At the close of every year, our email marketing gurus get together and discuss their predictions for the year that lies ahead. We asked them to share their thoughts with us, so we could in turn share them with you – our valued subscribers. Enjoy the read!
Interactive email will be huge and everywhere (with increased support for CSS)
“As we move toward a more integrated digital experience, the way we interact over email will slowly start to mimic our experiences online. We’ve seen great strides in interactivity over email and should expect to see more innovation in this area that include making a reservations directly from your email, booking a flight or viewing video directly from the email itself.”
Connect with Mia
Age responsive emails and digital content
“Beyond responsive layout, emails and digital content that adapt to a user’s age will take relevance and user experience to another level. This could include font type, image style and even icons that change based on age. For example, in South Africa, we have seen some great examples of the evolution of financial and banking content for kids.”
Connect with Sheryl-Lynn
Email design trends
“This is an area that will need to adapt based on the fact that 2017 might bring with it interactive email. Maybe this is just my wish, but I think we will see far less use of stock images. ‘Real’, ‘in the moment’, ‘slice of life’ type images are going to appear on email and websites. Images that communicate a thousand words or evoke emotions.”
Connect with Stergios
Changes to Outlook and Gmail lead to a better inbox
“On the heels of partnerships between companies like Litmus and Microsoft and the likes of Gmail now supporting CSS media queries, we will see far more synergy and dialog between the email designers and the email applications. Standardizing email code will reduce the time and effort it currently takes to present a consistently branded message across the myriad of devices that consumers use.”
Connect with Alex
The importance of customer experience
“There is an incredible amount of email that customers receive on a daily basis which is often unwanted or seen as spam. The reality is that marketers are trying to push their content, offers and latest deals to the customer, but so is everyone else. This means some great content is unfortunately being ignored or missed. Less is definitely more. Going forward it will be about the quality of the customer’s experience within the communication and not the quantity of emails you send that will differentiate you from your competitors and allow you to achieve your marketing objectives.”
Connect with Ross
Predictive email marketing
“For the past few years, marketers have had to rely on segmentation and personalization to increase email relevance, done in a reactive way, by using existing data and behaviors. But, we are now seeing a shift towards using data to predict what a recipient wants, and delivering that to the inbox. Predictive marketing is the practice of extracting information from existing customer datasets to determine a pattern and predict future outcomes and trends. So, if you have the data, you can analyze customer actions and behaviors to predict what they will do next. Based on the success several brands have experienced with predictive marketing, we can expect more businesses to implement predictive marketing techniques in 2017 and beyond…”
Connect with Adam
At the close of every year, our email marketing gurus get together and discuss their predictions for the year that lies ahead. We asked them to share their thoughts with us, so we could in turn share them with you – our valued subscribers. Enjoy the read!
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