The future of email marketing: Artificial Intelligence, interactivity, personalisation, and more

Email marketing of the future is exciting and fuelled by innovation, and for business willing to adapt, the opportunities are enormous. Here’s a sneak peek at some of the changes email marketing is set to undergo.

Artificial Intelligence will takeover

Chatbots are essentially artificial intelligence-powered software designed to streamline complex predefined tasks without the need for a human to be involved directly. They’re also revolutionising the way email marketing is being carried out.

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Think of Siri, which is probably the most famous bot of all. Facebook Messenger, with its one billion users worldwide, opened up its chatbot, allowing businesses to interact with their customers in an advanced environment.

Chatbots, with their ability to track individual customer behaviour, can send contextually relevant and personalised messages, helping brands connect with their customers on a more personal level and engaging them the right way, which can ultimately help boost ROI. With more and more customers using multiple digital platforms and wanting information on-the-go, chatbots help brands access data and communicate on various channels quite seamlessly. Bots also provide another crucial assistance to marketers in helping them keep a tab on the key metrics that help in analytics and optimisation and keeping track on changing market trends.

Emails will become shorter and shorter

Smartphones are gradually taking over as the most used device for checking emails. Statistics show that over 65 percent of users first read emails on their mobile devices. Marketers are already taking heed of this trend and refashioning their brand newsletters to fit the need. This means that emails will get shorter and more precise.

A 2016 research showed that the most apt email length in order to gain maximum outcome was between 50 to 125 words. This ‘short and sweet’ approach to emails does well to serve the new-age customers with decreasing attention span, the need for fast consumption of information, and slower internet connections on mobiles as compared to desktops. In fact, emails are even predicted to completely transform into push notifications in the future.

Animation and GIFs will make visual communication exciting

Who said emails are static and boring? Add in a cool animation or Graphics Interchange Format (GIF) and your email immediately comes to life. Future predictions for email marketing show that emails are set to become more fun and interactive with the inclusion of animations. GIFs and animations have been extremely widespread on social media and websites, and emails are now looking to leverage on this popularity as well. Animations are great visual communication tools. They convey a message or story quickly, they capture customers’ attention, and have a high shareable quality. However, it is unlikely that these features will be used solely. Instead, they will be combined with standard email features like texts, links, images, and call-to-action buttons.

Hyper-personalisation will be the need of the hour

Forget personalisation, hyper-personalisation is going to become the most ubiquitous word in the marketing industry. If you’re not tailoring your messages to individual needs, then you’re not getting across to your customers at all. When it comes to emails, people tend to filter out anything that isn’t interesting to them. This way, it becomes very difficult for brands to communicate. Personalising your messages makes a huge difference. The future of email marketing might see customised features such as changing content depending on the time of opening the email.

Machine-to-machine communication will rise

Emails are going through a seismic shift, and in the future, you probably won't even have to worry about opening and sending emails. Experts predict that with the rapidly advancing technology and evolving needs of customers, emails will make a massive switch through increasing machine-to-machine communication. For instance, if a grocery item in your fridge is depleting, then a software in your fridge will immediately be able to update your shopping list on the grocery app on your smartphone. Marketers will need to be extremely tech-savvy while adopting and adapting to newer tools as they come into play.

So, what’s your take on the new-generation email marketing?