“Without change there is no innovation, creativity, or incentive for improvement. Those who initiate change will have a better opportunity to manage the change that is inevitable.” While William Pollard may have been best known for his contributions to the Quaker religion, this saying rings true for email marketing.
2014 was the year of big data and omnichannel, but digital marketers will need to move beyond these over-hyped trends and embrace change to stay on top in 2015. Here are five predictions that I think will shape email marketing over the next year.
1. An Email Marketing Renaissance – Rebirth of Operational Competency
Due to the ever-increasing expectations of subscriber audiences, yesterday’s best practices are 2015’s table stakes. Capabilities such as advanced segmentation and personalization, A/B split testing, behavioral re-targeting and list maintenance will be required to reach median levels of success. A renaissance period of email marketing will pick up momentum as marketers realize the importance of maintaining operational competency in email as a foundation for digital.
2. Federation of Digital Messaging Across The Enterprise
Email marketing best practices will become federated beyond closed systems. Operational workflows will move away from campaign-at-a-time thinking and email capabilities. Walls between organizational silos will slowly be broken down, and the advent of cross-functional marketing teams will gain traction. Additionally, the inevitable merging of PR and marketing communications with email and other marketing functions will take seed.
3. Email Marketing Contact Strategy = Multichannel Connected Strategy
Now is the time to connect email data across all available customer-facing systems. As customer expectations continue to increase, brands must begin to foster consistent and value-based relationships with people across every touch point. In 2015, email contact strategy and segmentation will be dictated based on real-time data that exists across the enterprise. This means connecting messaging data with customer information contained in CRM, ecommerce, payment, and other enterprise systems. Those that don’t follow suit will start to see their messaging performance decline throughout the year.
4. The Internet of Things Presents New Channels
The recent explosion of connected devices – from the Apple Watch to connected cars – shows that we are all becoming obsessed with connecting our lives to the Internet. Today there are seven billion things online. By 2018, this number will reach 18 billion. With all of these new connected objects, marketing challenges and opportunities will quickly arise. As email marketers start to grapple with the limited email rendering capability associated with wearables, they will start to explore new ways of developing these channels to seize emerging marketing opportunities.
5. More Innovative and Interactive Messaging
Despite poor HTML and CSS support in many email clients and devices, email marketers still pushed the boundaries of what was possible with email design this past year. In 2015, we will see more brands pushing the envelope in their message design. B&Q recently sent some highly interactive emails with sliding carousels and “tappable” hot spots. While Virgin Airlines and Burberry have been including HTML5 videos within their emails. Others yet have even created interactive games that work in some email clients, like this Splat the Fly game.
These are a handful of trends that will shape the digital landscape in 2015. One thing is for certain; 2015 will be a dynamic year for email, and I am most excited to see how brands embrace the changes to drive successful experiences for audiences – and not be sheep.
Brennan Carlson is Senior Vice President of Business Development & Product Strategy at Lyris, Inc.