Email Marketing Trends to Watch in 2020

Email marketing will grow in importance because the social media landscape changes
Trust in social media companies is declining. Sail thru found nearly half all consumers decide to delete a minimum of one social media account within the next year and 40% of individuals claim to possess deleted a social media account in 2017 because they didn’t trust the platform with their personal information.

While social media isn't likely to disappear, marketers are realizing that depending too heavily on social media is risky. Social media managers learned the hard way that organic reach was a setting facebook could easily tweak when Facebook tried to monetize in 2012 and organic reach plummeted. Between 2012 and 2014, “organic” reach dropped from 16% right down to 6% and for giant pages with 500,000 likes, organic reach hit as low as 2%.
You can still pay to succeed in people, but AdStage found Facebook’s CPMs (cost per thousand ad impressions) increased 90% year-over-year from 2018 to 2019. few sustainable rate of inflation for marketing budgets and this trend that has continued for the last several years.
Email has consistently remained the highest channel that buyers prefer when receiving offers from brands. Additionally, as an inventory size grows, the value to succeed in your subscribers doesn't increase significantly. due to this we expect to ascertain companies invest more heavily in building their own databases of emails and enhancing their email programs in 2020.


Broader use of AI/Predictive email marketing

 

2018 and 2019 were both predicted to ascertain massive growth within the use of AI and machine learning technologies. While AI hasn’t always landed needless to say , it's taken on a greater role in marketers day to day lives in 2019 and this is often likely to continue in 2020.
Predictive analytics is making micro segmentation cheaper and fewer labor-intensive and dynamic, real-time personalization has become more accessible for little marketing teams. Marketers are writing higher converting emails and subject lines guided by AI and machine learning helps marketers better time emails. additionally , predictive email marketing can also help marketers reduce churn by identifying which contacts are presumably to unsubscribe.

AI brings smarter spam filters

As we predicted last year, email service providers are increasingly using AI to fight spam. Google announced in early 2019 that that they had incorporated Tensorflow into their spam filter, allowing them to dam a further 100 million spam messages per day.
From Google: “it also helps us personalize our spam protections to every user—what one person considers spam another person might consider a crucial message (think newsletter subscriptions or regular email notifications from an application).”
In 2020, it'll be harder than ever for senders to land within the inbox if they don’t follow best practices or their emails constantly go unread.

The rise of BIMI
BIMI stands for Brand Indicators for Message Identification and may be a newly created sort of email authentication that we believe will become far more commonly utilized in 2020.
It would appear to be improved deliverability alone should be an honest enough reason for marketers to authenticate their emails. But this is often often not the case. Existing email authentication protocols, DKIM, SPF and DMARC, are mostly invisible to subscribers and lots of marketers neglect to implement them.
BIMI ties deliverability to brand recognition by making your logo visible within the inbox in supported inboxes if your emails are authenticated. this provides marketers a robust incentive to authenticate their emails because authentication is now tied to brand impressions within the inbox.
While currently only Yahoo supports BIMI, Google has announced it'll soon support BIMI and other inbox providers are expected to imitate .

Less volume/higher quality

SendGrid found marketers across virtually all industries sent less email in 2017 than in 2016. In 2017, the sole industry that sent more email than in 2016 was online dating, and in contrast to most other industries, dating websites saw email engagement decline in 2017.
We expect this trend of marketers sending less frequent but more targeted email to continue. As spam filters get smarter and marketers struggle with deliverability issues, the sole solution are going to be to maximize email relevance to extend engagement.

Brands will think more holistically about touch points

 

Making sure your audience stays engaged is vital to improving deliverability. As marketers attempt to maximize engagement, they're going to be forced to optimize timing not only of individual emails but of collective efforts. B2B account-based marketers have taken this approach for an extended time.
Automation has made logging touch points across platforms and company divisions more scalable, and that we expect to ascertain more companies adopting a worldwide approach to logging email touches in 2020.

 

Continued tension between personalization and privacy

Consumers are getting distrustful of huge data aggregators. A survey of 2000 consumers conducted by Sailthru found 60% of consumers feel uncomfortable with brands buying and selling their data. 60% also believe the U.S. government should regulate how companies use consumer data. Governments are responding and 2018 saw GDPR become in Europe and therefore the passage of broad privacy regulations within the state of California. Regulations are likely to only get more stringent in 2020.
At an equivalent time, consumers have come to expect a particular level of personalization in branded communications and even web experience. 33% of consumers say companies recommending products that don’t match their interests may be a main reason they unsubscribe.
Machine learning and AI are playing an ever greater role in marketing which seems unlikely to vary . The Gartner 2018-19 CMO Spend Survey found martech spending, at 29%, is now larger than human labor costs at the most companies.
So what is the takeaway?
Consumers are becoming savvier. they need to understand how their data is getting used and need it utilized in ways in which benefit them, not exploit them.

Dark Mode

Whatever your thoughts on dark mode, one thing is surely , it's here, and it isn’t only for nerds anymore. With Apple’s introduction of dark mode to OSX then IOS in 2019, dark mode is now an option for both mac and PC users.
How email clients treat emails in dark mode varies across platforms. This presents a further hurdle for email marketers who want to make sure their content renders well for all of their subscribers.
Consumers aren't very forgiving to brands whose emails display poorly, so taking time to check and consider how your emails will display in dark mode across various devices are going to be key in 2020. If you are looking for a few guidelines, Litmus put together a superb guide designing emails for dark mode that’s worth a glance .

Email format polarization

Interactive emails are “trending” for the previous couple of years because the next big thing in email. At an equivalent time, there’s been ongoing debate between marketers who swear by the plain text email, and corporations pushing image rich templates.
Interactive elements, when done right, can greatly enhance user experience and make it easier for marketers to showcase products and at an equivalent time gather data. That said, a study by HubSpot in 2015 found that while consumers SAY they like image rich emails, the numbers don’t bear that out. There’s also reason to worry that the more coded elements an email has, the more likely email service providers are to label it as promotional or spam.
In 2020, we expect to ascertain this polarization widen as marketers experiment with both simpler, and more code rich email formats while trying to balance deliverability with user experience.