Who even checks their Gmail promotional tab anymore? A surprising number of people, it turns out. In a time when most consumers are becoming increasingly disillusioned with social media, email marketing is making a comeback.

Email has always been a highly effective way to reach consumers. Compared to social media posts, emails have a higher conversion rate. Customers may not love it, but they do like the personalisation features emails offer.

Brands and businesses are once more looking at email to solve customer engagement and traffic problems that social media once managed to do. Email may be hip again, but there are notable problems facing marketers. Read below for the biggest challenges staring email in the face as it climbs to the top once more:

The Privacy Crisis

The biggest challenge facing modern-day email is of course the data breach scandals. Several prominent privacy scandals have caused consumers to lose their email addresses and associated passwords. The Yahoo breach a while back saw everyone’s emails getting hacked. More recently, a massive data breach affected over 700 million accounts.

These scandals are not the fault of marketing brands, but it’s easy to see why customers might mistrust businesses. For example, handing out email addresses to various companies is usually how hackers get their hands on it. Adobe, for example, collected subscriptions vial free trials and other tactics. But the company was hacked and the emails were stolen.

Email marketers should expect that consumers would be very wary once more to hand out their email addresses to a business. Your company may need to address these privacy concerns first. Ideally, design a privacy policy with a strong focus on rights. Also, show potential customers how your business addresses security concerns to dissuade worries.

Reaching Customers over the Spam Filters

After privacy, the next big challenge is spam. This particular problem has plagued email marketing for some time to come. There’s always a risk that a recipient may mark a marketing message as spam, thus dooming all your emails to get blocked by an insidious filter algorithm.

Spam filters are now highly prevalent, even compared to before. Hacking and phishing attempts are major reasons. However, a great digital marketing agency can still design your business content that will not force users to click spam.

Keeping content as relevant as possible is a great way to avoid being marked as spam. Plus, personalise the content to actually reach consumers with your message. Then there’s no risk of spam.

Why It’s Important to Focus on Personalisation

Spam avoidance is not the only reason to personalise your content. Personalisation is the best way to keep subscribers interested in the content. Plus, personalisation is being hailed as the top tactic to get through to the elusive Gen Z consumers.

Personalised content is highly targeted towards a specific consumer. It builds customer interest and loyalty in return. Personalisation doesn’t just refer to addressing the consumer by name in the email. It also refers to offering personalised recommendations, among other options. Personalisation is the ultimate tool to get to potential consumers in this day and age.

Finding Out What Makes Content Interesting

The content that you email has to be as innovative as possible. It has to be eye-catching enough to keep consumers subscribed. It should also inform customers as well. There are several approaches to find what content is best to include in an email marketing effort. What doesn’t work, on the other hand, is traditional promotional content.

Don’t send bulk emails filled with product links, hawking particular products like a billboard ad. Consumers will be instantly turned off by such content. Instead, focus on the quality of the information you represent. Instead of sending a giant buy-it ad for a product, send a video of how the product is made. Companies can also send gift suggestions to overall improve the content strategy in email marketing.

Get Out of Your Comfort Zone to Succeed

If you want to succeed in an email marketing campaign, be willing to get out of the comfort zone. This may include offering other people’s products in order to retain subscribers. Be willing to experiment and find out what works.

Take for example, Hiut, which was formerly a jeans store chain. When the business went bust, the brand focused instead on becoming a luxury lifestyle label. It succeeded mainly due to an innovative email marketing campaign, which involved sending lists with products from other companies.

Email marketing is making a return. Make the most of it by not falling into old traps.  

 

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