2016 Email Marketing Resolutions: Start the Year Right

With so many of our potential customers focusing on cleaning their inbox and reaching the coveted status of ‘Inbox-Zero’, this year, we need to focus on better ways to engage them throughout the sales funnel. With this in mind, advanced marketing automation, responsive design, and behavioral segmentation are all examples of elements that are poised to help both freelancers and companies conquer their 2016 email resolutions. Let’s take a closer look at each one within the context of emails below:

2016 is going to be a big year for email marketing automation providers. From being able to send automatic follow-up emails at specific intervals, to ensuring that your emails are in sync with your current CRM software, individual, manual-tasks are slowly becoming obsolete. To truly stay competitive and on top of your email marketing quotas, advanced marketing automation providers should be considered in order to elevate your ability to reach potential buyers, from the initial point of contact to specifically-timed follow-ups.

Some leading providers such as Hubspot and Marketo have paved the way for others to enter this space. Of course, marketing automation on its own, is insufficient. To truly drive engagement and court leads in the most effective manner, marketing automation adopters will need to combine efforts with data-based emails, highly-relevant and targeted content, as well as appropriate design and strategy.

Responsive Design

If your email fails to look attractive or appear accurately on someone’s smartphone or tablet, you are not really ready for the new year, especially when you consider that over 50% of emails are opened from mobile devices. Thankfully, there are different tools that are user-friendly enough to ensure that your email will look great across different devices, helping you reduce the probability that your email will be overlooked or automatically deleted.

 Try GetResponse’s responsive email design feature to play around with the layout and follow this up by A/B testing the design to see if any iterations are needed. Of course, any email you send should be tracked to see whether or not it impacted your overall open and click-through rates. Basically, responsive design strategies should become inherent parts of your overall email marketing strategy if you are set on conquering 2016.

 Behavioral Segmentation

Regardless of how great your email content is and how well designed it appears across devices both small and large, if your email won’t be seen by the appropriate end user/target, you are essentially working hard with no visible finish line. In order to deliver targeted and relevant emails to potential leads, you must understand the buying profiles of your intended audience. Using behavioral segmentation is a great place to start in order to be able to better reach out to certain prospects based on their buying tendencies, including understanding what stage they are in in the sales funnel. 

Some tools to help you ease into this process include Beampulse and Optimove. Test out their product offering to see how they can integrate into your existing email marketing strategy.

Time to Wrap Up

The world of email marketing has changed tremendously over the years. If once, the focus was placed on actually making sure you could send a specific email to a list of users, today’s email marketers are measured according to their ability to distribute well written, well-designed, and highly targeted content to potential and current customers. 2016 will be an exciting year for the email marketing world – here’s to impressive engagement measures and lower bounce rates!