As part of our annual digital trends, we have collected thoughts on 2015 digital marketing trends from expert leaders and practitioners in their field.
Below are 3 Email Marketing Trends for 2015.
| Paul Ford, VP of Product & Marketing at SendGrid | |
 | With ever-evolving spam traps and increasingly clogged inboxes, we will see an increase in the use of email preference centres in 2015. This is a tool that helps marketers to establish a healthy communication cadence with their subscribers, and provides them with an easy way to manage their email from a centralised portal. Through email preference centres, marketers will be able to reduce unsubscribe requests, complaints and spam reports in their email marketing campaigns, so that they can reach the inbox of their target customers. Marketers will also need to be clever with the content of their email to cut through the noise from competitors, composing personalised emails with short, effective subject lines and relevant promotions. |
| Dela Quist, CEO at Alchemy Worx | |
 | 2014 has been another year of change for the email inbox, but the goal of many marketers still remains the same: send the right content to the right person at the right time. This leads brands to treat email as a singular event, measuring its performance by open, click and purchase rates alone. However, with intelligent automation email can offer much more insight than any other channel and with any luck 2015 will be the year that marketers acknowledge email isn’t just about immediate engagement. In the last year advances and new tools have meant it is now possible to automate content management in ways marketers only ever dreamed of previously. For email this is the last and most difficult part of the process, but will begin to allow marketers to go beyond mere broad segmentation. Without the automation that these new tools allow, true personalisation is an incredible time-intensive and expensive process. So I suppose you could say that 2015 will be the year that we realise the opportunity email offers for hyper-personalisation of marketing. |
| Ohad Hecht, COO at Emarsys | |
 | The biggest challenge facing online-only consumer brands today is customer loyalty. A recent study we conducted found UK consumers give their hearts to just three brands, and an overwhelming majority of those prefer businesses that have a physical outlet. Quite the smack in the face for online-only retailers correct? But there is a light at the end of the tunnel and that light is personalisation, which plays a vital role in building customer loyalty and trust. Genuine customer connections that underpin long-term sales success can prove especially challenging for online-only brands as a sizeable chunk of consumers believe a physical store is still the best place to experience the style and personality of a brand. 42 per cent of the consumers we surveyed stated personalised treatment would keep them coming back. Service advice and recommendations are key influencers of loyalty in person, but brands must personalise to ensure consumers feel valued, understood and treated as individuals. |
