If you’re interested in glimpsing the future, this is your post: spend a few minutes reading these lines on the email marketing trends for 2018.
Although it’s still a little early, here are some tips we can already start applying to our emails and our email marketing campaigns during 2018.
Email marketing trends 2018
Background
In 1989, almost 30 years ago now, what we know today as the «world wide web» was born.
Earlier, in 1965, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was the first to demonstrate the use and workings of the first electronic mail system, known as MAILBOX.
In 1971, Ray Tomlinson brought email to the ARPANET network.
Last year the trend reports from the Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs told us that more than 60% of B2B (Business to Business) companies in 2017 improved their results thanks to their email marketing strategies.
There’s no doubt: email marketing is a serious matter and one to factor into our commercial and digital strategy.
Let’s look at what the email marketing trends for 2018 are.
Email marketing trends 2018
One key to understanding the email marketing trends for 2018 is the ability of our devices and of the network to deliver a highly personalised experience.
So it shouldn’t surprise us that most of the following points have to do with personalising email marketing.
Responsive email marketing design
It’s plain to see: reaching web content through our mobile devices is increasingly common, and that’s the main reason the email marketing sector has such a clear direction.
We have to design our email marketing campaigns with this in mind; not doing so will inevitably take us nowhere good.
By contrast, if we build this way of working into our process, we’ll get results that are far more appealing to recipients.
Don’t waste a single opportunity — this is marketing, folks.
Highly personalised forms
We’ve all come across an ordinary contact form; for a long time the phrase «subscribe to our newsletter» has been part of our lives.
The truth is we’ve seen it all so often that it has become a bit dull and faded from our minds.
We need to be surprised constantly; we’re spoilt children.
And we can give people what they want: we have to rise to it and offer the user the right claimer — we can even offer one tailored more closely to their tastes.
Good inbound marketing; done this way we’ll be able to segment our customer base.
Adapting the language to the recipient
One of the keys to any good communication is adapting the content of our message to the recipient.
The Nazi propaganda chief, Joseph Goebbels, had his own list of propaganda and communication rules. The truth is that, sadly, applying them to Nazi propaganda worked very well for him.
One of his points was this.
Every message transmitted from power must be simple and easy to understand; if the most intellectually limited person in the crowd can grasp the message, anyone will, and therefore the greater the number of recipients that message will have.
To achieve that we clearly have to look after the copy.
The language has to take into account the section of the population it’s aimed at.
Icons and emojis
Surprisingly, icons and emojis are making their way into everything; they were overdue in email marketing and next year they’ll be a very strong email marketing trend for 2018.
Since we use these elements across almost all our digital communication channels, they’re deeply woven into how we communicate.
That’s why we can bring emojis into our email marketing campaign and, if your brand won’t take that device, you can design your own emojis or icons.
Animated gif
The gif is on nearly every list of email marketing trends, so it shouldn’t surprise us that it’s also an email marketing trend for 2018.
These days a large share of email services can already carry a gif in the body.
The advantages of the gif are very clear: it lets us say a lot in a short sequence of images.
Visual
This is an old request; it comes up again and again among email marketing trends.
Human beings are going backwards: they have no interest in reading long texts to understand something, they don’t need to.
Let’s offer them visual content, easy to read and that doesn’t drain their resources.
Our email won’t be the only one they read that day and, what’s clear is that faced with that overload they’ll unconsciously choose to read whatever is quick and appealing.
We’ll get there by bringing images, figures and shapes into our email marketing campaign.
The ideal body text is between 75 and 100 words.
Instagram-style image grids
Riding the current wave in which instagram is the social network growing its following fastest, a very good option is to use its grid system.
We need to be clear that the images we use in our email marketing campaigns will have a big impact on our potential clients.
If our image selection is right, we’ll be able to convey a great deal — feelings, our philosophy and so on — and therefore earn that much-wanted click.
Conclusions
Now that we have all this information to hand, we can see that the email marketing trend for 2018 moves along some very clear general lines.
Little by little we’re leaving behind the coldness of machines and learning to personalise how we treat the user through content, creating a sense of closeness and warmth.
Clients like to think they’re being treated specially, which is only natural — we just have to remember that they chose us.
And that’s our selection of email marketing trends for 2018.
