The email marketing landscape is constantly changing and in order to stay ahead of the curve, it’s important to know what trends will be big in 2022.
In this blog post, we’ve picked out some of the most important email marketing trends for 2022 and we’ve also provided tips on how you can adapt your campaigns to keep up with these trends.
So whether you’re just starting out in email marketing or you’ve been doing it for years, read on to learn more!
User-generated content
User-generated content is one of the most important email marketing trends for 2022. It’s not just about creating your own messages anymore; it’s also about letting others create them as well! With more people than ever before using social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter to interact with businesses and leave reviews, you have so many opportunities to include user-generated content in your emails. People will often post photos of products and show themselves using them too. This is also great content for your emails.
Spend some time gathering user-generated content like photos, videos, and reviews, and start building campaigns around this. A recommendation from a real life customer carries a lot more weight than your standard marketing emails, so the businesses that are taking advantage of user-generated content are likely to be more successful. Plus, you can get the customers to do the hard work and save yourself some time.
You can encourage more people to create their own content by implementing hashtag campaigns or running competitions. The most obvious example of this in recent years was the Coca-Cola campaign with personalised bottles. They encouraged people to take photos with bottles that had their names on them and post them to social media. Overnight, they’ve got thousands and thousands of pictures of real customers enjoying their product and the customers don’t realise that it’s all a big marketing stunt. You can also try things like offering a 10% discount for customers that leave a review or share their purchase online.
Once you start encouraging customers to generate content, you can then use it to enhance your email campaigns.
Microsegmentation
Microsegmentation is another important email marketing trend for 2022. Segmentation means breaking your audience down into smaller groups, based on their demographics or behaviour, and then sending specific messages to each group. This allows you to tailor your campaigns and get better results.
In the past, segmentation meant breaking down your audience into groups like men and women or young people and older people. However, in 2022 we will see a much more granular approach with microsegmentation.
The aim is to break your audience down into smaller and smaller segments so that you can target them as accurately as possible. This means that people who are most likely to respond to your emails will receive them, and people who aren’t interested won’t be bothered by irrelevant messages. The segments are broken down into 4 categories:
- Geography
Can be broken down into county, city, specific area, etc. May also include segments like urban or rural. - Demographic
Includes age, gender, job/income, education level, religion, and any other detail to help build a customer profile. - Psychographic
Includes things like general lifestyle, important values, personality, etc. - Behavioural
Focuses on browsing behaviour, past purchases, spending frequency and habits, etc.
This is a more time-consuming approach than traditional segmentation but it will yield better results in the long run. The key to success here is detailed market research and data collection. You need to collect and analyse as much data as possible, so you know your customers inside out.
The problem that a lot of businesses have here is that they collect a mountain of data but they don’t know how to break it down and take useful insights from it. All you end up with is a big pile of useless numbers clogging up your computer systems. The good news is, there are people (and computer software) that can sift through it all for you and create reports that you can actually understand and use. Investing in a better data management system and then using that to improve segmentation is a crucial strategy in 2022.
Personalisation
People like to feel special, that’s why personalisation remains a very important trend in 2022. When you receive an email that’s been personalised for you, it feels like the business has taken the time to understand your needs and they’re doing their best to help you. This builds trust and strengthens the relationship between customer and brand.
There are a few ways to personalise emails including:
- Using their name
- Making recommendations based on past purchases
- Send birthday emails
- Use triggered emails to follow up after a site visit
Be careful when using customer names because if you use them every other word, it just gets annoying and the customer sees right through it. But addressing them by name at the start of the email is a simple way to make things seem a bit more friendly.
The rise of artificial intelligence
This might sound scary, but don’t worry, it doesn’t mean that robots are going to take over the world. Not yet, anyway. It does mean that there are some excellent AI tools you can use to improve your email marketing.
One of these tools is a predictive analytics tool. This takes all the data you’ve collected about your customers and uses it to create models that predict what they might want or need in the future. This means you can get ahead of the competition by predicting trends and planning your campaigns accordingly.
AI tools can also do a lot of the legwork for you. Things like scheduling and cleaning up bloated email lists that would normally take you ages can be done automatically for you. So, you can direct your attention to more important things instead.
If you don’t start implementing the right automation tools now, you will soon fall behind the competition and your email marketing service will be far less productive than it could be.
Streamlined newsletter designs
Newsletters have long been an important part of email marketing and there was a time when companies wanted to pack them full of all kinds of animations and videos and anything else they could think of. It may have been impressive 10 years ago and consumers responded well to massive amounts of complicated visual content, but things are changing.
Easily digestible content is the name of the game these days, so all of those bells and whistles can be removed. The newsletter of 2022 looks far more streamlined. It’s all about getting the message across quickly and effectively without anything else to distract from the core content.
The key to making this work is a good layout that guides the reader through it without any distractions. Make sure your most important points are in prominent positions at the top of the email and use bullet points wherever you can to make things look simple and clear. Use visual content where necessary, but don’t put in a load of videos for no reason because they just slow down loading times and get in the way of your newsletter.
Interactive email content
Interactive content instantly makes an email more engaging. It’s no longer just a case of reading and clicking on links, you can now actually do things within the email itself. This could be anything from filling in a form to answering questions or even playing games.
There are all kinds of different interactive content types that you can use and they’re all great for getting people’s attention. Just make sure that you strike a good balance between this point and the previous one. Make your emails interactive, but don’t fall into the trap of packing them full of any animated element you can find for the sake of it.
Good interactive elements include:
- Animated CTAs
- Gamification
- Hover-over effects on images and text
- Polls and surveys
- Sounds
Increased focus on accessibility
Accessibility in the online world is something that companies are paying more attention to. How does somebody with a visual impairment interact with your email content, for example? If you are not thinking about accessibility, you are making life difficult for a lot of potential customers and it’s unlikely they will continue engaging with your business.
However, there are a lot of easy ways you can improve accessibility without making too many changes to your content. For example:
- Optimise for all devices
- Focus on simple layouts that are easy to read
- Choose font size and colour combinations with readability in mind
- Include a text-to-speech function
Growing concerns about online security
This is something that has always been a concern for people, but it’s becoming more and more of an issue as time goes on. Email marketing is a great way to get your message across to customers, but if their personal data is at risk then they’re not going to be happy about it.
You need to make sure that your email marketing activities are compliant with the latest online security regulations and that you have a good data privacy policy in place. It’s not enough to just talk about your commitment to customer safety, you need to actually make sure it is protected through proper protocols and practises.
Get your email marketing strategy ready for 2022
Email marketing is still going strong and it looks like it will continue to be a powerful tool for businesses in the years ahead.
In fact, this list will get even longer as time goes on because there are new developments every day in the ever-changing world of email marketing.
The important thing is that you keep up with trends and use them effectively so your email marketing campaign stays relevant and you continue to create your own success.