As you may already know, we have been running a series on ClickZ all this week about the future of email marketing, featuring case studies, interviews, and insights into cutting-edge innovations taking place in the field.
If this is the first you’ve heard about the series, or if you’ve missed a couple of instalments over the week, not to worry! We’ve put together a handy round-up for you below, with summaries of each article in the series.
Day 1
How Lonely Planet used email to launch its new homepage by Seb Neylan
In this guest article by Seb Neylan, Director of Online Marketing for Lonely Planet, Neylan describes how Lonely Planet used email as a channel to promote the relaunch of the lonelyplanet.com homepage.
He details how the brand used its email messaging to position the homepage as the ‘front door’ to its multi-channel ecosystem, the metrics it tracked, and how the campaign compares to email campaigns to launch new products and communicate with its audience.
Day 2
How artificial intelligence is changing email marketing by Al Roberts
Everybody is talking about artificial intelligence these days, and email marketers are no exception. And given the importance of email to many companies’ businesses, it’s no surprise that artificial intelligence and machine learning are being used to innovate in email.
Al Roberts looks at the various ways in which AI is being applied to email marketing, from multivariate and A/B Testing to predictive prersonalization.
How rich media can bring your emails to life by Clark Boyd
Email as a marketing channel survives and thrives based on new and more inventive ways of sustaining a customer’s attention – otherwise the audience disengages and open rates drop. Developments such as artificial intelligence and automation give us ways of enhancing the way we send (Read more...) but rich media allows us to enhance what’s in them.
Clark Boyd explores the many and varied ways that rich media can bring emails to life, from GIFs and cinemagraphs to embedded social media, and investigates the brands who are using them best.
Day 3
How fashion brand Thread is delivering hyper-personalized emails at scale by Chris Camps
If you haven’t heard of Thread, they are a men’s fashion start-up doing some seriously interesting things with style – and emails. Chris Camps spoke to Tom Banham, Content Editor at Thread, to find out how email powers Thread’s “hyper-personalized” fashion recommendations, delivered straight to users’ inboxes.
From stylist recommendations to fashion tips, Tom explains how personalized emails go hand-in-hand with Thread’s tailored approach to clothing, and how the company manages to scale up its offering to consumers with a tiny workforce.
Do brands still need bulk email software? by Al Roberts
There was a time when companies wanting to effectively make use of email as a marketing channel had to buy bulk email software to send emails to their customers and mailing list subscribers.
But times have changed, and the rise of cloud-based email delivery platforms which offer many of the same benefits of bulk email software has called into question whether we even need it anymore. Al Roberts examines the advantages of cloud-based email delivery platforms, and considers whether there is still a place in email marketing for bulk software.
Day 4
4 ways to make sure your email technology is mobile optimized by Rebecca Sentance
Just as with web browsing and search, consumer habits around email are trending overwhelmingly towards mobile. In 2016, Gmail reported more than 1 billion monthly active users – with 75% of them on mobile devices.
If you want to keep up with the steady trend towards mobile email, your email technology – that is, the tools and service provider you use to send email – needs to be optimized for mobile. But how can you find out whether yours is? I outline four ways to make sure your email technology is mobile optimized, with suggestions for tools to help make your emails great on mobile.
Inbox innovation: The tools and technology powering the future of email by Chris Camps
The high-volume, low-cost nature of email makes it ripe for innovation. But when you really get down to it, what are the most promising innovations currently being pioneered in email marketing?
Chris Camps lists our picks for the technology that will make up the future of email.
Day 5
How these 11 brands are nailing cart abandonment emails by Tereza Litsa
Cart abandonment is a persistent problem for ecommerce brands, with a global average of 76.9%. But one thing can help to turn the tables: the humble cart abandonment email.
Tereza Litsa analyzes 11 brands who have brilliant cart abandonment emails, and looks at what email marketers can take away from their techniques.
Day 6
What does the future hold for email? We asked our readers by Rebecca Sentance
To round off the series, we look at the results of a short survey we sent out to our readers on ClickZ, to find out what they think the future holds for email.
How important is email to marketers’ overall strategy? How firm do they consider their ‘grasp’ on the martech universe to be? Where do marketers see email in five years – and is it at risk of being replaced by instant messaging? Read our write-up to find out the answers to all of these questions.
Related reading
Automation tools are important for marketers trying to improve their productivity. Here’s how to save time and streamline your team’s efforts.
All last week, we here at ClickZ ran a series entitled 'The Future of Email Marketing' in which we took a microscope to the brands, technology and ideas underpinning the future of email. But at the same time, we really wanted to know what our readers at ClickZ thought the future had in store.
Cart abandonment emails, which notify a consumer about a shopping cart with products left in it, can be very effective in improving a brand’s conversion rate. But as with all types of email marketing, you need to get the approach just right in order to have the best chances of success.
The high-volume, low-cost nature of email makes it ripe for innovation. The sheer amount of data email marketers work amplifies the significance of even the smallest improvements. Buzzwords like 'personalization' and 'automation' are among the promised benefits of advanced email tech, and feature heavily in this article.