As digital marketing agencies take on the ever-evolving task of understanding and evaluating their multi-channel marketing strategies, allocating time and resources for every channel becomes crucial. Email marketing has always been a dependable platform for digital marketers to market themselves as a brand and also to meet their clients’ marketing needs. However, it was only reinstated in 2020, as emails were extensively used to disseminate important messages during the lockdown.
This year, digital marketers want to build on the lessons of previous years to further the role of email marketing in planning impactful campaigns. In this post, digital marketers join us to discuss these lessons as well as features they will focus on in 2021.
Making the most of personalisation
Harpreet Munjal, a digital marketer and founder of LoudGrowth, says, “Email marketing is a core part of our marketing strategy as it saves our time and boosts productivity. We depend on email automation for important tasks like lead generation, reporting to our clients, content promotion, payments, and feedback. Also, email reporting data helps to improve our content marketing strategy.”
Personalization, segmentation, follow-up emails, A/B testing, integrations, automation, and analytics are the most common features used by his team at LoudGrowth. However, there is still room to excavate more. “In 2021, we plan to deep-dive in some of these features. We’ll further our focus on deep-segmentation, more integrations, nuanced automation, personalization, and testing,” says Harpreet, whose agency sends more than three million emails per month.
Quality over quantity
Another digital marketer, Siddhant Jain, who is a Growth Manager at DigiDarts, says, “A/B testing is the one feature that we have been using the most and suggest every brand to do the same. In future, we are looking at using workflows to their optimal capacity. It will definitely be the most important feature for any brand in 2021 as it simplifies the process of creating different pipelines to engage with the users at each stage.”
Last year, many email marketers understood that quality supersedes quantity when it comes to sending out campaigns. “Even if it’s their favorite brand, no one wants to receive emails from them every day. It is crucial that we share content on a consistent basis but not spam them. Another important learning is to go hyper-personal. Based on this, we will be designing our future campaigns,” adds Siddhant.
Design is key
While automation and personalization will continue to be the main focus for marketers, email design is something that cannot be ignored. In a survey Zoho Campaigns conducted on LinkedIn, a majority of participants voted minimalistic designs as the future of email designs.
Digital marketer Bhavesh Parmar says, “Interactive design and pre-designed ‘free’ email templates are trends that I am rooting for. You might have a great automation system in place but everything might fall flat if the design is not optimal. According to me, a strong design makes a campaign successful.”
We hope these expert tips help you plan your email marketing calendar. If you want to learn more email marketing strategies to grow in 2021, check out Zoho's recent tip on the subject.
