The financial crisis will continue to provide a boost for online marketing. In the search for efficient marketing methods, it stands to reason that there will be a transition from offline to online channels and particularly, to online direct marketing. Not only for internet dealers, email marketing is one of the top marketing strategies. We have traced five trends for you:

Trend 1: Integrated Email Marketing

One of the strongest trends, which became apparent in the course of this year, was the path to a comprehensive integration of email marketing into standard communication procedures. What were mainly independent newsletters and mailings in the past, will increasingly become tasks of automated or trigger-based standard communication procedures via email dialog marketing systems. These tasks include:

  • Order and dispatch confirmations.
  • Status emails for memberships or bonus and loyalty card systems.
  • Reactivation mailings in case of decreasing activity.
  • Reminder emails for appointments and servicing.
  • Automated follow-ups.

The aim is to centrally control all dialog marketing communication with clients, comprehensively analyse it and use it for target-orientated marketing. Cross and upselling offers can therefore be directly integrated and the email communication will be optimised.

Trend 2: Mobile Email Marketing

The mobile internet is growing. Currently, only 10% of emails are received and read on a mobile, but this proportion will increase massively with the expansion of compatible mobile phones. A study of the media research group forecasts even a proportion of 54% in the coming years. With the mobile usership, email marketing requirements are changing. Technical restrictions, such as screen dimensions and HTML display equally require a special adaptation as do type and scope of content.

A special significance in mobile usage will be assigned to RSS feeds. Inherent to its functional principle, RSS facilitates mobile usage. It has become apparent that the proportion of mobile RSS users is growing faster than the proportion of mobile email users.

Trend 3: Legally compliant Email Marketing

One should assume that marketing is always legally flawless. Practical experience however, shows that immense uncertainness and partly negligence exist in the context of data privacy and data usage. Negative headlines and a change to the legal framework have contributed their part. The question of legal certainty of their own marketing is becoming a vital task for many companies. On one hand, to obtain clarity about the current status quo, and on the other hand, to avoid making crucial data unusable due to legally incorrect data usage or technically deficient administration of the permission marketing compliance. With the trend of legal certainty, new cooperation models in particular (see Trend 4) and the classic structure of subscriber lists are gaining significance.

Trend 4: Person-to-person and marketing via intermediaries

After its predestined application in e-commerce, like in the media and publishing sector, email marketing is now becoming a strategic marketing tool in other sectors. However, industries and manufacturers of branded goods, as well as franchises regularly encounter the problem of an intermediary between themselves and the end consumer. Afraid of being targeted by direct marketing, the latter are often sceptical of a direct communication between manufacturer and end consumer. In reality, collaboration offers many advantages. The manufacturer has interesting stories and product information which the dealer would love to use for its direct marketing communication with his customers. A solution could be offered by person-to-person email direct marketing, where data management in a trust centre provides the manufacturer with the option of communication while securing the dealer’s data sovereignty. This model of cooperative communication platforms will become increasingly popular due to the new data privacy regulation, which prohibit the propagation of customer data e.g. to a center without explicit consent).

Trend 5: User Individualisation

Individualisation has always been a main topic in email marketing. However, in most cases, there is a lack of content, knowledge of the subscriber or suitable systems to realise high-performance individualised communication. In the future, it will become the task of intelligent linking with tagged data sources to carry out the automated allocation of the correct information. The compilation according to subscriber interests and motives will be as important as the control of frequency and reception time. Receive frequency and time fundamentally determine the feasible total activity of subscribers and therefore the ROI of the email marketing.