Top 7 Email Marketing Trends in 2023

The new year is a great time to look ahead and try to project key trends for the coming year. Changes are expected across all channels, including e-mail marketing which has been a staple of digital promotion campaigns for decades and remains a top earner for numerous businesses.

Some e-mail marketing trends are already gaining steam, and it’s very likely they will continue throughout the next year. Here is a rundown of areas to pay close attention to heading into 2023:

1. Email Marketing Automation

The main argument against e-mail automation used to be that it’s too mechanical and potentially invasive, but this is not necessarily true today. Traditional drip campaigns used to be very repetitive, but with modern e-mail marketing tools it’s possible to create smarter, more focused promotions that will have an activating impact on the customers. By using various templates and integrating the mailing campaign with sales automation, businesses could send their conversion rates skyrocketing. That’s why next year could be the right time for business owners who didn’t already automate their e-mailing efforts to consider doing so.

2. Deeper Level Of Personalisation

The age of one-size-fits-all marketing is long gone, and brands have to address individual customers in ways that match their organic interests and preferred communication style. While this is not a new development, time is running out for marketers who are still trying to push the same messages on everyone. With plenty of customer data to analyse and excellent personalisation options in all major enterprise e-mail software solutions, all conditions are in place to embrace even deeper customisation and formulate offers based on user actions and direct requests.

3. Interactive Content

E-mail is generally understood to be primarily a text-based medium, but this doesn’t have to be the case. It’s perfectly technically possible to include interactive elements such as CTA buttons, mouseover effects, surveys, image carousels, and much more. The only limitations that remain are creative, as marketing professionals can be conservative when it comes to e-mail composition and insist on using a traditional format even if it doesn’t work. Brands that open up their approach and start animating their e-mails with various types of interaction have a clear edge.

4. AI & Conversations

Modern linguistic AI tools are very effective at recognising hidden trends and optimising the content of an e-mail campaign based on the objectives and audiences. These tools can be valuable at every stage of a campaign, from shaping its overall structure to composing individual lines of text to include in a specific e-mail response. AI can significantly contribute to automation and personalisation, and has the potential to unlock a whole new level of interaction if used strategically and in alignment with other elements of an e-mail campaign.

5. Privacy Protection

Users are growing wary of their data being harvested without permission and sold to their-parties en mass. Many of them want to limit the volume of incoming promotional e-mails and gain a sense of control over what ends up in their inbox. Marketers have to acknowledge this and find less intrusive ways to build their networks of contacts. Adopting permission-based procedures and including opt-in possibilities is the way forward, and this trend can only grow stronger as awareness of data ownership becomes more prevalent.

6. Newsletters

While many marketers see newsletters as a thing of the past, in reality this format still offers some crucial advantages, especially for sales-oriented campaigns. Newsletters combine text with images, can include actionable elements (i.e. links), and are easy to deliver automatically according to pre-defined schedule. However, modern-day newsletters need to be respectful towards the users and focus on their natural interests, which is why it’s a great idea to have a preference web page and use it to personalise newsletter content for each subscriber.

7. Collecting High Quality Data

There is certainly no shortage of customer data to be found online, but reliability of conclusions businesses can make by analysing it varies greatly depending on how the data was collected. It’s very important to focus on the right metrics and place more weight on factors that are truly indicative of the user’s mind-set and expectations. Ideally, insights should come directly from potential customers and include not only their demographics and spending habits, but also more detailed opinions about the brand, its products, and earlier promotional efforts.

8. Chat Marketing Mix

How people discover, decide, buy, share and become brand advocates is a process that has moved online, and increasingly mobile. More recently, the rise of real-time messaging has led to a seismic shift in how people prefer to connect with businesses. We are not saying social messaging automation will or even should replace your email campaigns but rather work alongside them to enhance and create more touchpoints along the path to sale. Social messaging bots can have CTRs ranging from 20% to 60%, that’s 8X more clicks than the average email campaign! Messenger bots also outperform email campaigns when it comes to open rates, with Messenger open rates ranging from 70% to 90%, much higher than the 15% to 25% open rates you experience with email. In 2023 you’ll start to see more brands collecting emails via social messaging automation.