How COVID Changed Email Marketing

 

Email marketing is undoubtedly a core tool in every smart business content strategy and has continued to strive in our pandemic stricken era where more people are naturally spending increased time on their devices. Ultimately, the course of the COVID-19 pandemic has reshaped how marketers view and use email marketing, hence, we have outlined three of the biggest changes in email marketing trends since 2020 to guide your marketing strategy.

Ensuring a personalised customer experience

 

Email marketing is known to increase customer engagement, and while personalisation is not a new concept in email marketing trends, it is now more important than ever. Everyone is going through a hard time in the pandemic and consumers are all the more seeking a personal connection with brands. Hence, uncovering how to create an authentic connection is crucial for marketers.

Tailoring your message by using the customer’s name is a staple in personalised email marketing. However, it’s not personalised enough on its own. Telling a story and using language specific to your audience in a manner that does not feel contrived can help customer’s feel engaged with your brand. Personalised welcome emails for new customers are common, but personalised emails should be integrated throughout the customer journey to show that you’re listening to your customer’s needs and engaging with them. Marketers who put themselves in their customer’s shoes and respond appropriately make the best communicators.

In 2021, robotic content that focuses on pushing a product is lacklustre and uninspired. Finding a happy medium between selling your product without coming across as any other business is a careful balancing act – you don’t want to run the risk of ending up in someone’s spam folder.

Rapidly changing consumer preferences 

Email marketing is central to nurturing, engaging and retaining customers in a time where everything we once knew about consumer behaviour rapidly changes and evaporates.

The instabilities and stresses imposed by the Covid-19 pandemic have created a new set of purchasing behaviours, priorities and market trends, where an authentic yet engaging experience is truly important to the next steps in the customer’s journey.

Swiftly changing consumers’ behaviours and preferences have skyrocketed the need for authenticity, value, and quick accessibility to a business through EDMs. Quality and purpose have become the main differentiating factors for consumers when purchasing from a brand and this showcases the amplified importance of targeting and segmenting your customers within the wider audience.

These small changes could leave a great impression on your customers to accelerate your business and boost retainment rates to your brand. But remember, creating an inclusive experience for all potential and existing customers requires authenticity. There will likely be repercussions if your customers perceive your email marketing content to be mere virtue signalling in an attempt to capitalise on significant cultural moments.

Thinking ahead of technological advancements

Technology is rapidly advancing, and organisations must continually evolve and reshape how they think, learn, and communicate. Embracing technological disruptions, instead of avoiding them, is necessary to build adaptability and remain forward-looking. To stay competitive in our new COVID-19 business and economic environment requires new strategies and practices, and this fact also rings true in email marketing. Many organisation that failed to implement technological changes prior to the pandemic crisis because they weren’t a top priority have found themselves frantically scrambling to recapture their previous customer base.

For instance, Google’s mission to remove third-party cookies on their Chrome browser will likely have a dramatic impact in the marketing space of digital advertising. Cookies are primarily used by brands to improve user experiences by collecting data and metrics from their websites. Furthermore, advertisers rely on this third-party and individual data to measure their performance and help segment their audiences. For marketers, this creates a huge implication to ad-tracking and effectively tracing lead generation. The new privacy regulations and increasing governance online is likely to negatively impact marketing strategies and hinder processes of analytics for businesses. This move spells terrible things for those who aren’t prepared and are not willing to strategize

Ultimately, there is a lot much to gain from our experiences in these unprecedented times. If there is anything COVID-19 has taught us in the marketing world, it’s to embrace these challenges and revamp your email marketing solutions.

If you need any guidance or support to revamp your email marketing strategy, contact us today.