns and delivering relevant content to your subscribers has never been easier. Successful personalisation strategies have three components:

Segmentation

Email marketers need an efficient way to group customers by demographic information, purchase history, browsing activity, etc. From this information, it’s possible to tailor email messages to specific groups. As cohorts grow larger, you can make your segments more granular. Remember this only applies to your marketing and promotional emails, being personal and unique to each consumer, and doesn’t rely on “people who bought this also bought this”.

Dynamic content

74% of online consumers get frustrated with websites when content (e.g. offers, ads, and promotions) appear to have nothing to do with their interests. Marketing content needs to adapt to individual customers’ precise interests. You can’t just send email blasts with one-size-fits-all messages. That’s why 75% of enterprises will be investing in personalized messaging.

Autonomous Email Solutions

As businesses grow, it becomes increasingly difficult to give one-to-one attention to each customer. With the advent of AI machine learning has come an era of hyper-personalisation software that is entirely autonomous, requiring zero human involvement ever. Marketers no longer need to create workflows to send, as hyper-personalisation also delivers send-time optimisation of emails to customers at the right time. You now have the perfect product selection delivered to each consumer exactly when they want it, relevant to that recipient, and the effect is the biggest increase in marketing ROI than has even been known.

Capitalise on the new age of analytics.

90% of the world’s data was generated in the last 12 months. Sound intimidating? It doesn’t have to be. It’s an opportunity to truly know your customers and drive your business goals. That’s why 94% of marketers are investing in data and analytics capabilities to identify customer information for targeted insights, and 94% of marketers are building management capabilities to collect, store, manage, and analyse customer profile data.

In the past, when you wanted to know how your campaign performed, you usually turned to someone on your operations team to run a report, which could take days or weeks. And then the results generally showed just email opens and clicks.

But today’s marketer has much more real-time data at their fingertips. It’s how you use that data to learn, adjust and optimize your campaigns that will set you apart from your competition.

The modern email marketer is a kaizen marketer, focused on continuous improvement. They’re constantly trying new ways to reach subscribers, testing subject lines, adjusting button sizes, and adapting messages and tactics to optimize campaign effectiveness and make each campaign better than the last.

Split testing

Every audience is different. You must test to know what works. Using the results correctly from A/B tests can improve conversion rates by 49%. Modern email software makes it easy to A/B test your email campaign, make adjustments on the fly, and continuously improve your campaign performance. remember SwiftERM have conducted A/B testing continuously for over 10 years, culminating in their solution.

Campaign effectiveness

Understanding which aspects of your email campaign drive engagement and influence purchase decisions is critical. You need tools that shed insight into what your subscribers care about and which CTAs and links drive engagement. This will allow you to implement more of what works and will ultimately improve campaign performance—engagement and revenue— over the long and short term.

Business value

Email marketers need to be able to deliver concrete ROI in the form of leads, monetization, and revenue, often with shrinking budgets. Insight into what subscribers care about positions marketers to drive more conversions. 

Seize the emails you don’t know you’re sending.

Customers expect a consistent experience no matter how, when, or where they interact with your business. But here’s a little secret: Your business is sending emails you don’t know about and chances are, you’re missing huge opportunities. What’s even worse is that these emails have the highest open rates of any emails you send.

What are these magic emails? And how do you get your hands on them? Transactional emails are automated messages sent to individuals triggered by some sort of action or inaction. Think purchase receipts, confirmations, shipping notifications, and password resets.

Open rates for transactional emails are four to eight times higher than traditional emails because customers usually ask for the information contained in them. Talk about relevancy and timing.

Transactional email open rates are 8x higher

Traditionally, developers code these emails. But marketers who want every email to be on point, personal, and engaging look at transactional emails as an opportunity to build brand loyalty and drive revenue. You already do that through newsletters, announcements, and promotional emails. Now you can add transactional emails to the list. Turn emails with crazy high open rates into beautiful customer communications and new opportunities to engage customers and drive revenue.

Wrap up

In the new era of the DIY Marketer, the savvy marketer can and should use easy and effective tools to capitalize on the specific interests of millions of customers, reaching them with compelling, relevant emails that will drive better business results.

Luckily for us, today’s technology makes sending relevant, beautiful emails easy for everyone. Even novice marketers can feel in control of their email marketing, leading to better email campaigns and stellar results for you and your brand.