Mom, Blogger and Science Lover: Top 9 Email Trends and Tips

First and foremost, email is not dead; although it is periodically proclaimed to be with almost every new social media platform or upgrade to existing platforms. Email remains one of the most read, trusted and kept media available, even by millennials. To remain relevant, email marketing strategies need to evolve to meet the receiver where they are. So here are some of the latest tips and trends to help your company build emails that adhere to industry best practices and provide maximum engagement with your existing or prospective customers.

Think mobile first: More emails are viewed on mobile devices than any other device. And not only does the design need to fit that format, the messaging and content needs to adjust to fit the receiver’s “format” or ability or willingness to receive the message quickly.
Subject Lines Better Make a Good First Impression – 47% of email recipients decide whether or not to open an email based on subject line alone. To improve open rates your subject line should incorporate one or more of these elements: a sense of urgency, something to peak their interest or curiosity, offers, personalization, relevance and timeliness, start with an action verb, data & numbers, ask a question, humor/puns and cool stories. They should also be concise – no more than 50 characters. So tryout some A/B testing on your subject line text to see what garners the most opens.
Personalization – Research has shown that emails that included the first name of the recipient in their subject line had higher click-through rates than emails that did not. Tailored messages should speak to high-engagers vs. low-engagers or to persona segments. Content should be based on different sources including for instance geo-location, device, weather, time, trends and stock levels.
Utilize Call To Action Buttons – First of all be sure to have simple and strong calls to action to drive interest to click thru to your website, email a person at your company or call to learn more. Make sure the calls to action are buttons that are a bold, vivid color and large enough to click with thumbs via mobile phone viewing.
Keep it concise – According to 2016 research, the sweet spot for email length was between 50-125 words for optimal effect. Use short, punchy paragraphs, bullet points and bold headlines to draw interest to a few key items of interest. Sum up information in a few sentences and encourage viewers to click to learn more on your website. With less space and minimal attention spans, expect email content to get shorter.
Fewer stock images – Use of more pertinent “local/on target message” images, “Real”, “in the moment”, “slice of life” type images are grabbing the interest and attention of your audiences, especially Millennials.
Utilize imagery and graphics boldly – The advice is for the text to image rate to be 60:40 or even 70:30. Consider using animated gifs, infographics, videos and other images largely to drive interest and reinforce messages in your email. Many folks only skim rather than read emails, so visual items are a great way to help folks quickly understand the information and take a
ction.
Play Around with Send Time & Days – By tracking your response from email opens and clicks and varying the times to see what is most effective for various segments you may be able to increase engagement. Weekends are not off-limits for email. People have more time to read them (must be mobile responsive). Marketers should experiment with sending emails in the early morning or late at night for mobile audience subset.
Segmentation – Take the time to think about various relevant segments and pull targeted lists to focus on these groups. Created segmented lists could have targets based on geography, age, gender, past purchases, products and/or services, change in buying behavior, customers who referred new customers and many more.