Email marketing is sometimes looked at like the dinosaur of the marketing world. It's old, it's been around since the internet started. Your grandma knows how to use it...but is that a bad thing? Just because something has been around for a while doesn't necessarily mean it's a bad thing, right?
Take a stroll through time with me. The wheel is old technology. It's been around a LONG time. Historians think that the first wheel came out of Mesopotamia almost 5500 years ago. Does that mean that it's no longer useful? Absolutely not. Our stone-age ancestors invented the wheel and found a better way to move goods and services around. It was way better than hauling everything on their backs. How much has the wheel changed in the last 1000 years? It went from being made of stone, to wood, to made out of whatever number and combination of rubber, steel, fabric, and chemicals. The wheel has only improved with time.
Email is the same. It has only improved with time and I think it will continue to improve with time. In my last blog I discussed why I'm bullish on email marketing. For this week I wanted to discuss a few trends that I'm seeing in email marketing. I'm also going to share a tool that I've been using to track trends at an even more granular level. Let's dive in.
Trends in email 2024:
So, let's start out by looking at this tool. I'm a power tool junkie. I love working on projects where I can use tools to make the job easier. I will sometimes even start projects specifically so I can buy a new tool...it's a problem.
I'm the same way with technology "tools" as well. So, when I found a tool that I can use to analyze emails and see what competitors or other companies are doing in their email campaigns I jumped at the opportunity. Enter sendview.io. It's a unique tool that allows you to sign up for a bunch of email campaigns without cluttering up your inbox.
So, here's what I did. I signed up for 17 different email campaigns. You can see all the different brands below.
-My Favorite Quilt Shop
-Michael's
-Dick's Sporting Goods
-The Sportsman
-Al's Sporting Goods
-Bass Pro Shop
-Scheels
-Sportsman's Warehouse
-Cabela's (a little tidbit about me, I have a dog named Cabela...I'm a huge outdoor, camping, fishing, hunting guy)
-Shabby Fabrics
-Cutter Pillar
-Hobby Lobby
-JOANN Fabrics
-My Girlfriend's Quilt Shop
-Stitchin Heaven
-Missouri Star
I tried to get a good mix of local and national brands. This would allow me to see what local stores might be doing differently than national brands.
So, without further ado, we're going to look at some of the trends in email marketing.
Emojis!
Email subject lines are a place to catch recipients eyes. Emojis can help with that. In fact, I found that of all the emails sent roughly, 40% of all subject lines had an emoji of some sort. The most popular were the fire 🔥 (43 times) emoji followed by the Christmas tree 🌲(20) emoji. Other notables were sparkles ✨, tada 🎉, and because we of halloween, the Jack O Lantern 🎃.
Images:
Images in your emails can help bring your products to life as well as add an extra link to your page. In the group mentioned above there were an average of 29 images per email. To put that into context each email averaged roughly 412 words. That means for every 14 words there was an image. I guess the old phrase a picture's worth a thousand words is outdated.
Links:
Links can help funnel your customers directly to your action areas. All marketing needs to be timely, relevant, and ACTIONABLE. If you send an email that doesn't encourage your customer to take action it will get lost in all the other emails they receive. Links need to be included. Our email senders averaged 25 text links per email and 24 image links. (Look up above. Most emails averaged 29 images total...so almost every image became a link.)
Your links should be trackable so you can see your customers behavior. Each time a customer clicks a link you can track that and know what items/events/classes/offers are enticing your customers to purchase. When you know that you can create more content that will enable you to better meet the needs of your customers.
Timing:
As I mentioned before, marketing should be timely. Timing is everything. You may need to test the waters to find out what works best for you, but our email senders were send-heavy on Thursday mornings. Does that mean you should try for that day or maybe shoot for another? That's up to you, but now you know and can make a decision from there.
Conclusion:
Those are just a few of the trends that I looked at. It was interesting to see the behaviors and strategies of different brands and industries. Email marketing isn't going away. The ROI is high, the technology continues to evolve, and people tend to use what they're familiar with, which is email.
In today's world there's a million different ways to market and promote and it's easy to get caught up in the new and flashy methods. Hopefully, after reading this you at least give email marketing some consideration. Maybe try adding some images and links, a GIF or two. It may work better than you anticipated. If it doesn't work, what are you out?