Email marketing is still considered to be the most important and effective campaigns there is in the digital age. But, with so much content being created these days, it is important to stay up to date with the latest trends in email marketing. The average consumer receives more than 500 marketing messages in a month, and opens fewer than 1 out of 15. Here are the top ways to make your emails stand!
The Faster Points
- Using videos in email increases open rates and click-through rates significantly.
- It is a good idea to make sure the content of an email is interactive, because allowing the audience to engage in your emails helps increase the feeling of control.
- User generated content helps build trust because consumers tend to trust other consumers opinions versus companies.
Video
First it was images, and now consumers have turned to videos as a way to digest content. About 59% of executives prefer to watch a video over reading just plain text. Video is important because consumers have so much content available to them, that the average attention spans are becoming much shorter. A video allows you to get the message across quickly and is more entertaining than just text. Including a video in an email can increase open rates of 19% and click-through rates increase up to 65%. Any video that you chose to add to email should relate to the text within the email. That way, the video is enhancing your email content, not taking away from it. They also reduce content overload in emails, instead of cramming emails with a lot of content, which again, will overload audiences, you can add the additional content to the video. Not only are videos more engaging, but they are more interactive as well. Consumers have the choice of playing the video, which is giving them more control on what content they are choosing to consuming. Videos used to be a no no, because the file size was large, which would cause slower downloads, and larger emails that were often filtered out as spam. With the recent launch of iOS 10, HTML5 video support is back again and is easier than ever! There are also many different tools that companies can utilize to create quick and simple videos that they can send to their audiences. YouTube Director is a great tool to utilize because it is free to create content and Google makes it easy to create an advertisement out of your videos as well!
Interactive content
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- Using interactive content within emails is another effective and growing trend. With the growth of digital advertising in the last decade, the way we relay information to consumers has drastically changed. Instead of the traditional advertising methods that were more about advertising to consumers, it’s more about giving the consumer power and choice in what they are viewing. Interactive content is a good strategy because it helps increase the feeling that the consumer is in control. The different strategies include: quizzes, assessments, videos, contests, and calculators. Another reason this strategy is successful is because it can be more enticing as well. Plain text is not very interesting and can easily be dismissed when receiving hundreds of similar emails daily. With more content out there than ever, making an email more interactive also makes it more interesting and engaging. It will enhance an emails click-through rate and also increase the likelihood that a consumer will share your content.
User-Generated Content
We know that consumers are being delivered more and more content everyday. Videos and interactive emails tend to help companies stand out from their competitors. Another great way to stand out is by using user-generated content. User Generated Content is defined as any form of content that was created by users. This content can include anything from reviews, videos, discussion forum posts, blogs, audio files, and digital images. In fact, 92% of consumers trust organic, user-generated content more than traditional advertising. For example, if a company posts a photo of a consumer using their product or testimonials, it helps create a trust between the consumer and company. It also creates a community, where consumers have the power to read and write reviews from other consumers. These days consumers are trusting their peers, families, friends, and social influencers more than companies. Now there are programs that can add an email plugin that brings UGC capabilities for emails. For example, Stackla is program that makes it easy for marketers to serve the most relevant, interesting UGC for their consumers. This tool pulls together any content that relates to your product and allows you to sort and manage what content you want to display to your audience. Overall, user-generated content is increasing engagement and conversion for businesses who utilize it.
Email marketing is not going away anytime soon, if anything it’s continuing to grow. If you aren’t already using some of these tactics, then it’s time to start implementing them now!
If you have any more questions about Email marketing or just need help with your website’s marketing in general, Contact us today or request a quote!
