What Does 2017 Have In Store for E-mail Marketing?

2017 is going be both – a good year and a bad year for those relying heavily on email marketing. Let us unriddle it for you. Google has taken up quite a few strategies to promote the right kind of SEO marketing. All websites that use pop-up ads and email subscription forms may just end up on Google's naughty list this year. In other words, email marketing is still awesome as ever, it is just not okay to push your visitors to sign up for newsletter subscriptions every time they visit your website.

There were quite a few signature trends that defined 2016 and today, we will talk about four of those that will survive 2017 as well. This will answer quite a few questions like, “how will email marketing look like in the next 5 years”, “how will email marketing affect SEO and website traffic”, “what are the best ways to increase CTR with email marketing strategies” and many more.

Here are the 4 leading trends that, we think, will define email marketing in 2017 –

i. Targeting –

An email without an audience it quite pointless, isn’t it? It’s like a postcard without an address. But the trick is - how to find the right audience for your brand.

The best brands in the market use quite a number of monitoring tools across different channels to listen in on their customer conversations, stalk their every move and improve their own targeting methods.

A trustworthy SEO Company will tell you that targeting has got a lot to do with customer behavior and psychology rather than algorithms. Effective study of consumer behavior enables you to decide the right budget for yielding the maximum ROI. The same data that is being used for email targeting can also be used to predict the marketing prospects, new audience groups and new product performance in an old marketing group.

ii. Automation –

Believe it or not, you may already have automation elements blended into your email system. To be sure, ask your website manager and/or SEO expert about it.

In the meantime, let us tell you why automation is so important for the success of email marketing. The kind of behavioral data that has been mentioned in the first point gives way to broadcasting systems and tools. What we think is you should not switch to complete automation just yet.

Many email systems and websites do not have the necessary plug-ins and compatibility to run completely automated mailing systems right now, in the dawn of 2017. So we suggest a gentle blending in of automation with the existing email activity that supplements broadcast.

iii. Data privacy stays the top priority –

With the security fiasco ushered in by WordPress and Joomla! Back to back in 2016, we would suggest you keep your website templates and database management systems as updated and secure as possible. 2017 is definitely going to be another magnificent year for big data and machine learning, so also suggest you gear up for a fast and massive learning game. First, you should opt for a professional database management system. It can be residential or remote, but it should have all the recent security updates and access authorizations.

Permission as a whole is getting much stricter for marketers and website owners equally. What the marketers can and cannot do with the data is becoming more strictly regulated than ever. With the most recent agreement from General data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in Europe, we can expect a score of new data privacy regulations. 2016 has not been a very good year for those who incurred the wrath of ICO (UK) for illegal marketing strategies. Small and big corporations were fined thousands of pounds by ICO for the violation of ethical marketing strategies.

Believe it or not, the Telegraph Media Group was fined a whopping 30,000 pounds for sending out broadcast emails with content they had no right to publish. The privacy issues and safety concerns are becoming more complicated by the day to a point where all EU brands are using services that host their data in the US and that is causing a massive outcry for the lack of security concerns.

So anyone with the hope of introducing new email marketing strategies in 2017, watch out! You may be overstepping a new line without even knowing it.

iv. Creative elements in the regular emails –

This has been done by quite a few companies in the past, and that is what makes the process more challenging. This is one of the safest and surest trends that are to survive in 2017. But we expect to see newer designs with more interactive elements that can both entice and engage the addressee.

While mostly, these creative emails are a huge success, many other times they fall flat on their faces. This happens when clever designs make it too complicated for the laymen to access the real content. Live links can be lost within links and it can become really cumbersome to open a heavily designed email from a mobile device.

Have you ever received a heavily designed email on Gmail? Well, it looks like the last season of The Walking Dead. You can’t tell what died and who is responsible for it. Everything is a mess since this client, like many others, are not equipped to handle such heavy designs.

So, unless you are a HTML wizard (or you have one in your pocket) do not attempt to go for an overly adorned email template. Go for a simple design, with the right highlight on the content and eye-catching layouts.

In the next 5 years, we can see a massive makeover in the marketing protocols that will change the way most people see emails. An integration of Big Data with A.I. and automation will make email marketing the most suave option for all digital and social marketers around town.