15 Ways To Set Email Marketing Goals And Predictions in 2023

Do you know that email is actually older than the internet?

The very first email was sent in 1971 when the internet was still to be invented around 12 years later.

Since then, emails have come a long way, becoming one of the most successful and persistent not just modes of communication but a tool for marketing.

Email Marketing trends have been changing for a long time, and for good with adapting more automation technology.

For businesses, the challenge is to keep up with the new changes and trends, so they will be one step ahead of the market to gain a competitive advantage.

So here we are in 2021, looking at the present goals and what’s coming in 2022. Not just goals but predictions for businesses too. Let’s dig in!

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Including User-Generated Content

One of the simplest yet effective methods to increase your organic traffic and get more conversions is including user-generated content in your emails.

It increases the trust quotient of your emails amongst your clients and consumers when they see the positive feedback from all different kinds of people.

This cements the chances of conversion from subscribers to paying customers.

The best thing about user-generated content is the material you can get free of cost. In fact, it further even helps you to boost engagement with your audience or customer.

It boosts relationships amongst your readers in the process itself. To add even more, you can always consider adding poll results, photographs of your customers, customer reviews, and even video testimonials.

Make sure you also add a CTA button in the email to get the benefit of the doubt the customer is willing to give you with assurance from the user-generated content.

Emails also can be used to create user-generated content. For example, you can ask your subscribers to participate in a user poll or survey.

Through it, you can retrieve the relevant data. Encourage them to share their opinions, feedback, and suggestions.

There are always multiple ways to create or utilize user-generated content through email targeting subscribers.

Hyper-Personalize Your Email Campaigns

Customers do not want to feel like they are just a chore for a marketing practice or just a number, one amongst hundreds addressed only to sell something.

And that’s not what you want them to be getting from your brand. If that’s the impression they usually receive from your brand, they will simply ignore and overlook your emails.

If motivated well, they would go forward to unsubscribe you or even mark your email as spam.

Actually, no one wants to feel like merely another cog in the machine. They want to feel special, noticed, and treated well.

So when you value your customer on a personal level, then they tend to give value to your emails as well.

That’s why not just personalization but hyper-personalization is required for emails, and that has been one of the trending practices of 2021 and even will continue in 2022 as well.

In fact, this is a trend that is never going to go out of date!

How do Businesses Hyper-Personalize Their Emails?

To hyper-personalize their emails, you need to first develop a balance between automation and personalization to lay the foundation right.

The lack of personalization tends to come from the increase in automation. Since automation is a critical part of the email marketing campaign, you cannot simply eradicate it.

So it all becomes the game of optimizing the automation on the personalization standards.

To hyper-personalize emails, businesses first try to get as much data from their customers or clients as possible.

The data comes from their profiles, their preferences, their shared opinions, suggestions, feedback, their purchasing habits, and more.

Marketers are focused on retrieving data from customers and leverage it to hyper-personalize emails using various tools and strategies such as segmentation, automation, etc.

They also use Artificial Intelligence to customize the email campaign accordingly. AI is capable of anticipating customer behavior and preferences using the information collected from them.

It also analyzes their open rates, preferred products, interests, purchasing habits, previous purchases, wish lists, and other profiling information as well.

Personalization is a hot trend, and it is only going to grow day by day, and that’s for years to come.

Use Animation

Another popular trend of 2021 has been coming the way for quite some time, and it is something that is going to stay longer.

Using animation in the emails wasn’t difficult as the actual animation. In fact, it was easy to create and integrate into the email design.

Then, there are CSS animations that allow designers to create transitions where one element of the email into another.

Brands started utilizing the dynamic elements in the animation to capture the attention of their readers.

Surprisingly, a good and smart animation is highly effective in holding the attention of the subscriber, so it increases engagement rates.

And it needs to be basic but something catchy and interesting, leading to the message of your email. It can set up the foundation of your message or add an effect to it.

Animation helps your emails to bring to life and make them more dynamic. However, with animation, another problem can be troublesome, which is delayed loading time.

So businesses also focussed on ensuring the size of the email is reduced as much as possible.

For example

Uber started their Halloween email campaign, where they added simple yet highly effective animations to their emails.

When users open the email, they see a bat flying across the full moon where the headlights of a car get illuminated, revealing a black cat.

There are some very subtle animations in the background as moving wallpapers. And that’s coming out to be highly attractive and compelling for subscribers to stay and read.

Optimize Using AI

AI is a relatively new technology that the world is still adapting to, and that’s too with the given limitations.

Many businesses are stepping up to utilize the technology in one way or another. However, on the flip side, there are still many businesses that are still perplexed by the very concept of it.

It comes with futuristic promises and applications of greater lengths. But some of them are extremely viable at this early stage.

The market is still adjusting to the idea, and then there are inexperienced as well as experienced marketers; both are quite skeptical regarding the use of AI in email marketing.

The fact is AI is tremendously able to handle email marketing practices in terms of data management and processing, way better than marketers.

AI applications help manage the data with minimal effort. There are different areas where it can be utilized :

Creating alternative effective subject lines
Survey optimization
Reorganizing email campaigns
Optimization of sending frequencies and time
Predicting outcomes using analytics
Cleaning up a mailing list
Processing a large amount of client data at the same time

AI has the capability to enhance email marketing, its impact, and processes. It can increase the efficiency and speed of your email marketing campaign.

It is highly capable of completing time-consuming and complex tasks easily as compared to being traditionally tiresome.

Focus More To Achieve From Your Newsletters

For businesses, it is essential to capitalize the most of the newsletter where it can serve multiple purposes:

Engage with your subscribers
Offering value to your subscribers
Delivering information & updates
Offering products
Converting subscribers to customers
Promote Repeat purchases
Help in building relationships

And even more. Newsletters are often reduced to merely a good-looking email template but that’s not it, not even remotely.

Newsletters are known to be the foundation of every email marketing campaign. It is a more evolved, smart, and efficient way to communicate with your subscribers.

It is essential for businesses to put conviction in the creation and usage of newsletters, well-optimized, crafted and strategized to bring better results.

The idea of the newsletter is to provide content through emails to engage the audience so they look forward to their emails.

There are certainly different models of content creation used offered through newsletters :

Curate bit-size news in the newsletter
Add the list of short guides on a particular topic
Hand-picked blogs from the internet or business blog
Special offer products
Products curated on occasions, festivals, etc.

And so on.

Have a look at 100+ Amazing Email Newsletter Content Ideas

Use Plain Text Emails

With increasing technology and design, it is safely assumed that emails scale to be better and more complex in their presentation, and that’s what makes it better.

But that’s not true! The usage of plain text in emails without any additional design elements is pretty much effective and popular.

Tons and tons of businesses still prefer to communicate to their subscribers through plain text emails.

Also, it tends to be more personalized, less sale-sy, more conversational, casual, and effective. Chances are, a lot of emails you receive in the email inbox are like this.

Many businesses resonate more with this email design as they prefer to deliver their messages in the most straightforward manner.

This has been a trend over the last few years, and still is and the fact is going to be as simplicity never gets old.

It also makes the email less flashy and too-much desperate for attention. People do not just assume it to be selling something with such emails.

Optimize Emails For Multiple Platforms

Emails need to be optimized well to work smoothly on multiple platforms. Mobile optimization is highly required for a better user experience.

It is important more than ever as a larger portion of consumers are reading their emails through their mobile phones. So, not optimizing the emails is basically leaving money on the table.

You need to optimize your emails to be highly responsive to both desktop and mobile versions as well.

Optimization also requires emails to be read easily with consistent design without any bugs or errors.

The emails need to be apt in their communication even if the images are not loaded on mobile phones as it tends to happen.

Apart from mobile devices, there are other platforms such as various screen-size tablets and phone sets as well.

Interactive Emails

Another popular trend in email marketing in 2021 has to be the rise of interactive emails.

The brands rapidly adapted and it became a generation-friendly change in the email design and content.

Interactive emails help businesses to boost engagement. It is growing increasingly famous as technology evolves over time.

Not to forget, it is not too difficult to make the change for designers and copywriters in the emails.

Here are different ways how they make their emails more interactive :

Animated buttons and CTAs
Gamification elements
Rollover effects to enlist offerings
Surveys, polls, and user-generated interactive content
GIFs and hover-over images
Interactive product carousel
Design mode options

Less Copy Is Better

The future of email marketing primarily focuses on the quality of the copy, rather than the quantity of the copy.

This must be due to the reduced attention span of the people in this day of age. With the popularity of mobile applications such as TikTok, it is clear that people are fond of short-form content.

Not to forget, their fondness for shorter and shorter content-mode content platforms as they want to be impressed in less time.

That goes for everything on the internet. It is brutal when it comes to winning the eyeballs of the audience on the web. Everyone competes against everyone and everything.

So people want to invest less time and want more returns. If someone is proposed to, they want to know about it as quickly as possible without giving up on it.

Clearly, the copy also gets impacted due to this shift, hence a shorter copy is always better than a better copy.