Email marketing trends of 2019: what Nashville businesses need to know

In 2019, email marketing will continue to focus on personalization, advanced segmentation, and the value of loyalty programs.

Email marketing is still a vital part of any digital marketing strategy. The ability to reach potential or current customers with the right message in their inbox can drive engagement and purchasing behavior unlike any other medium. This is because almost no other marketing platform has the targeting and segmentation options available to email marketers today.

As we discussed in 2018, one of the most important trends of 2019 in email marketing is to continue and personalize your messages to customers. This means going beyond adding merge fields like “first name” and “company name”. Rather, you should use the data that you have in your CRM to create unique messaging based on important demographic information like your client’s job title, location and behavior.

If you aren’t personalizing your email, you are missing out on an amazing opportunity to engage customers with your business in a meaningful way.

What makes personalization possible is advanced segmentation. There are many software platforms on the market that offer sophisticated data collection and segmentation for a reasonable price. You can segment your customers manually if you don’t have the budget for fancy marketing software. However, consider investing in a software solution that allows you to not only segment your audiences using behavioral parameters, but can also automate this process so you can focus on other aspects of your business.

The customer behaviors that are most valuable to your business are the web pages they are visiting on your website, the products they are viewing, how they interact with your social media channels and their previous purchasing behavior. The ability to capture and segment your audience based on this kind of data is a good benchmark for finding a marketing software.

One of the main benefits to focusing on getting quality messages to the right customers at the right time with advanced segmentation and personalization is the ability to build customer loyalty. A loyal customer is worth more of your time and effort than chasing new customers all the time. Focusing on engaging existing clients should be a main focus of your 2019 email marketing efforts.

Many businesses are expanding their loyalty-building efforts by creating loyalty programs backed by email messaging. These emails ask customers for their data in exchange for special deals and offers sent periodically by email. The data you can gather from these loyalty emails will help you with all of your other email marketing efforts. What’s the best time to send emails? What calls-to-action are the most effective? Which promotions generate the most purchase activity?

By using your loyalty program as a testing ground, you build a loyal client base while developing best practices for your other 2019 email marketing efforts.

Email marketing in 2019 doesn’t look all that different from 2018. If your business can expand on these tactics, you will be able to make this the best email marketing year ever.