Now that we’ve entered the first quarter of 2019, you’re already making big marketing plans for the year ahead. You’re probably hard at work laying the all-important groundwork for the digital strategy you’ll execute over the next few months.
Even so, you’re still filling in the details. You’ll need to lock down boardroom buy-in on the strategies you’re building — and to get that approval, you’ve got to have a clear overview of expert predictions for the year’s trends, along with hard numbers to back up every prediction you plan to act on.
Here, you’ll find Coherent Path’s top picks for blog posts packed with original research, meaningful stats, and detailed forecasts about the email marketing trends we’ll see in 2019. Before you hit “send” on those meeting invites, give these pieces a quick read.
Marketing Land — Email Marketing Trends to Expect in 2019
It’s no secret that personalization lies at the core of any successful email strategy. This article predicts that 2019 will see a rise in quality over quantity in personalized email content — and we strongly agree. We’ll also see investments in mobile marketing continue to grow, potentially overtaking desktop. Interactive content will become even more widespread than it already is. And a growing number of marketers will turn to loyalty programs as powerful tools for capturing customer insights.
Total Retail — Forecasting 2019: 10 Trends in Retail and E-Commerce
From the rise of chatbots to the growth of influencer marketing, the coming year will see a shift from broad-based channels to more personal ones. Across traditional and emerging channels alike, customers increasingly expect to be treated to experiences that reflect their unique tastes and desires. Email is no exception — in fact, we can expect 2019’s marketing emails to appear less and less like advertisements, and more like individually curated catalogs.
Marketing Land — 4 1/2 Predictions for Marketers in 2019
Even as customer data becomes increasingly integral to all forms of marketing, concerns about privacy continue to intensify — and that means marketers need to stay up to date on regulations like GDPR. On a related note, while automation simplifies campaign planning and execution, marketers must consider each automation solution from their customers’ perspective, and make sure they’re adding value to the experience.
MediaPost — New Year, New Gmail Promotions Tab
Gmail’s new Promotions tab helps personalized emails stand out from the daily barrage of spam. The tab is already active in Gmail’s latest updates on iOS and Android. It bundles the emails most relevant to each customer under convenient headings, and calls attention to compelling features like discount codes and product images. We’re hugely excited about the Promotions tab, because it promises to help brands boost click-through rates on the most accurately personalized emails without the need to invest in any new creative assets.
G2Crowd — 40+ Powerful Email Marketing Statistics You Should Know in 2019
In this article, you’ll find a wealth of well-sourced statistics to back up your case for investment in a tailored email campaign. For example, personalized subject lines generate a 50 percent open rate — much higher than average. Personalized emails also deliver six times more transactions than non-personalized messages. Customers are twice as likely to subscribe to your email list as they are to interact with you on Facebook. The conclusion is clear: personalized emails deliver greater ROI than any other content on any channel.
Forbes — Three Predictions For Email Marketing In 2019
This blog post advocates a “hyper-personalization” approach in which customer insights enable marketers to go beyond segmentation, and tailor email content for each individual subscriber on their list. Video and other interactive content, meanwhile, will become less of a bonus and more of a customer expectation. And as data protection regulations tighten, it’ll be more crucial than ever for marketers to choose automation solutions that keep customers feeling respected and engaged.
Business 2 Community — Top 10 Benefits of Email Marketing
Although email marketing’s effectiveness is well proven by now, it’s equally clear that personalized emails generate far stronger returns than non-personalized ones. This post provides ten concrete recommendations for widening the gap between your tailored email content and your competitors’ spam. By leveraging customer insights to build credibility, authority, and recognition for your brand, you’ll get far more value out of the time and budget you invest, and cultivate relationships that lead to repeatable transactions.
Whether these articles teach you some new tricks, or just validate the predictions you’ve already made, we hope you find them useful. Like you, we’re looking forward to a productive, learning-filled 2019!