With all the media coverage, attraction and sexiness of social media marketing email marketing has been mistakenly placed in the role of “little brother” or “disadvantaged stepchild” compared to digital display and social marketing initiatives. In reality for most companies this is not the reality. Email marketing is seen as a digital powerhouse by many. And the data speaks for itself. The conversion rates for email marketing remain substantially higher for email marketing compared to digital display ads and social media initiatives. Email marketing not only remains relevant and a key resource any integrated marketing arsenal.
That said 2015 demand a number of tweaks and considerations for your email programs. One of the most important in terms of template and message design is to think “mobile first” as the platform your emails will be viewed on. Things like a 35 character limit to your subject line will be critical.
At the same time email design still needs to support dozens of platform/email clients from AOL to Microsoft Outlook. The smartphone and its larger screens are not to be overlooked. Also Android consideration is no longer a luxury. You cannot design templates and messages for the iPhone only as the be all and end all.
Also with its dominance anything Google does in Gmail has to play into your strategies for email programs. The GoogleInbox app offers new user options including display tiles, opportunities to pin message at the top of the email box, ability to set snooze and reminder settings for reading emails, and really personalized file and segmentation settings for categorizing emails received.
The result is that marketers will have to be really creative as to image strategies given Google will extract to create tiles. Many of the features of this app will allow time shifting opening emails. This will impact the long used strategic timing of email scheduled delivery, And user ability to fine tune categorization of emails will require marketers to step strategies up in terms of content and message segmentation and customization.
All the above result in more challenges for small businesses and entrepreneurs and will likely result in trending demand for third party service ESP’s and services like ProMail and ThemeForest.
