Top 5 Trends for Email Marketing in 2019

Author: Gautam Mane

If you have been involved in email marketing for years, and feel that there are no newer aspects to cover, then you have another thing coming. Prepare to get surprised by our list of 5 hot trends of 2019 and beyond.

The first email was sent out in 1971. That is known to most students of the history of digital marketing. But the surprising thing is that it took just 7 years for the first recorded instance of Email Marketing to take place. Digital Equipment Corp was the company involved, and they sent out a few hundred emails to intended recipients.

Since it is more than four decades since that event, one would have thought that the learning curve for Email Marketing would have been well and truly covered by now. But surprisingly, that is not the case at all. Every year of those 40 decades has seen some or the other sharpening of digital marketing and Email Marketing strategies. The year 2019 has been no different. These Email Marketing Trends will define and change the way B2B Marketers use emails for promotion and marketing in the coming years.

1. Predictive Automation

Over the last few years, a lot of automation has been introduced in email campaigns. This includes trigger-based email dispatch, which could be on the basis of birthdays, purchases, website visits or any other event that the marketer wishes to use as a trigger. But today’s Email Marketing Trends dictate that emails will be crafted on the basis of the prediction of which business wishes to buy what.

2. Account-Based Targeting

This concept is similar to Account Based Marketing that is all the rage in B2B marketing for the last several years. What it means is that emails will not always be sent to thousands of email ids on a list. Rather, specially crafted personalized emails would be used to communicate with the highest value accounts.

3. Privacy

We saw recently how the GDPR regulations played havoc with email lists and also email content of digital marketers. This is just a forerunner of things to come. The entire design of any email marketing campaign will begin from the privacy of the recipient, and how the messaging can be crafted without impinging on privacy norms.

4. Data

A decade back, data still was at the centre of any email marketing campaign. But that data primarily consisted of a slew of demographic data, and of course the email id of the recipient. But in 2019, data would mean that the digital marketer would know a lot about the recipient of the mail, and design the content accordingly. This also ties in with the first trend mentioned above – that of predictive automation.

5. Personalization

We hinted at this trend a bit in the second trend above. The trend we see taking centre stage is that the business owner will go very deep and try to get relevant information about the company that the communication is being directed at. The next level of personalization will include drilling down into specific activities of the target organization, and tying that to the value proposition being offered.