According to statistics by McKinsey, marketing strategies and budgets within organizations of all sizes across the world have been hugely impacted by the huge pandemic of 2020.

Apparently, some of the hardest-hit sectors and companies, aside from the ones that were forced to shut down operations because of COVID – 19, would take more than five years to recover.

One thing is clear –marketing plans change in the wink of an eye.

In the same way, the marketing industry as a whole, changes and evolves rapidly with changes in the socio-political and economical segments.

This is why it is important to stay on top of the latest trends in marketing. It helps stay relevant and sometimes it even helps stay in the game.

Email marketing was one of the most affected segments in marketing as a whole. However, it is seemingly making a fast recovery.

At the start of the year, according to Hubspot, email marketing was going through what could have been the last lap. However, since the pandemic hit, and since people turned to more digital channels, email marketing earned a new lease of life, with almost 27% more emails being sent by marketers.

Whether email marketing was about to die in the first place, is definitely something to think of. But the pandemic sure surged a rise in email marketing programs.

“Email Is The New Email” ~ Jordie van Rijn

Why do you need an email automation tool?

Companies the world over are increasingly adopting automation tools for various aspects of email marketing. Some of the best solutions offer intelligent features not only for creating strategic email campaigns but also for effective list building and analytics.

The current generation is needless to say, extremely tech-savvy and more demanding in terms of their needs and interests. On top of everything, social media serves as their voice for anything where they feel the need to be heard. For the same reason, customers have turned more towards digital channels, both social media, and email, which makes it more important for marketers to concentrate on reaching out to customers where they spend the most time.

Studies have revealed that customers use social media to communicate and connect closely with brands, but more than 60% of them prefer being contacted by brands via email. This means that email is the biggest window of opportunity for businesses.

Furthermore, owing to the huge popularity of mobile phones, it goes without saying that customers are spending more time on their mobiles, with a good majority of them using phones to even open and read emails. This necessitates the creation of mobile-optimized content by marketers.

To top it all off, it has become extremely important to analyze numbers and make precise data-driven improvements to stay in business, given the tough situation that entrepreneurs were put through in the last year. Even in an active business world, with competition getting fiercer by the day, it is indeed inevitable for marketers to determine exact metrics and keep pushing limits to stay ahead.

Fortunately, email automation tools serve to be the answer or the solution for all of these concerns.

One of the biggest trends in marketing these days is companies using comprehensive marketing automation tools, with first-class email marketing integrations for enhanced performance. Solutions come equipped with everything needed to provide an overall enriched customer experience. Some of the most effective features they incorporate include email automation tools, social CRM, analytics, customer service help desk, and web optimization.

Companies with larger and more active customer bases are better off using such a holistic and all-encompassing automation tool, as they provide the efficiency of a number of essential solutions, all incorporated into a single platform.

To state an example, Agile CRM is one such efficient and comprehensive automation solution featuring an advanced email automation tool as well. It covers a variety of customer relationship management features including social CRM, social listening, analytics, web engagement and optimization, and contacts management. It offers rich sources to collect customer data and leverage it to gain a competitive edge.

In its email automation tool, Agile CRM offers well-designed capabilities like automated subscriber management and an easy to use drag and drop newsletter campaign builder to help you craft and send effective emails. It integrates with all of your inbound marketing platforms including your website, blog, and social media pages to collect subscriber data and populates a centralized database where you can filter and segment leads to craft suitable campaigns. It also features an array of performance analytics for you to make improvements wherever needed. In addition, it features a unique video email creation tool as well that lets you join in on the most proven effective type of content today – videos.

In short, Agile CRM features everything you need to up your email marketing game in its email automation tool.

Now that we’ve established the fact that email marketing is here to make a big impact, here are 10 of the biggest trends in email automation tools that we can expect to see in the coming years.

Top trends in email automation: How tools are changing over the years

AI incorporation in email marketing automation
AI-based technologies are on the rise everywhere. In email automation tools as well, AI-based features are being developed to leverage the big data boom that is happening because of the Internet of Things and because of intelligent data collection across digital platforms.
Collecting insightful data is no doubt one of the first steps to achieve business success, but it is also important to utilize the data being collected to gain a competitive edge. AI-based features help marketers predict sales and revenue as well as customer behavior with respect to purchasing decisions, putting them on the driver’s seat towards more conversions.

Automation powered email drip campaigns
Automated email drip campaigns are undoubtedly more powerful and effective in reaching out to customers at the right times and striking while the iron is hot. The numbers prove it further – apparently automated emails receive as much as 119% higher click rates than broadcast emails.

Hence, it comes as no surprise that we will be seeing the use of more automated email drip campaigns by businesses with some of the best email automation tools in the market today like Agile CRM.

Automated email list cleaning techniques for higher quality leads
Advanced email list cleaning solutions are increasingly being incorporated with email automation tools in order to create higher quality lead lists to pursue. Companies have come to the realization that it is not enough to merely build a long and growing email list. It is also important to ensure the quality of the leads being captured by different techniques. For several reasons, the email IDs captured by landing pages or opt-in forms may not be accurate or real. Having fake and invalid email IDs in your list can gravely affect your open and click-through rates. Hence it makes sense for companies to adopt list cleaning as well, along with email automation tools.

Interactive emails are the name of the game
As mentioned before, with the advent of social media, it has become easy for customers to get close with their favorite brands and connect with them on a personal level. This makes it important for brands to be more engaging with them, not just through social media but also through email.

For the same reason, more companies are using interactive and attractive elements in their emails in order to gain customer attention and increase click-through rates. Interactive emails are in fact a sure-fire way to increase email engagement rates and establish better customer relationships. At the end of the day, it is not about how long your email list is, but how engaging your content is. And email automation tools like Agile CRM offer interesting elements to keep engagement high.

Ultra-personalization for the win
Advanced email marketing analytics provided by email automation tools help businesses create super-personalized email campaigns that resonate with customers and connect with them. Intelligent analytical software incorporated into automation solutions these days, dig deep into customer behavior and provide the necessary info to distinguish common groups of customers and offer personalized content. Additionally, the segmentation features offered by email automation tools also help group customers and send relevant emails. Suffice it to say, brands are getting ready to use ultra-personalization techniques for their business.

Omnichannel approach for improved lead nurturing
Companies are integrating different platforms in their marketing efforts to adopt an Omnichannel approach for improved lead nurturing. It allows companies to reach out to customers from multiple directions and grab their attention where they give it most. It thus helps marketers effectively target customers in the right ways to achieve the desired outcome.

New-gen email automation tools like Agile CRM facilitate such an Omnichannel approach by providing multiple integrations in a single platform.

Increase in overall investment in email marketing
According to the latest statistics, email marketing generates an ROI of 4200%. In other words, it brings in $42 for every $1 spent in email automation tools, which makes it THE highest generator out of any marketing strategy. Hence, it is no surprise that companies are planning to further increase their overall investment in email marketing over the coming years. From using advanced and holistic email automation tools to the latest email cleaning techniques, the list of technologies that marketers are going to invest in is are growing.

Content is still king
As is the case with any marketing channel, content is always evergreen in email marketing as well. There is nothing that substitutes good content in any channel. Content is always king and the truth remains that no amount of advanced email strategies will perform well unless the content is powerful. Hence companies are investing more in email automation tools that facilitate the easy creation of resonating content.

Steve Cartwright shares some of his winning email content and design tips to set stand out and grab customer attention in this post.

Email Marketing: Content and Design Tips to Set Yourself Apart – – https://t.co/xpeWmvfyZF ##marketing pic.twitter.com/1DzzQmCH1m

— Steve Cartwright (@FX_Digital) December 30, 2020

More focus on privacy
Lastly, email marketing is going to be seeing new and advanced email automation tools focused on improving privacy and data security in order to protect customer information and encrypt confidential data. As intelligent technologies are being used to gather important customer information for marketing purposes, companies have realized that it is also important to preserve the information and prevent it from being misused.

Bottom line

From the above 10 trends that show how email automation tools are changing and evolving over the coming years, it is clear that email marketing as an effective marketing channel is indeed in for the long haul. More advanced technologies are being developed and incorporated into comprehensive solutions to further improve the effectiveness of email marketing. Whether or not the social media surge will continue we don’t know for sure. But email marketing stays supreme.