Email marketing used to be simple. You put together a list, send it out, people read it, they take action. However, with the advent of mobile, phones growing in size and ever evolving technology companies, like Google, adding new features and releasing new applications, email marketers now have to be tech savvy to see their campaigns succeed.
In large companies there is often one person, or even a team of personnel dedicated to staying up on technological advancements (in addition to producing and maintaining innovative email campaigns). They can keep up on new trends, experiment, and delve into detailed analytics relatively easily. It’s their job. But this type of staffing requires resources that may not be in the marketing budget for a smaller organization. Not to fear.
Thankfully many of the email marketing service providers that serve the SME/SMB segment have caught on to this. Companies like Hubspot and Litmus release incredibly detail reports that aggregate data so that it’s easy to understand and use with relatively little time invested. Service providers like Constant Contact continue to add new features and templates that position users to remain competitive. In a world where technology has become, and will remain, an integral part of marketing, all of this makes expertise accessible to any size business.
Technology will never be a bad thing. It may be a little difficult to adopt changes at first, but ultimately it’s going to give you access to more data and more of your audience while decreasing time and money invested in reaching them. Let’s take a look at some of the currents trends in technology, demonstrated in this Litmus report, and how they might affect your email marketing this year.
What to Prepare for in 2015 and Beyond?
Mobile: Over half of all email is read on mobile
Big data becoming smaller (more accessible to SME/SMBS)
Smartphone adoption
Increasing phone screen size
Wearable tech (iWatch)
Release of new operating systems (iOS 8 and Windows 10 in a few months)
New supported image file formats
Inbox by Gmail – Popular new application
DMARC and SPAM legislation changes (How your emails will be, or not be, received by email service providers)
Automatic image display and other major updates to Gmail
More HTML/CSS customization capability in editing dashboards
Likely wide dispersion of email clients used by your audience (how does each display email, what features to they have that affect design and deliverability)
It’s an exciting time to be in marketing. Technology is rapidly expanding how we do what we do, allowing us to reach new potential and drive better performance. Email marketing has certainly evolved from what it was, but it’s not going away anytime soon. Rather, new technology and tech trends among various segments of the population will continue to change how we use it. As millennials and the next generation age here in the U.S. and global connectivity paves the way for a both-feet-in digital age, email will remain one of the best ways to communicate, and thus one of the best ways to market.
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