Five Email Marketing Trends in 2022 to Impress Your Clients

We are in the middle of 2022, so we thought it was a good time to review some of this year’s best email marketing trends.

Email marketing may not be as new and sparkly as some recent marketing trends, but it’s still very effective.  Email marketing has evolved and remains one of the best forms of marketing to directly engage with customers.

Consider that

• Email is also one of the highest ROI generating digital communication channels, generating over $42 for every $1 spent.
• In 2022, global email users number 4.3 billion people. By 2025, it’s going to be 4.6 billion. That’s over half the global population.

Here are some trends we have seen that are important this year and will continue to be heading into the future.

1. Hyper-Personalization Will Become Increasingly Important

First among our email marketing trends is hyper-personalization. People today expect personalized emails.  Including their names in your salutations is a much, but that’s not enough anymore. If you want people to open your email, read it and act on it, you need to send them email that is tailored to them. Personalization vastly improves the effectiveness of email campaigns.

In fact,

• Personalized emails deliver six times higher transactional rates than other email.
• Personalized email marketing generates a median ROI of 122%.

The heart of good marketing is to focus on the customer’s needs and solutions for them. Mass personalization has been a rising trend in marketing across the board, but nowhere is it more important than it is in email marketing. We now have the capabilities to send increasingly personalized email based on micro-segmentation, interests and behavioral data gathered through various marketing channels including social media.

Tools such as Hyperise can help tremendously with personalizing email. For example, you could include an image specific to B2B customers such as their logo or a photo of their product if appropriate. You could also personalize text (including calls to action) and video.

2. Open Rate Key Performance Indicator Has Taken a Backseat

Up until recently, open rate was one of the most important KPIs of an email campaign. But about a year ago, when Apple released of iOS 15, iPadOS 15, macOS Monterey, and watchOS 8, they included a Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) feature that changed the game as more and more people use those systems.

According to Apple, “In the Mail app, Mail Privacy Protection stops senders from using invisible pixels to collect information about the user. The new feature helps users prevent senders from knowing when they open an email, and masks their IP address so it can’t be linked to other online activity or used to determine their location.”

Long story short, if the Apple user opens an email, it’s never going to show up on your tracking. It’s also not going to tell you where users open emails, or activity on the device your customer used to open the email.

This affects other measurements that may rely on open rates including some A/B testing.

But that’s just Apple, right? Well, yeah, but here’s the thing.

• 66% of the users open emails on mobile devices.
• 58% of people who open emails on a mobile device are doing it on an Apple device.

That’s a huge part of your audience for any given email campaign. You can still use open rates for non-Apple users of course. But you can’t really assume the results are representative of your entire audience. To keep up with email marketing trends, it’s time to stop mourning the loss of complete open rate data and move on to other KPIs such as click-through rates.

3. Email Marketing Automation Is a Must

Automation aids in many email functions and typically works with a CRM system. You can automate

• Updating your client’s lists including adding to and cleaning email lists
• Sending emails triggered by customer actions such as buying a product or clicking on a link
• Email drip campaigns designed to nurture them through the marketing funnel or other purposes
• Better segmentation of email campaigns

4. Artificial Intelligence Improves Efficiency

Artificial intelligence is a big topic in email marketing right now, but it’s still somewhat in its infancy. It can help with many, many tasks including these:

• Artificial Intelligence makes it much easier to personalize email, because it can crunch vast amounts of data quickly.
• AI enables analysis of big data and all the many actions and interactions of each customer.
• This in turn permits the automation of email campaign flows and triggers for specific emails.
• Since AI can help marketers analyze huge amounts of historical data almost in the blink of an eye, you can quickly determine the best specifics of email campaigns such as subject lines, calls to action, optimized send times and so on.

5. User-Generated Content Increases Impact and Credibility

Another important element of email marketing trends is user-generated content. Many marketers have learned how to use user-generated content for social media. But you should also be repurposing it for email. After all, , in a recent survey, 60% of consumers said user-generated content is the most authentic kind. In other words, they trust it more than content created by a business.

Consider that any user-generated content campaign you are doing on social media can also be shared in email. For example, if you run a contest for people to show themselves using your client’s product on social media (with specific hashtags), you can share the best ones in email campaigns. (You will want to mention you plan to do that when you tell people about the contest.)

Of course, user-generated content need not only be photos. It can also be text such as testimonials or reviews. Over 90% of people say they consider online reviews before making a purchase.

Other user-generated content to consider includes video and audio content.

Umbrella White Label Email Marketing Services Keep Up on Email Marketing Trends

If you would like to offer cutting edge email services to your clients, but they are not the focus of your agency, you may want to resell email marketing services from Umbrella. You can feel safe that your client’s are being well-served by Umbrella’s experts while at the same time realizing a profit.

Contact us for an enlightening conversation about how we can help you help your clients with email marketing services.