Email Marketing Trends to Watch Out For in 2022

Coming from a year plagued with a pandemic, we can all agree that the world put a lot of pressure on 2021, hoping that this year will be better. Thankfully for most, 2021 is a better year than 2020. Even in eCommerce, 2021 has been more successful than last year, although, this year brought with it some new challenges for digital marketing. Starting with data privacy laws and updates, digital marketers have had to make some adjustments to navigate new data privacy limitations. We can expect 2022 to expand on these challenges. Hence, marketers should start preparing for the trends that will impact their marketing efforts next year. In this article, we will talk about five trends that will impact email marketing next year.

The Effect of Data Privacy on Email Marketing

In the last few years, there has been many stories about data privacy in the news. Whether it be a new government regulation or a technological update. It should not come as a surprise now that it has become more challenging for marketers to collect user data. Apple’s recent iOS 15 update comes with mail privacy protection features that will no doubt impact email marketing in 2022. We might see other companies release new features and updates that will further increase data privacy across platforms in 2022.

Although these changes will affect all digital marketers, email marketing is different from other types of digital marketing. Email marketing is the oldest of all digital marketing methods still used today. Hence, email marketers may not have to struggle with as many challenges as other digital marketers. But it’s good to start preparing for a more challenging data privacy scene, even with email marketing.

Increased Focus on Personalization

One of the reasons digital marketers collect third-party consumer data is to use the data to create personalized campaigns. Marketers use third-party consumer data to create targeted campaigns based on demographics, consumer behavior, shopping history, etc. Data that customers willingly give you is considered 1st-party-data.

But now marketers will find it difficult to access and collect any more consumer data. It will slowly become harder to create such targeted campaigns. However, most of them will start capitalizing on the third-party data they already have. Email marketers will have to work with the consumer data they already have, particularly focusing more on segmentation and personalization. Keep the consumer data you have now safe, you can use it to create targeted and personalized campaigns in 2022.

Increased Focus on Performance Marketing

One of the metrics email marketers use to measure the success of their email campaigns is the open rate metric. Open rate metric only tells them how many people open the email. Over the years, the open rate metric has proven inadequate for getting more robust insight into how recipients respond to email campaigns. Open rate only shows the number of recipients who opened the email, it doesn’t tell whether recipients read the email content or engaged the call to action (CTA).

Now, with data privacy updates that restrict their access to mail user data, email marketers may soon abandon the open rate metric altogether. Instead, email marketers will focus on performance metrics such as click-through rates and response to the calls to action (CTAs) in their email campaigns. We will also see a rise in the attention email marketers give to the conversions and sales generated from email campaigns.

Optimizing Email Marketing With Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Although the world has not delivered highly functional AI inventions like movies show us, the last decade has given the world impressive AI inventions. We can now leverage AI to enhance different operations in different sectors. In eCommerce, we now have AI tools that can automatically write or rewrite content for marketing, leveraging on the performance data you supply the tools. Next year, we will see more email marketers using such tools to write email subject lines, content, and CTAs faster.

The limitation with AI right now is that it cannot work alone or create content from the scratch. As an email marketer, you still must supply AI tools with the necessary data that they can build on to create similar content. You can expect that AI will be faster than humans manually writing content every time.

Interactivity Within Emails

As a marketer, one key element that can help you generate better results is the element of simplicity. Creating marketing campaigns that will not inconvenience your target audience. Many email marketing campaigns typically require the recipients to click and leave the email page to a website, app, or a social media platform. While this is not a bad thing, many recipients will find it stressful and will avoid doing so. Unless they are convinced they need or are interested in what the email campaign has to offer. Email marketers are shifting towards interactive emails rather than those that steer you away from the email.

In 2022, we will see different types of engaging interactivity within the email content, such as surveys, forms, polls, etc. Not only does this reduce inconvenience for the recipients, but it also increases your chance of generating more engagement and conversions from your email campaigns. Since the email content will have fewer steps, email campaigns that prioritize interactivity will be more user-friendly than email campaigns that don’t. Additionally, these email campaigns will also be more mobile-friendly than email campaigns that don’t prioritize interactivity.

Bottom Line

We have come to the end of the year, and what a thrilling year 2021 has been. Now, as we end the year, it’s time to start preparing for a new year with new trends!