Category: email marketing

Do you know how email marketing trends like user-generated content and personalization can enhance your messages and engagement? 🤓

You might be familiar with some of the latest advances, but others might be new to you because they’re not standard practice yet. These are among the trends that can reshape your email content landscape and conversion rates.

1. Interactivity: AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages), a Google framework, brings activities like completing forms and game playing to emails. E-commerce and subscription sites like Finish Line and Booking.com have used it, but any business can leverage it for engagement. Another, lower-tech option (with or without AMP) is user-generated content (UGC).

AMP: With features like AMP List, you may automatically update product listings and remove old offers. AMP Accordion hides or expands content like FAQs and product information. AMP also animates “call-to-action” buttons.

Google offers AMP to software developers, but many email service providers/platforms (ESPs) don’t currently support it. (AWeber, MailChimp, and MailModo are among the AMP-enabled platforms.) AMP-capable ESPs often feature limited versions like design features in their template builders. Also, it’s incompatible with some non-Gmail clients.

UGC: With this and other creative email marketing trends, you may spur readers to act through methods like:

• Requesting a review after a purchase
• Asking readers to complete a survey

2. Personalization: Go beyond adding subscribers’ names to emails or segmenting your list by audience with custom customer-focused content. Amazon, Starbucks, and other vendors have used predictive personalization based on customers’ locations and other data to forecast content or products that appeal to them. 

Example: A sporting goods store emails a discount on a parka to a buyer who lives nearby and recently bought thermal insulated gloves.

AMP also enables personalization through collecting data directly from surveys, forms, and other content in emails. 

3. Accessibility: Emails continue to become more text than image-based. Easy-to-read fonts and complementary colors are among the elements that make them accessible, especially for readers with visual and cognitive conditions. 

Litmus reports that in 2022, an average of 35 percent of people read emails in “dark mode,” with dark backgrounds against lighter-colored text. 

To ensure everyone can read your messages, check if the text is clear. Browser add-ons such as WebAIM’s WAVE and tools like EXPERTE.com’s Accessibility Check test if the elements of emails meet accessibility standards. The EXPERTE.com tool works like the accessibility checker in Google’s PageSpeed Insights except it scores and assesses every major page at a website.

4. Automated content: Artificial intelligence (AI) tools in ESPs let people create images and email copy. Leading providers Constant Contact and MailChimp are among those that now offer AI assistants. (MailChimp’s Email Content Generator is available only to their standard and premium plan users.) Creators who cull content from other sources can use apps like: 

• Wordtune: Summarize content from a website address. 
• Claude: Cut and paste content into the platform and prompt it for a summary. 
• Feedly: Through its Leo tool, this RSS reader lets you pull online content based on your reading history and keyword alerts. 
• Google Alerts: Save keyword searches for relevant news articles
• Web browser extensions that aid content curation

5. Automated content curation: For a fee, ESPs like rasa.io and Futurescope offer in-platform content curation. 

Rasa.io pulls content from various sources like blogs and social media accounts. Its AI automation tool will then sift through the content, and based on users’ clicks, customize a message for them. Futurescope lets you choose a topic or industry to create brand-specific content.

See where to put your e-newsletter content–save time and gain results

What’s your favorite email marketing trend? Feel free to comment below.

QUOTES

“I see interactive as a huge shift in email development. Early analytics have shown far greater engagement from users who receive interactive messages.”

~ Mark Robbins, Email Developer, Rebelmail

“Content curation involves finding other people’s good stuff, summarizing it, and sharing it. Curation is a win-win-win: you need content to share; blogs and websites need more traffic, and people need filters to reduce the flow of information.”

~ Guy Kawasaki, The Art of Social Media: Power Tips for Power Users