In How to Future Proof Your B2B Marketing Strategy we discuss how marketing should be a dynamic relationship between value creation, capture, and realisation. This entails designing scalable systems to enhance your digital presence and which create value for both your customer and partners through collaborative relationships. 

An important part of building a flexible system is keeping abreast of marketing trends without being swayed by every passing fad. It's about doubling down on what you know to be working and incorporating new elements into existing strategies when it's justified.

While email marketing is fairly conventional compared to relative newcomers like social media, it continues to play a vital role in B2B digital marketing. Email allows for a more intimate form of one-to-one communication with receptive prospects who have opted-in to receive content.

Email marketing consistently delivers better ROI than other disciplines. According to the DMA, for every £1 spent on email, marketers see an ROI of £35.41. 

Since its birth in the early 1990s, email has also proven to be an incredibly resilient marketing channel. It has weathered numerous technological and social shifts, including voice search, social media, smartphones, and the GDRP.

As businesses deepen their digital transformations, email is set to continue to be key in delivering value to customers. Indeed, as third-party tracking cookies are phased out, the role of email addresses as unique identifiers are becoming increasingly important for digital marketing strategy.

Five Email Marketing Trends

In the Litmus 2020 State of Email Workflows report, 78% of respondents said email is important to their company’s success. However, changing conditions have made it necessary for organisations to rethink email marketing strategy, alter workflows, and adopt new marketing technology.

To keep up with the times, here are some important trends in email marketing that you should be following.

Email Marketing Integration

It is now widely recognised that B2B buyers expect a more sophisticated experience delivered across all channels, just like they receive as consumers in the B2C sphere. Yet over a third of marketers said their email marketing was poorly or very poorly integrated with their other marketing channels.

It is our job as marketers to provide an omnichannel customer experience that fits seamlessly into our audience’s lifestyle. We need to break down the email marketing silo and integrate email with other digital marketing strategies across the customer journey. 

Lead nurturing happens across multiple channels and email is one of the most measurable channels for connecting with customers on an individual level. Each email address is an opportunity to glimpse into the behaviour and content preferences of that unique subscriber. 

The insights you gain from email marketing are a valuable resource for your entire content marketing strategy. Did a particular subject line have a high open-rate with a target segment? Test if similar language resonates with that same audience segment elsewhere – such as paid advertising. Did a recent piece of user generated content get a lot of engagement on social? That topic might make for a good addition to your newsletter. 

Up to the Minute Email Design

More emails are being sent than ever before. Attention spans are getting shorter as people get more adept at filtering what is and isn't relevant to them. The only answer is for brands to earn their place in people’s inboxes by centring content on their customer’s needs.

Interactive Content

Beyond making emails valuable, helpful, and actionable, marketers are also upping the ante through creative design and interactive email content. For example: 

• Thinking beyond the grid when designing emails – The careful combination of copy, layout and colour will make your message easy to scan and digest, enabling the reader to act quickly.

• Adding video your email – Campaign Monitor found that links to video content can increase email open rates by 19% and reduce unsubscribe rates by 26%.

• Incorporating animation – CSS animations can be applied to buttons and call-to-action images to provide small hits of interactivity. GIFs can also provide an element of motion and entertainment. Although much maligned as low quality and low brow, they can be very effective when professionally designed specifically for your campaign.

Mobile First Design

Another critical piece of email design is mobile optimisation. According to EmailMonday, mobile email can account for up to 78% of email opens, depending on your target audience, product and email type.

Mobile optimisation is not just about your templates or code being responsive to different screen sizes. It also includes things like using concise copy that is at an optimal length to be read on a smaller screen or compressing image file sizes to improve page loading times. 

Dark Mode

Dark mode compatibility has also become an increasingly important design consideration for email marketing. Major email service providers (ESPs), such as Apple, Gmail, and Outlook, all now offer dark themes. This means marketers need to learn how to design messages for both light and dark modes. Failure to do so could result in emails rendering incorrectly in email clients.

Voice Compatibility

With the rise of 'smart' devices, speakers and voice assistants, forward-thinking email marketers are also designing with voice accessibility in mind. For example, when someone asks Siri to 'read my unread emails' it checks for new messages and provides a brief audio overview of them. Marketers can help their message stand out in these audio summaries by using things like semantic HTML and clear auditory CTAs.

1-to-1 Email Marketing Strategies

Hyper-personalisation and dynamic segmentation is fast becoming the standard for email targeting. Combined, they allow brands to create dynamic email marketing campaigns that speak directly to client needs. For instance, is someone a first-time buyer? An engaged partner? Or are they an inactive customer?

An integrated marketing automation platform lets you segment based on omnichannel data collected across your website, email, social and other channels. You can also set up email sequences based on behavioural triggers. These types of functionalities allow you to deliver hyper-personalised content at scale. 

Personalisation is more than just addressing an email to a first name rather than a broad ‘all audience’ greeting. Dynamic elements such as copy and images mean that email campaigns can be automatically tailored to industry, stage of customer journey, and lead score.

Moreover, you can use information like birthdays, key milestones in a working relationship with a client, or change of career for the recipient to implement lifecycle marketing strategies. However, make sure you don’t overstep the mark. You must balance personalisation and privacy. 

Data Cleaning

Personalisation and automation requires clean data. When it comes to email marketing, credibility and trust are key. Using junk data in your email marketing system can trigger irrelevant campaigns, which will damage your reputation.

The first step of ensuring you have clean data is knowing your data sources. Never buy email lists. It is unethical, the data will likely be low quality or unverified, and you run an enormous risk of violating the GDRP or being black listed by your email service provider. Instead, use lead magnets like a professional education email series, white papers, webinars or eBooks to build your own custom email lists. 

Stay on top of database maintenance by regularly updating contact information and deleting or replacing junk data. Remove stale contacts from your list to ensure that you’re spending time emailing people who really care about your products and services. A small engaged audience is more valuable than a large audience that never opens your emails. You can further enhance your customer experience by ensuring that email subscribers have a way to control the message type and frequency. 

Efficiency & Optimisation 

The level of email personalisation now expected by people depends on automation and artificial intelligence (AI) tools. Manual processes simply can’t match the efficiency of functions like smart list segmentation, send time optimisation, and automated workflows. 

AI-powered email automation can maximise ROI in several different ways. For instance, it can reduce production times with optimised modular email templates that can be personalised using segmentation and dynamic content. Or, in circumstances where all the whistles and bells aren’t needed, it can send simplified, text-only emails which feel more personal and important.

Automation platforms are also much more effective at running A/B and multivariate testing. Doing so allows marketers to better understand what does and doesn't work when running email campaigns. Moreover, when enhanced with machine learning, automation platforms can also analyse past results and use predictive analytics to optimise performance. 

As a result, AI automation is pushing the boundaries of what we, as digital marketers, can do to create a tailored customer experience. It is no wonder that the global AI and automation market size is projected to reach USD 266.92 billion by 2027.

Enhance Your Email Strategy with 1827 Marketing

1827 Marketing’s expert team can help you develop tailored B2B email marketing campaigns to forge a stronger relationship with your clients and partners. Our integrated marketing automation platform will help you save time, track results and maximise your email marketing ROI. 

Contact us today to learn more!