On Monday, Sept. 23, a major marketing firm released a survey of marketing professionals across eight different industries.
Across all industries, the marketers surveyed agreed: Email marketing is one of the primary ways firms can draw traffic to their websites and increase sales revenue.
But beyond that, it also highlighted some interested trends developing in email marketing that we thought we’d share with you.
- GIFs are hot: GIFs — an acronym for “graphics interchange format” — are small moving pictures that look a little like very short film clips. Marketers polled in the survey said including GIFs in emails made their intended audience members 54 percent more likely to respond to the message.
- Your audience is mobile: Forty-four percent of messages that get opened are opened on mobile devices. This means when you are generating an email message, it is important to consider how it will look and read on a mobile device as well as on a desktop. It is best to assume that viewers won’t engage with a message they can’t open on their smartphone or tablet.
- Special characters in subject lines get attention:One email marketing analytics firm recently reported its anecdotal observation that including a special character in the subject line of emails resulted in 10 to 15 percent more of the emails being opened. It’s good to make sure you’ve thought about how you’re using a special character before you actually include it — they can add a sense of fun and playfulness, but just like every other tool at a marketer’s disposal, they are not the right fit for every single message.
- Consider using Pinterest: Marketers who responded to the survey said the including a mention of Pinterest in the subject line of an email were opened 11 percent more than other marketing emails that didn’t mention Pinterest. Once inside the message that used “Pinterest” in the subject line, users tended to click links 25 percent more than the average user. Why? One theory is that Pinterest users tend to be very interactive, participatory and engaged.
- Segmentation and Personalization: In the early days of email marketing, it was thought to be acceptable to send out the same email to every single address you had access to. However, it was soon realized that this turned viewers off because it resulted in messages that were uninteresting or inapplicable to large segments of recipients. Today, email marketers are much more able to craft unique messages for certain segments of a potential audience; that ensures information being delivered on your behalf is relevant and potentially actionable for its recipient.
These are just five of the most interesting results we saw in this survey. For further information, you can contact us.
photo credit: JeepersMedia via photopin cc
