Trends Shaping Email Marketing

By Author: Marisn Mackle
Total Articles: 656
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Every good idea has something forming and shaping it. Email marketing is the new idea for bringing a product or service to the consumer. Most consumers working online check their email. Marketers wanting to take advantage of this are crafting and creating emails that are being sent to the consumer, or potential customers, to market their product. Confronting them are new trends in customer behavior and the business environment that are shaping how they do it.

Personalization

When I sort my email, or my mail, I quickly go through the list and discard the ones I don’t want. I can usually discern which ones go to the trash pile in seconds. They’re advertising. They’re generic, and either I know I’m not interested or there’s nothing there to catch my eye. It only takes seconds and little or no thought. Then there’s the second pile. This covers a range of mail and notices that start one step above the first group that went into the trash to one step below the emails from people I know and want to read and respond ...
... to. I can’t speak for everyone but the emails I look at and read are the ones that interest me. It’s amazing what you can interest people in, or find they are really interested in but didn’t know it until they saw it. Some clever marketer sent something that personally interested me and so I stopped what I was doing and took a few minutes to find out what this specific email was all about.

Personalization is becoming the new trend, however, in some companies, it’s not happening as fast as it is in others. A recent study STJ, found one company was sending out only 4% of personalized emails tailored to the customer receiving it. Another company sent out over 50% of their emails tailored to the individual. Why the disparity? Some companies like the way they’ve always done it and find it difficult to change. When they see their sales plummet and find their customers are going somewhere else because someone else is marketing their product, they’ll feel the pain and they’ll change.

Consumer Privacy Regulation

Defending the rights of the consumers are sets of new laws that regulate and protect the consumer from aggressive marketers especially when it comes to emails that are personalized to a specific individual. These laws, like the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation and the California Consumer Privacy Act will impact how personalized emails are sent to individuals because they enable the consumer to consent to it. This applies not only to whether they receive an email. It also applies to how personalized data is used or sold to other channels.

Frequency

Remember the stack of mail and email above? Sometimes it gets too big and my time is too limited, or both. Then the discard pile starts to quickly grow. I become less discriminating about what I want to keep and a lot more ruthless about what I want to trash. When I see repeat offenders, it almost becomes personal. There’s only so much information and data I can absorb or have time to absorb. Marketers are finding that finding that fewer emails work better. They want good data. They want useful feedback. They NEED the consumer to work with them and are finding if they are not inundating them with a mind-numbing volume of email and notices, that they will get what they want. That means fewer, carefully crafted, personalized emails are ultimately going to be the most effective.

My name is Michel Marsin and i work full time as a freelance writer, editor former social worker. I am passionate about writing articles on different topics.