You send emails and keep track of the statistics. But every once in a while you ask yourself: do I still do the right things? Email marketing is developing rapidly. AI is changing how you personalize, recipients place higher demands on relevance, and email is increasingly being combined with other channels. After this article, you will know which email marketing trends really matter and what you can do with it tomorrow.
Why Email Marketing Continues to Grow
Email is the only marketing channel that you own. No algorithm that determines how many people see your message and no platform that suddenly reduces your reach. Your list is yours. That makes email structurally valuable, regardless of whatever social media trend is going on.
In addition, the ROI, whichever you earn from what you invest, is structurally higher than that of most other channels. More than 11,000 companies in the Nigeria actively work with email marketing software via BROWNMAILER. That number is growing, not because it's hip, but because it works.
Personalization goes beyond a first name
The time you addressed someone with “Hi, [first name]” and called that personalization is over. Recipients expect you to know what interests them, when they are active and what phase of their customer journey they are in, according to the imaginary step-by-step plan from discovery to first purchase and which communication therefore fits which phase.
Good personalization starts with the data you collect. Think about which pages someone visited, what emails they opened earlier and what they bought. With profile enrichment and segmentation, you add that information to your contact profiles and use it to divide your target audience into groups that fit together. For example, you send a different email to a contact that has visited your price page three times than to someone who has never clicked.
Do you want to get started with your first newsletter or improve your existing approach? See how to create a good newsletter.
Email marketing, AI and smarter segmentation
AI is not a substitute for your marketing brain, but it makes you faster. Within the current email marketing trends, you can see AI popping up more and more in two places: when writing content and when smartly organizing your contacts.
With Active Intelligence, the AI layer of BROWNMAILER, you generate email templates, write better subject lines, and get suggestions for texts that convert. You keep control, but you no longer have to start with a white screen. At the same time, AI helps you to segment your mailing list smarter based on behavioral patterns that you might not see directly yourself.
Have you never worked with AI in your email strategy? Don't panic. The functionalities are built in such a way that you can pick them up step by step.
Automation as standard, not as an exception
One of the most notable email marketing trends is that marketing automation is no longer something for large companies with large budgets. Small and medium-sized entrepreneurs use automation as a standard part of their approach.
What do we mean by automation? An automation represents an automatic set of mailings or a process: You set a trigger, for example: someone fills out a form or visits your price page. There you link an action: a follow-up email, a tag, a task for your sales team. Set up once, then it runs on its own.
The fact that automations can yield a lot shows the following result: VA school saved 300 hours and $16,500 per year by automating its onboarding process. That’s no exception, that’s what good automation delivers once you have it right.
More channels, one strategy
Email is increasingly working with other channels. SMS has an average opening rate of 95% and approximately 93% of recipients read the message within five minutes. WhatsApp has an open rate of 90%. Those are numbers that no other channel achieves.
The trend is not that email is being replaced, but that it is being supplemented. A reminder via SMS for a webinar for which someone has signed up via email. A WhatsApp message as a follow-up to a quote. Both are available as add-on within BROWNMAILER, so you can link them to your existing email flows.
List structure remains the basis
All email marketing trends stand or fall with the quality of your mailing list. A growing list of people who are actually interested in what you have to offer is worth more than a large list full of contacts that never open.
Do you want to know how to grow your mailing list in a way that also works in the long term? Think of forms that are directly linked to an automation, to giveaways that exactly match what your target group is looking for and to segmentation that makes your list immediately meaningful. This way you build not only on reach, but on a list that works for you.
What does this mean for your approach?
Email marketing trends like AI, automation and multichannel are not loose developments. They're connected. You personalize better when you know more about your contacts. You'll automate better if your list is well segmented. And you achieve more when you combine email with the channels where your contacts are already active.
Wondering what this looks like in practice? Start your free trial account and try out BROWNMAILER for 14 days. No payment information required, because this stops automatically.