Amid the hustle and bustle of the holiday season , marketers may have forgotten the fact that there’s a whole new year ahead of them for which they ought to strategize sooner rather than later.
January is almost halfway gone, with the rest of 2015 stretching out beyond it. However, if you still don’t know how you’re going to optimize your email marketing strategy to pique recipients’ interest, boost click rates and ultimately benefit your bottom line, it’s not too late to get up to speed on this and other email marketing trends in 2015 that are projected to impact the medium this year.
Marketing Trends: Breaking down silos
In our previous article, we took a look at personalization and how big data technology has enabled small and medium-sized businesses to segment their audiences and cultivate a deeper connection based on the premise of treating consumers as individuals with unique interests and preferences. Now we’re turning the focus to integration across channels and acknowledging that while email was once considered to be the isolated old guard of online marketing strategies, this is no longer the case.
“Years ago, email was a unique marketing channel that essentially existed in a silo,” wrote Business News Daily’s Nicole Fallon in an article for the news source. “However, as more and more communication channels have opened up … marketers now need to approach email as their consumers do – as part of an omnichannel marketing strategy.”
Full integration within a few years
Among the more than 1,100 email marketers who took part in Econsultancy’s eighth annual Email Marketing Industry Census earlier this year, 85 percent stated that they believed email would become fully integrated with other marketing channels within five years. That being said, respondents were divided on exactly how this would come about. Nearly half (46 percent) either “strongly agreed” or “somewhat agreed” that there would be a single marketing technology platform encompassing all channels including email, while 30 percent either “strongly disagreed” or “somewhat disagreed” and the remainder were neutral.
What steps has your small business taken to sync email with other outreach channels? Do you agree with the prediction that the medium will achieve full omnichannel integration within five years? What other email marketing trends in 2015 are you strategizing for?
