12+ Hottest Email Marketing Trends You Need To Test

2021 was one heck of the ride for the world, especially for business owners, as it witnessed tectonic changes in the market.

It is hard to say whether some of these changes are going to stay or are merely a trend under the circumstances and their impact.

The ripple effect already birthed the different behavioral changes and pattern shifts in customers.

Consumers have changed their perspectives on how they buy things and engage with businesses.

The one good news that stands tall is people are leaning more and more toward online purchasing and becoming used to this digitalization.

If you are a marketer or business owner on the verge of re-configuring your email marketing strategies, then there are plenty of changes you need to address.

Businesses are already adapting to these changes, these trends as we move towards the end of the year 2021, so you better start catching up to these hottest email marketing trends of 2022.

Emails That Are More Than About Selling

Subscribers today expect more from emails than just mindless sales pitches and promotions from the brands.

In fact, it becomes one of the most infuriating things for them consistently being sold in one way or another.

According to Rob and Kennedy, the Email marketing heroes duos suggest changing the approach, especially regarding the content of your email.

2022 is the year when marketers need to put the idea of providing value in one type of email and offers in another into the garbage.

They rather focus on mixing them up. If you think about it, it is pretty obvious; you know that one type of email has an offer and another the value you need.

You will definitely feel more compelled to open value-based emails as compared to the ones that pitch you to buy.

This certainly explains why the open rates for those emails are so low.

How To Combat Low Email Open Rates?

Rob and Kennedy offer the best way to beat this is to make sure that every email has a strong reason for the subscriber to open it, whether you are selling or not.

Now, how you do that is very simple. You make sure that every email you send out to your subscribers again, irrespective of whether you’re selling or not, must be valuable to them.

Emails that include educational or helping content such as tips, tricks, advice, blueprints, guides, and success stories are heavily consumed by people.

Then, also free resources, downloads or free trials, any free downloadable are snatched upon.

Make sure you stick to the promise that you made while signing them up, and when you think subscribers are engaged enough and hooked with your brand, then you can offer them a product.

Focus on Micro-Segmentation

Email segmentation has always been a critical email marketing practice and also an integral tool for crafting more personalized emails.

Usually, your email list is segmented on the basis of age, geographical region, gender, and a few other categorizations.

But with CRM tools getting more powerful over time, segmentation has been taken to another level.

Now one can segment their email list on the more advanced criteria such as their past purchase records of the prospect, their previous interactions, and their searches regarding products or services.

Not just that, more and more criteria can be created to dig deep to categorize potential markets.

So, it is safe to say that micro-segmentation is the new segmentation that businesses are catching up with.

Micro-segmentation works minutely on profiling the customers and creating micro-segments.

Example

For example, if you are a clothing brand, you can create segments of the prospects depending upon what weather they are experiencing at the time.

With rainy weather, you can send discount offers on raincoats and windcheaters. And that’s particularly how you craft the email as well.

For prospects in the cold season, you won’t send the same offer about raincoats and windcheaters.

Utilizing Email Marketing Technology Advancements

The overall marketing technology is growing rapidly, and one of the hottest email marketing trends is capitalizing on those technological advancements.

The quicker you will jump on this bandwagon, the better competitive edge you will have against other brands.

There are more and more advanced features available for marketers to access, and since they are affordable, brands are utilizing them at their best.

One of the best examples of these advanced email marketing technology is the aIT tools that help to craft subject lines, email content, and call-to-action as well.

Also, machine learning is another marketing technology that helps you figure out when your users are spending more time in their inboxes.

This means you will be automating your email to send in the times when your users are more likely to be opening their inbox.

Just like these, more technologies are available at your disposal to advance your email marketing campaign for higher conversion.

Practicing Hyper-Personalization

Micro-segmentation plays an integral role in hyper-personalization.

They complement each other as both plays on a much deeper and more advanced level than earlier.

Hyper-personalization, as it sounds, is a more advanced version of personalization where you strategize an approach to make it more relative and connect to the target audience.

Since, through micro-segmentation, you have far better access to the data, you can achieve much more relevance and reliability in your email communications.

Hyper personalization allows you to tap into detailed profiling and data collection on your prospects.

For example, you will even have access to the local searches of your prospects, according to which you can offer them more relevant and exclusively specific deals.

When you write such tailor-made hyper-personalized emails, it tends to boost your email engagement and increase the chances of conversion.

Eliminating Inbox Insecurity

Don’t get too confused! It is basically about achieving high deliverability with your emails, in other words.

It has apparently come across as one of the biggest challenges in email marketing in the last few years.

Scott Hardigree, the founder of Email Industries, addressed the fact that good deliverability is extremely vital for brands.

He also mentioned how hard it is getting to hit the user’s inbox on a consistent basis.

This is certainly a wake-up call for marketers to do more than they are doing already.

In the upcoming year 2022, achieving high deliverability is the ultimate goal, and hence the trend to ride on.

In the quest to eliminate inbox insecurity, there is more to go, and it begins once you improve your deliverability to some extent.

Email Authentication Is Necessary

Director of Email Marketing at Events Partners, Adam Holden-Bache, gives valuable advice to marketers.

He said that brands need to make sure that they have completed the essential steps for email authentication.

Also, marketers need to consistently review their analytics to identify the points where they failed to make deliveries in the user’s inbox.

They also must look to the new possibilities offered by the new arrival BIMI and email authentication standards like DKIM, SPF, and DMARC.

Doubling Down On Email Automation

Email automation seems to be never going out of the top email marketing trends, as it has been the same since its very inception.

It is only getting more advanced over time to get more from the marketers and their time.

With email automation, marketers can set up automated workflows that send out emails to their subscribers when triggers are alarmed.

This helps them to save a tremendous amount of time and effort, especially automating the repetitive and what is considered ‘chores’ of email campaigns.

For example, autoresponders are used to send all those commonly-sent emails where personalization is not required, such as welcome emails, product updates, etc.

Have a look at 30+ Effective Automated Emails That Boost Sales

Email Automation Is Key To Passive Income For Businesses

Email automation partakes hugely in the passive income of any business as it keeps on sending marketing emails to set email lists and segments depending upon the triggers.

Since it is the leading marketing trend every year, so you can consider it more of essential marketing practice to achieve higher conversions.

Not to forget how it reduces the workload of marketers and optimizes their results, achieving more in less time.

Also, when automated emails also mean consistency, it builds brand on regular interactions over time.

Automation also allows you to send a variety of emails focusing on particular goals with every email sent out.

Have a look at Ultimate Guide To Email Marketing Automation

AI-Driven Email Marketing

One of the remarkable examples of Artificial intelligence and email marketing has to be this –

A user who searches on Amazon for a particular product or particular type of product. And just not after a while, they receive a similar recommendation in their inbox by Amazon.

How dramatically does it increase the chance of the purchase through those recommendations which otherwise go random and ineffective?

That’s the power of Artificial intelligence (AI) in email marketing.

Using AI, business owners can send out more targeted emails; this even works far better than micro-segmentation or hyper-personalization.

AI is much more accurate than any other marketing technology or strategy out there, and it is certainly the future of marketing for sure.

Agile Methodology In Email Marketing

The agile methodology in email marketing is getting more and more push amongst marketers and brands.

One of the simple reasons behind this is the fact that creating an email requires so much time and effort.

In fact, according to Litmus, 53 percent of brands take around two to three weeks to create just a single email.

Tapping Into Micro-efficiencies

Hacking the micro-efficiencies in this whole process is certainly the best way to achieve the deadline much faster.

Micro-efficiencies in different areas can be achieved by breaking down every part of the process into bite-sized tasks.

Now, these tasks are definite and can be completed much faster without compromising the quality.

To really attain this, marketers need to create sequence-wise planning of their email content and design the whole copy.

Execution Of Sequential Bite-Sized Tasks

Every bite-sized task needs to be separated from each other yet synchronized to equalize the completion of the whole process in a much better and faster way.

Execution is everything, and hence the right talent and skills need to work on these tasks.

Once you develop these standard procedures for the development of your email, you will start to see how you paced up the speed of the whole email creation process.

To reduce the time of the process, you can also create reusable blocks of coding defined for the email header, footer, logo placement, and other brand-based elements.

Time-based Personalized Automation

Everyone knows the basic personalization done in the email to send out to subscribers but not that’s wearing off.

Nikki Elbaz points out very genuine concern regarding the overestimation of personalization terms.

She mentioned how personalization has just become a buzzword that has no meaning anymore.

Putting the contact’s name in the subject line is just another gimmick that even subscribers can smell far away.

It begs the question of redirecting the personalization dynamics on much more strong ground instead of relying on bags full of tricks and gimmicks.

Behavioral-based Triggered Emails

Marketers need to ask themselves- how they can personalize in a way that is actually authentic and helpful for their subscribers.

There are some highly promising players in this game, such as behavioral-based triggered emails.

This means sending out emails that specifically serve the subscriber based on what exact stage of their buyer’s journey they are.

So, this is about personalized automation using time-based emails.

To begin with, this requires more and more data from your prospects, which means more steps to engage with subscribers, pay attention and learn where you see results.

Empathy-driven Messaging

One of the biggest turnoffs for subscribers is when the messaging of your email is misjudged.

The owner of Flourish & Grit, Emily McGuire, stated this issue she faced last year turned into the biggest concern in 2022.

She stated that in 2020, she faced inauthentic messaging that took over the actual real suffering going on in the pandemic.

In the simple understanding of what Emily is trying to say here, that inaccuracy in messaging or just pure ignorance and even lack of conviction end up making the brand unempathetic.

Where Brands Go Wrong With Their Messaging?

You can call it anything like lack of perspective or misunderstanding towards the audience, or simply being ignorant of the situation.

Brands and marketers need to understand emotions are strong, and we live in modern days where people are more aware than they ever have been.

Any in-authenticated messaging or misguided communication that makes them go and that too say out loud; your emails lack empathy.

Brands might get away from this in the early days, but nowadays, you also have to take care of the sensitivities of the audience.

More Visual Play In Email Design

Using images or visuals in the email design is just how traditional email marketing works, but it isn’t enough.

Even with good open rates, subscribers do not read the email, far away from engaging with it and clicking on CTA.

Grabbing and holding the attention of the subscriber in the email body is becoming more challenging over time.

So brands are getting more creative towards using the visuals in their email. It is not just about using static imagery.

There has been heavy usage of visual elements and strategies such as GIFs, animation, and even embedded videos.

On top of that, some brands are smartly utilizing color schemes to instill curiosity and trust.

You would see the use of color gradients, 3D images, image storytelling, illustrations, animated illustrations, 3D image animations, and so much more.

So 2022 and beyond is going to be more about utilizing the visual play in the email design, including strategies like storytelling, color psychology, etc.