Email Marketing Trends That Businesses Should Take Stock of in 2022
Table of Contents
If email was important for businesses earlier, now, it is downright indispensable. Due to the pandemic, the email dependency of several organizations across the globe has grown multifold over the last couple of years. While around 70% of brands increased their email marketing workload, nearly 37% augmented their email budgets. 2022 is expected to be as path-breaking for email as were 2020 and 2021, if not more. That said, let’s take a look at some email marketing trends which we feel will call the shots within the email landscape this year. Read on to find out!
Increased Emphasis on Personalization
Personalization has been among the prized weapons in every email marketer’s armor out there, making it one of the most prominent email marketing trends this year. The volume of emails being exchanged at present is higher than ever. So, the only way to get through to your target audience is by sending them relevant and personalized messages.
The greater the relevancy of your emails, the more engagement, and interaction they will invite. To achieve that, however, you first need to meticulously segment your email lists. Divide your customers into different sections based on various parameters like age, location, occupation, gender, browsing history, past purchases, preferences and interests, position in the sales funnel, and the like. Subsequently, this will enable you to implement personalization at scale.
Take a look at this email from GasBuddy.
Over here, GasBuddy has provided the user with a detailed driving report which allows them to both, take stock of their own habits and see how they fare in comparison to others.
Moreover, 2022 will witness marketers adopting an increasingly data-driven approach to fuel their personalization ambitions. You can leverage zero and first party data to gain a deeper understanding of their interactions and activities. Ultimately, this will power businesses to deliver extremely targeted experiences, improving the performance of their email marketing programs in the process. At the end of the day, all customers want is to be heard and acknowledged by their favorite brands. And embracing a data-intensive personalization approach will let brands accomplish that with ease.
The Spotify Wrapped initiative is undoubtedly one of the most popular first-party data personalization campaigns to have emerged in recent times. Here’s how it looks.
Greater Focus on Privacy
The announcement of Apple’s Apple’s MPP (Mail Privacy Protection) heightened awareness about the privacy concerns of email users across the globe. With MPP in effect:
1. The IP addresses of the recipients get hidden, meaning senders can neither link it to their other online activities nor determine their subscribers’ location.
2. Moreover, it will also prevent marketers from knowing whether recipients opened their emails or not.
This pushes email marketers to be exceptionally mindful of their customers’ privacy.
Here’s an email from Hover that conveys their respect for their subscriber’s privacy.
Another significant takeaway from this development is regarding how you measure your email success. Gone are the days when businesses relied on open rates to assess the performance of their campaigns.
Now, they will have to rely on other metrics such as click-throughs, list growth, conversion rates, revenue per email, and LTV (lifetime value) for evaluation. Marketers will have to actively monitor what their subscribers are doing after clicking on their emails and utilize that information to gain the upper hand. A good way to stay on top of your customer’s pulse is by inviting them to participate in surveys.
Here’s how DeFeet goes about it.
Practicing Accessibility
With inclusion being a core principle of the email community, more and more emphasis is being laid on accessible email design now. Apart from that, not paying heed to accessibility can spell some serious doom for your campaign’s performance as well.
At present, almost 15% of the world population has some form of disability. Hence, if your emails are not accessible to people of all abilities, your visibility and reach will suffer immensely.
Here’s an accessibility checklist you can refer to while crafting your future campaigns.
In addition to capitalizing on email’s high market penetration, practicing accessibility also keeps you free from legal trouble. There are a number of international frameworks and legislations in place that make it mandatory for businesses to make their content accessible for people with visual, physical, auditory, cognitive, and speech disabilities. Failing to comply with these laws can earn you a string of legal disputes, and several sleepless nights in the process.
Take a look at this email from Instead, which abides by all the accessibility design best practices.
Humanizing the Brand
The last couple of years has kept people from meeting their families, friends, and loved ones in person. Even on the professional front, we have been forced to resume our proceedings on a virtual basis, online meetings being our only source of interaction.
This has left the majority of us craving for a personal and human connection. Thus, in 2022, humanizing the brand is expected to establish itself as among the leading email marketing trends.
And perhaps there’s no better way of doing that than putting a face to the names who run the show. No, we’re not just talking about CEO addresses; we mean representing the whole team. In the future, communication containing personal anecdotes of the brand’s representatives might as well become a norm. After all, who’s a better ambassador for the brand than the ones who work tirelessly towards ensuring its success?
This email from Curology drives our point across perfectly.
Here’s another excellent example from Flywheel.
Tapping Into Cross-channel Marketing Opportunities
No matter how content you are with email as a channel, you can’t afford to remain oblivious of others. Other modes, such as SMS marketing, are slowly but surely starting to make their presence felt in the market. In fact, since the onset of the pandemic, people’s texting and personal screen time has shot up drastically. Thus, your email must meet the critical requirements of a well-designed short-form sales page or long-form landing page to reach them. Take a look at this graphic for greater clarity.
2022 will witness several brands trying to marry email with other channels such as social media and SMS. This will allow them to give a leg up to their reach and visibility, earning an increased number of leads in the process. At the end of the day, striving toward creating cross-channel marketing opportunities will only allow brands to break down silos and deliver a significantly more cohesive and personalized experience to their customers.
Different channels have different strengths and striking a synergy between them is the only way of ensuring your brand’s ascension to the top.
However, email is expected to stay at the forefront of businesses’ cross-channel efforts. This is on account of the following reasons:
3 Reasons Why Email Marketing Is Still on Top
1. Email can drive traffic effectively to other channels. If you want to call your readers’ attention to your website or social media handles, all you have to do is embed their links into your emails.
2. Email marketing can be integrated into your CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software and other tools to deliver highly personalized messages.
3. Email lets you collect valuable information about your subscribers.
Personalizing your email marketing campaigns is no mean feat, but with the right tools in your armor, the process can be quite smooth. This is where Outgrow comes into the picture. It offers users a comprehensive suite of features such as integrating their email with CRM, segmentation, analytics-run retargeting, embedding interactive content in emails, and email notification features, allowing them to stay ahead of the curve.
Wrapping It Up
To understand the cadence of email marketing in 2022, the team at Uplers got in touch with the who’s who of the email industry and compiled their responses in a neat infographic. The email marketing trends shared above are just the tip of the iceberg. Want to go through the rest? Find them here.