Email stopped being the little brother to advertising more than a decade ago. And in the ten years since, it’s grown up in a big way.
As we covered in our last post (Billions of Emails: 5 Marketing Insights), around 204 billion emails are sent per day on this planet. When you pause to take in the sheer enormity of that number (and the potential customization marketing automation could bring to bear), the future looks very bright.
But the perfect, utopian future email marketers are waiting for might not be a reality until after 2020. While Google is improving the way we interact with email by leaps and bounds (the Promotions tab was a huge win for marketers despite the initial firestorm of fear), there’s still too much competing software and not enough synergy.
So, for now, we just want to know the top changes coming to email marketing in 2015. Based on industry trends and expert analyses, these are 5 predictions:
1. There won’t be so many weird characters
If you use email, you’ve seen what happens when apostrophes go bad. Something that should have been a relic of the early 2000s, these types of crossover glitches are so common that we’ve all gotten used to them. But that’s not how email should be.
Fortunately, a lot of industry experts are predicting that SMTPUTF8 will gain wider adoption globally. This means that a larger set of international characters will be usable in both addresses, headers, and body text. This is a welcome development, as it doesn’t handicap emails to an English-only readership.
SMTPUTF8 still needs an acronym, though…
2. Mobile-first design will be everyone’s priority
The incredible rate at which we switched over from desktop to mobile has transformed all of marketing in the past five years. That includes email marketing, which has seen mobile usage go up from 8% to 48% between 2011 and 2014.
Mobile in 2015 will specifically be dominated by iPhone considerations. Apple’s must-have device accounts for 27% of all email usage and more than half of all mobile usage. Which means that subject lines still have a hard cap of 35 characters, and shorter messages are still way better.
Apple is also changing up Mail on the iPhone to include characters in the from name, subject line, and preheader text. So preheaders will be more important than ever.
3. Personalized, real-time messages coming soon
According to an Econsultancy and Adestra’s Email Marketing Industry Census, 78% of respondents think that all email communication will be personalized in the next 5 years. A bold claim, considering personalized emails are more automated than personalized these days.
But is it improbable? Absolutely not. The mere fact that industry vets all agree on the importance of personalization and real-time delivery is a great sign that email is taking confident strides in the right direction.
Improvements in the field of big data means better data for real-time campaigns and contextual behavior predictions. Supplemented with more sophisticated reporting, email becomes the new gateway for top-of-the-funnel marketing. Not just lead nurturing.
Of course, real-time email marketing won’t hit its stride until the Internet of Things is actually a thing. The massive amount of infrastructural reorganizing that would require means we might not get emails for coffee deals as we pass by Starbucks until 2020-30.
4. Emails are definitely going to be more visual
Aside from the move towards mobile, the shift to visual presentation is undoubtedly going to be the second biggest change to email in 2015. How do we know this? Google.
One of the biggest waves the email world rode out in 2014 was the introduction of Google’s customized tabs. Everyone was afraid that Google’s monkey wrench would cost them untold numbers because customers would just delete everything in their promotions folder. But it turned out that everyone loved having their marketing emails all in a folder where they wouldn’t have to compete with personal emails. Instead of deleting them, people were actually giving them the time of day and selectively reading them.
Emboldened by this development, Google has decided that the next logical step is to make each tab folder a gallery. Because Pinterest.
You’re looking at the beta version of Grid View, a Gmail option that turns your inbox folders into a Pinterest-style wall that pulls select text from marketing emails. While it won’t be for everyone, you can bet your bottom dollar millenials and digital natives are going to like it. Which means that it’s going to hugely affect the way we write emails.
Google is also thinking about changing up Gmail entirely with Google Inbox, a new email product that is better at bundling together emails via automatic user settings.
We don’t know too much about Inbox yet, but the drag-and-drop interface definitely does look easier to use than Gmail. Combined with GridView, it could totally revolutionize email UI and change the way we think about email. At least visually.
5. Email consolidation is still a dream
Sadly, the one thing 2015 won’t do for email is limit our options. CRM and ESP consolidation is not going to happen anytime soon, and we are still faced with a market of competing templates and codes. Companies like Litmus are trying to simplify things for email marketers, but they are quiet, lonely voices in a room full of megaphones.
Right now, the only real option for email consolidation is marketing automation. It’s up to those of us in the industry to really move the needle in the right direction and to better email marketing in the new year.
Email marketing in 2015
What do you think the industry needs to do? Please leave a comment and let us know.
