The State of Email Marketing in 2022

American computer engineer Ray Tomlinson sent the first email message (to himself) in 1971. By the early 1990s, we already had a spam problem. In the following three decades email would rise and fall in popularity, as consumers faced increasingly aggressive online advertising campaigns and juggled more and more communication methods. With the advent of social media, some marketing prognosticators even warned of an impending end to the original electronic message. But as we’ve seen: email is not dead. Ninety-nine percent of us check it every day. And that’s why the email marketing market is expected to more than double by 2027. (Fortunately, most of us consider email to be “the most personal channel to receive communications from brands.”)

(More Than) Three Mind-Changing Email Marketing Stats

Not only is email not dead, it generated a 4,200% ROI in 2021. That’s ridiculous. But if it’s not enough to convince you, here are three other reasons four out of five marketers say they’d rather give up social media than email marketing:

1. Email marketing is 400% more effective than Twitter or Facebook at reaching your target audience(s) (McKinsey & Co.)
2. Nearly eight in 10 consumers believe email is the best channel for company contact, preferring it almost twice as much as any other (DMA Consumer Tracker)
3. More than three quarters of all marketers have seen an increase in email engagement over the last 12 months (Hubspot)

In fact, nearly 320-billion emails were sent in 2021, and that number is expected to exceed 333 billion in 2022. As much as that means email’s here to stay, it also means there’s a lot of email marketing competition. To help you outperform your industry, I developed the official Customer Engagement Insider list of email marketing tips for 2022 and beyond.

The Top 10 Email Trends of 2022

Want to know how to do email marketing? In the last decade and a half I’ve developed, iterated and optimized the email marketing strategy of numerous companies, nonprofits and agencies, large and small. I’ve also implemented and overseen dozens of email marketing campaigns — and each one has enhanced my understanding of what works and what doesn’t. In 2022, though, we’re still facing a lingering pandemic and “The Great Resignation,” so for this year’s list of the most important email trends I also relied on what other experts are saying. 

Take this advice, discuss it with your team, and test out the strategies and tactics against what you’ve been doing. (Then, sign up and share your results in the comments below the article.) 

1. Data Privacy, Data Decay, and the Customer Data Platform

Privacy laws are changing, all the time, and we can no longer rely on third parties for collecting our customer data. Also, because of COVID, more people are moving around and re-thinking their priorities than ever before, leaving our data out of date. From what I’ve read, experts are recommending organizations use double opt-ins to protect data quality. Others are urging email marketers to redefine success, and focus more on data collection and aggregation techniques than ‘vanity’ metrics like open rates. 

I suggest you consider investing in a customer data platform, a marketing and CX technology designed to unify your data across all your online and offline sources. 

2. Segmentation and Personalization 

Between March and August 2020, 20% of all consumers switched brands completely and seven in 10 tried new digital shopping channels; the retail sector experienced a decade’s worth of growth in digital penetration in mere months. Nevertheless, for most retailers the surge in data didn’t help them better market to their customers and prospects. Why? Because their DMP or CRM or MMH’s outdated data modeling prevented them from effectively capturing critical shifts in consumer behavior. In turn, this prevented them from better understanding their customers. And today’s customers expect to be understood and appreciated by the brands they shop. They expect to interact with these brands, and personally connect with them. They’re sick and tired of traditional digital advertising and email marketing approaches.

Marketers who send segmented email marketing campaigns experience an up to 760% increase in revenue, but if you don’t know who to target — and when, where and how to target them — you’ll waste a lot of money sending marketing emails that alienate your audience(s). Even if you’ve created personas and communicated correctly to the right consumers, you can expect a lot of unsubscribes, abandoned carts and customer churn if you don’t translate each conversion event into personalized messaging through dynamic segmentation. This is how Netflix and Spotify outpaced their competitors. And with the data collection, unification, profiling and segmentation capabilities of a CDP, you can easily implement, iterate, optimize and glean invaluable insights from your email marketing campaigns.

3. Artificial Intelligence

One way to deliver a personalized, empathic experience to your email marketing recipients is to leverage artificial intelligence, or AI. Of course, it must be done with care; if you misuse or overuse AI, you can create the opposite effect, alienating your customers. To get the benefits, without the risk, start by using AI in your email marketing strategy for predictive analytics, split-testing subject lines, cleaning up your mailing lists and optimizing send times.

4. Omnichannel Marketing

Google has found that 98% of Americans switch between platforms and devices on the same day. This is why marketers who simply use three or more channels in any one campaign deliver a 287% higher purchase rate. Of course, if you optimize how you use these channels, you can experience even better results.

While multichannel marketing allows you to cast your net as wide as possible to reach more consumers and build brand awareness, marketers who commit to omnichannel marketing provide a consistent customer experience across channels — and retain nearly nine of 10 customers (versus 33% for those who don’t)! So what does omnichannel marketing mean?

Ninety percent of all consumers expect consistency in their interactions no matter where they are. Omnichannel marketing represents a rethinking of the customer lifecycle, with a focus on providing a seamless and personalized user experience across all channels relevant to the buyer journey. In other words, email may be alive and well, but it doesn’t stand alone. 

With omnichannel marketing, you don’t send email blasts or even targeted automated messages without first incorporating your email marketing strategy into an overarching 360-degree marketing strategy that integrates all essential channels. And the best way to achieve this is by first gathering, standardizing, validating, deduplicating and consolidating your data from all sources.

5. Empathy Marketing

Today’s consumers want more than consistency, and more than personalization. To be truly customer centric, you must fully embrace the person behind the consumer behavior; to understand your customers, their pain points, and what motivates them to act, you need to see through their eyes. In other words, you have to build trust by demonstrating personal empathy across your website and/or physical location, social media accounts, emails, text messages, digital ads and customer service communications.

Take Hotels.com, for instance. Instead of urging people to travel during the pandemic or scrambling to create new revenue streams, the company encouraged people to stay home. Company leadership knew this approach could cost Hotels.com near-term revenue, but that it would also demonstrate to their customers that the people at Hotels.com actually care about the health and safety of the people who use their services. Although Hotels.com took a risk, nothing eviscerates brand trust like showing all you care about is money.

Another, less risky way to show empathy in marketing is to provide in your emails and other communications what your audience is actually looking for. For many, it’s the opportunity to interact with your brand.

6. Interactivity

Customer engagement is “a proven way to boost your sales,” and delivering interactive experiences across the customer journey is one of the most effective ways to improve engagement. Yet, only 23% of brands have started experimenting with it, and only 32% are planning on trying it soon. This means you can separate yourself from almost everyone else who’s emailing your customers — simply by adding animated GIFs, image rollover effects, gamification elements, polls, surveys, interactive sounds and user-generated content. Gamification alone can help you increase customer interactions by up to 40%.

7. AMP for Email

You know AMP: Google built it in 2015 as an open source technology designed to boost page loading speeds on mobile devices. But did you know Google also released AMP for email? It could increase your engagement and conversions by 500%, by delivering the interactivity that more than half of all email recipients want. With AMP for email, users can take a survey, respond to an invitation, reply to a comment, or zoom in on products. Clickable interfaces allow users to explore your content without ever leaving the email for a landing page. But AMP’s real strength is that it can pull live data into an email, ensuring that each and every recipient will see the most up-to-date information no matter when or how they open your AMP email.

8. User-Generated Content and Social Proof

Buyers today are more selective about the brands they interact with and purchase from — and with consumers 240% more likely to view user-generated content as authentic (compared to content created by brands), now’s the time to invest in a strategy that leverages user-generated content in email marketing and other channels across the buyer journey. 

To get started, scour your social media channels and the world wide web for videos, images, reviews and testimonials featuring your products. Don’t forget TikTok. Don’t forget YouTube. Then, incorporate the best of the best into your AMP emails, social media posts, social commerce channels (like the Instagram Shop) and website (as an interactive element, through an app like TrustPulse). 

Do not, under any circumstances, fabricate your user-generated content; sophisticated consumers will catch you, destroying the valuable trust you’ve built for your brand.

9. Accessibility and Inclusivity

Another way to damage your reputation (with one-billion people worldwide) is to ignore the need for accessibility in your email marketing. By implementing accessibility best practices across all your digital communications, you can ensure your message reaches all your customers (including those with vision impairment) — and everyone is included. You can also stand out among your competitors, since only about half of all companies maintain these practices consistently. 

Here are a few ways to start improving your accessibility today:

• Add header tags (like H1, H2, and H3) to guide readers through the email
• Add alt-text to any image so a screen reader can read the description
• Use only GIFs with an animation flashing rate that is not between 2 Hz to 55 Hz, as this can aggravate photosensitive epilepsy
• Use proper color contrast to make it easier for colorblind people

10. Mobile Optimization

More than 50% of email campaigns are viewed on mobile devices and mobile-optimized emails are 65% more likely to generate clickthroughs to your website; yet, at least 20% of all email campaigns are still sent today without mobile optimization. So, make sure your email marketing provider either automatically optimizes for mobile or allows you to do so. Otherwise, switch providers. The mobile takeover has begun.

Image Credits (in order of appearance)

1. Photo by Joanna Kosinska on Unsplash: https://unsplash.com/photos/uGcDWKN91Fs
2. Photo by Melanie Deziel on Unsplash: https://unsplash.com/photos/U33fHryBYBU
3. Photo by Drew Dizzy Graham on Unsplash: https://unsplash.com/photos/s4dfrh7hdDU
4. Photo by Unsplash+ in collaboration with Getty Images on Unsplash: https://unsplash.com/photos/SU9MbBY0Obs