9 out of 10 marketers believe mail is the most important marketing channel. Check out the latest email marketing trends to stay on top of your small business email marketing.

“Nobody opens emails anymore” — no, ma’am. I’m afraid you simply aren’t doing email marketing right. On average, every dollar you spend on email marketing returns $42. The question of whether email marketing is worth the money is a no-brainer. And if you don’t find your emails working, you have an ineffective email marketing strategy.

Therefore, educate yourself on the latest email marketing trends first before deleting your Mailchimp account. With 90% of SMBs treating email marketing as their primary method to stay in touch with their audience, you cannot afford not to invest in effective email marketing strategies.

Email Marketing Best Practices 2022

Why reinvent the wheels when you can stand on a giant’s shoulder and look thousands of miles further than those who don’t? Email marketing best practices change each year base on changes in email clients, privacy policies, user habits, and market fluctuation. As we walk into the last quarter of 2022, now is a great time to review some email marketing best practices 2022 has presented us.

Content Personalization

Personalization remains on top of any marketer’s priority list. However, hyperpigmentation is a thing of the past. Instead, invest in a smart email marketing platform to create dynamic emails that automatically apply personalization rules to create dynamic emails based on your segmentation.

Elements of email content personalization include

• Subject line: personalize the subject line to create establish a direct connection the moment your email lands in a subscriber’s mailbox

• Email copy: Create dynamic personalization rules and adapt your email copy to the subscriber’s customer journey

• Recommended product and services: Change the product and services recommended in your email based on the subscriber’s activity and information.

• Graphics: similarly, you should change the images based on the subscriber group’s preference. For example, an email for back-to-school offers sent to parents should have different images versus an end-of-summer promotion email.

Account-Based Marketing in Email

Hypersegmentation is a story of the past. Instead of endlessly segmenting your subscriber list, identify high-value key accounts and build an ABM strategy.

Compared to traditional email marketing strategies, an ABM approach is perfect for larger enterprise clients with multiple decision-makers because it allows you to create a comprehensive email marketing campaign capturing stakeholders of your target account throughout your entire funnel with unique content.

Essentially, ABM emails are not about personalization. Instead, you create each email in the ABM campaign separately based on the key account you want to tackle.

Customer Appreciation is Key

Customers tend to develop a stronger emotional connection with businesses that acknowledges them as individuals. According to Experian, birthday emails with product recommendations or a special offer generate roughly 342% more revenue than a regular promotional email. For service-based companies, feel free to offer a gift card, a trial opportunity, or exclusive service access to existing customers and subscribers to generate new interest while making customers feel appreciated.

Omnichannel Marketing Approach

Many marketers are branching out of running simple email marketing campaigns but instead looking into an integrative approach leveraging email, SMS, and geo-fenced direct mail combined with media buying. Omnichannel marketing maximizes your email marketing ROI by ensuring the consumers receive your messaging one way or another without relying on one single channel to deliver results.

Make Reading Your Email Fun

Just because you’ve got a lot to say doesn’t mean your subscribers want to scroll through a screenful of text. It’s 2022 — make email-reading an engaging experience if you want to keep that open and click rate up! Some ways to make your email fun are

• Use gifs instead of static images

• Embed various videos, such as short product demo, personalized messages, or a BTS reel.

• Gamification

• Countdown timers

• Quizzes and Surveys

• Interactive signatures

However, remember to maintain a good balance between fun and real value so that engagement can turn into acquisition.

Align With Latest Trends

Stay on top of your industry trends and implement them into your small business email marketing strategy, because your audience is catching up with the news too. There is no better way to generate interest than talking about something your audience is excited about. This can be a new technology, a major industry update, or even news from a competitor, depending on your business type.

Email Automation

The workload behind effective email marketing has exploded exponentially since consumers continue to become more demanding with email personalization. Therefore, today’s email marketers must invest in smart email automation platforms that integrates with other marketing channels and their backend systems to integrate email marketing into their comprehensive workflow. Although we use the term “email automation,” our end goal is to automate our lead acquisition process related to email marketing.

For example, today’s email marketers often create a workflow with timed delays and conditional activities based on the recipient’s behavior. Did your recipient click on a specific link? Or did they simply open the email? Diversifying the responses sent under each circumstance allows you to engage your subscribers at the right time in the most appropriate way.

Email Privacy & Email Security

Privacy and security remain significant in your consumers’ world. Therefore, be sure your email contains everything needed to protect your subscriber’s data and privacy. Still sending new product information to a list subscribed to a different offer? Stop that. Sure, you probably won’t be fined for privacy violations as a small business, but your subscribers will hate you, delete you, or block you for sending information they never signed up for! I get it you want to promote your new product, but promoting it to the wrong subscriber segment does you more harm than good.

On the other hand, make sure to send your email through a secure email marketing platform, such as Hubspot, Klaviyo, or Mailchimp.

Email Accessibility

Pay attention to email accessibility to provide your subscribers with a seamless, friendly, and inclusive experience. Here are a few email accessibility best practices you should follow

• Use descriptive subject lines and summary instead of a general “deals inside!” or “Hello, [first name]“

• Use responsive design to enhance user experience across devices

• Create an HTML version and a plain text version of each email

• Write your image alt descriptions based on the image’s content

• Don’t overuse emojis!

• Check your typeface, font sizes, white space, and text spacing

• Don’t rely too much on color to emphasize key content

Dark Mode in Emails

Dark modes have become more popular among consumers after years of development. As of 2022, 82.7% of users choose dark mode over light mode for their OS, whereas 64.6% of people expect websites to apply dark mode automatically. Therefore, email marketers must design for dark mode if they want to increase their subscriber’s email-reading experience to drive conversion.

Optimize for Mobile Devices

Hand-in-hand with dark-mode design is mobile optimization. Four out of ten (40%) emails are opened via a mobile application (Statista), whereas mobile emails have a 65% higher likelihood of bringing customers to your website (OuterBoxDesign).

Start with responsive design. The last thing you want is losing information on the mobile end. Then, optimize your images for mobile display and compress them to reduce email loading time. When designing for the mobile, test across multiple devices and systems for the best results.

Real World Visuals vs. Stock Images

Creating graphic assets has always been a major challenge for small and medium-sized businesses. However, it turns out audiences prefer real-world photos over stock images, even if we’re talking about pictures you take with your phone while walking your dog. While stock images might look pretty, they do not speak about who you are and what your brand is about.

Meanwhile, think of how many times you’ve seen a stock image used a thousand times by some random business and thought to yourself: can’t they at least choose a different one? Don’t be one of those people.

Winning Email Marketing in 2022 and Beyond

Email marketing will remain a core digital marketing piece for B2B and B2C businesses, and the only way to stay ahead of the game is by catching up with the latest email marketing trends proven effective as we move into the last quarter of 2022. Create personalized content for each segment of subscribers, and develop comprehensive ABM campaigns leveraging omnichannel marketing for key accounts. Meanwhile, design your email for dark mode with accessibility and responsiveness in the mind. Finally, don’t forget to always ask for consent and protect your subscriber’s information, privacy, and security.