Every year we pick out trends which we think will shape the email marketing industry. In this  three-part series, we are discussing our pick of email marketing-specific trends for 2017 and beyond. In Part 1, we discussed how to use gated content to increase conversions and how attractive pop ups can increase newsletter conversions, leads and user engagement.

Throughout our email marketing trends article series, we will share many more email marketing tips and tricks. If you missed part 1, Click here to read it first.

Trend 4: Personalised Email

With the wealth of data we have at our fingertips these days, we are living in the era of email personalisation. Many businesses are still missing out on the opportunities this abundance of data provides though. How? If you’re still using stock email templates, it could be you. In fact, only 5% of companies are properly personalising their emails. This low figure could be due to the fact many businesses don’t know how to personalise their emails. (60% of marketing professionals recently admitted  they find it difficult to personalise their email content in real time. No wonder this simple strategy is being overlooked!)

There are some simple and sophisticated ways available to personalise your emails and increase conversions in the process. I’ll go through them below:

Ask Questions

Simple. Asking simple, straightforward questions to better understand your audience is a great way to show that you’re not a robot and that you want to communicate with your potential customers. Ask them what brought them to your website, or why they'd like to subscribe to your newsletter. By doing so, you gain insightful data you can use later to provide targeted, more effective emails.

Here’s a good example from Paper Style, a wedding specialist website.

Paper Style realised not everyone was visiting their site for the same reason and so adjusted their emailing preferences accordingly. This simple strategy helped to divide their customers and gave the business a better chance for sending more relevant material to potential customers.

By asking, ‘What are you planning for? - your wedding or someone else’s?’ This showed interest from the site and in turn increased both open and click-through rates. This simple question made their emails seem much more personlised and was a great success for the company.

Customer Personas

We’ve just recognised the value of personalisation and how segmenting your customers can help increase your open and CTRs. What if I tell you that you can take it even further? How? Customer personas.

Here's how it works:

Instead of asking a simple question, like in our previous example, you can group your potential customers together using different attributes and actions. Identify attributes through your audience's behavior and download history. Then, group each customer into a different persona.

The example below shows you what I mean:

Let’s say your customer is identified as a ‘Ruben’ (refer to image above). We can determine that this customer is going to be more interested in data generation than say, sales leadership. O the most effective emails to direct to this customer would be those about data generation and other related resources. When done right, this customer persona-based marketing will greatly increase your open and click-through rates.

Match Emails With Your Landing Pages

Here’s one more technique for personalising your emails and targeting your customers more efficiently and effectively in the process. Match your emails to your landing page.

The key to this technique is giving your email and your landing page a consistent look and copy. Having the same personalized CTA for your potential customers or using the same theme is a great idea here. It provides a unified experience which is more likely to convert.

Nuffield Health implemented this strategy with impressive results. Their goal was to increase membership subscriptions and at the same time generate more leads. They achieved this by creating multiple custom emails and multiple landing pages for each segment of their customer base. With the same content and basic look, this technique substantially increased their click-through and conversion rates and showed that customers respond well to personalised and targeted campaigns.

Trend 5: A/B Testing

Email campaigns, drip campaigns and newsletters are all great ways to increase email conversions. Like any marketing strategies however, they can be improved. You can achieve this through A/B testing. There are many aspects of your email campaigns that you can test and subsequently improve, I recommend only testing one aspect at a time however so you can more accurately measure your results.

Here are some common aspects perfect for A/B testing:

  • Call to action (“Buy Now!” vs. “Try Now”)
  • Subject line (“Product ABC on Sale” vs. “Discounts on Product ABC”)
  • Body
  • The layout of the message
  • Headline
  • Closing text
  • Your specific offer (example: “Save 50%” vs. “Free shipping”)

You can also test images, email sender’s name or time of day for sending. The possibilities really are endless. Not all of these different aspects are going to have a major impact on your customers, so I recommend testing small portions of your email list for short periods of time and measuring the results. Only your most successful variations should then be used in your email campaigns. Don’t stop there though. For best continued results you have to keep tweaking and testing your emails, outdated copy can have major negative ramifications for your campaigns.

If it's an ongoing lead nurturing email for example, test monthly or bi-monthly to keep up to date and ensure your email campaigns are yielding maximum results.

Tools For A/B Testing

Most email campaign software these days has inbuilt A/B testing tools, like for example Campaign Monitor, MailChimp and Active Campaign. If you don’t have these tools however, you can still A/B test manually. Split your email list into segments, send different variations of your email and compare the results manually. (Tip: exporting your data to an Excel file can really help with this.) Then analyse your results  by looking for significant changes in open rates, click-through rates and conversion rates.

Trend 6: Recap Email

We’ve discussed segmenting your customers, personalising your emails and the usefulness of A/B testing, but what else can you do? Send a recap email. Recap emails are an effective way to keep your email marketing strategy’s momentum alive. They summarise the highlights of your marketing campaign and add value to your brand through appearing organised and methodical. As you get to know your customers better through their wants and needs, you will be able to offer them better solutions, solidifying your role as a trusted brand or advisor. I recommend sending out a sales recap email directly after a promotion has ended. Whether you were offering a limited time offer or a discount, or you’re actually closing a product or service, recap emails can pique the interest of your customers in your next campaign.

Look out for part three of our 2017 Email Marketing Trends series in which we will delve into even more email marketing trends.


Did you miss Part 1 of our 2017 Email Marketing Trends blog series? Check it out here, or share your 2017 Marketing Tips in the comment section below!


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