Wondering which marketing automation trends will have a strong bearing on email this coming year? Read to find out...
As more and more brands attempt to vie for the attention of your customers, existing and prospective, with each new turn of the clock, it becomes all the more important for you to strengthen the relationship you share with your patrons. One of the most efficient ways of accomplishing this lofty objective is to leverage email marketing automation. Sending hyper-personalized messages to your subscribers that correspond to their interactions and behaviors and which are crafted from the data they have shared with you (and also information that you mine from their interactions, with their consent)- email marketing automation offers you a surefire way of boosting your engagement rates.
But the landscape of marketing automation is constantly evolving, meaning you must always stay abreast of the latest trends to prevent your strategies from losing sheen. And so, as we prepare to set foot in 2024, are you wondering which marketing automation trends will have a strong bearing on email this coming year? This is precisely what we look to answer in this blog today. Dive in and find out!
1. Prioritizing Omnichannel Marketing
Gone are the days when businesses used to interact with their customers only via a single channel. Today, not only do multiple communication channels exist, but each of them also boasts a sizable user base. This has made it a must for businesses to set up shop across all of them or risk falling behind the eight ball. And while you’re doing so, it is just as vital that you look to dismantle the silos between these channels (the aim is to meet your customers wherever they are and attend promptly to their needs and grievances) and strive continuously toward delivering a personalized and unified experience to your customers.
This is possible only if you practice omnichannel marketing. Juggling multiple interactions across multiple channels, however, can get incredibly overwhelming, especially if attended to manually (if your business has both physical and online stores, you can imagine how full your plate is going to be). Hence, to ensure the success of your omnichannel marketing efforts, you must leverage automation.
2. Putting Social Media Marketing On Autopilot
At present, there exist more than 4.95 billion social media users across the globe. So, one can’t simply afford to look past social media marketing anymore. In fact, for quite some time now, businesses have looked to integrate social media and email marketing to benefit from the ocean of possibilities that would result from the same. Uploading contacts from your email list to your social networks, leveraging your social media accounts to grow your mailing list, repurposing your email content into social media posts (and vice versa), promoting your social media handles on your emails (yes, that’s why adding social media buttons to the email footer has pretty much become a standard practice now), facilitate the sharing of your emails on social media channels- these are some of the ways one can go about it.
Now, both email and social media entail a lot of operations. And while brands have now become adept at optimizing their email marketing efforts with the help of automation, it is time they do the same for their social marketing endeavors as well. From scheduling posts in advance to gathering data efficiently for performance measurement, social media automation, much like email marketing automation, will save you valuable time and resources, drastically reduce your error rates, and increase your ROI.
Here are a few social media automation tools you can consider adding to your arsenal.
HootSuite
Buffer
ContentStudio
Scoop.it
Buzzsumo
CoSchedule
email automation workflow
3. Introducing Generative AI To The Fold
If 2023 saw AI making inroads into the day-to-day operations of virtually every industry out there, 2024 will see AI casting an even wider net. Particularly generative AI- the likes of ChatGPT, Bard (by Google), and Copy.ai- is going to disrupt the field of email marketing increasingly. As we speak, email think tanks are continuously evaluating the prospects of AI-driven copywriting.
AI tools help you produce large volumes of content in the blink of an eye. Whether you need a crisp ad copy or a detailed blog post, with the right brief, you can have generative AI fulfill your requirements in an instant. Especially in content creation endeavors that involve some sort of repetition, generative AI can prove to be an absolute lifesaver- rather than manually drafting each and every draft as you would have to do previously, now all you have to do is curate a master content template and subsequently generate multiple drafts from it with the help of AI as per your requirements; quite convenient, you’d agree?
With generative AI, you stand to improve your productivity by leaps and bounds. The greatest impediment to a writer’s productivity is, no doubt, the writer’s block. No matter how sorted you are in your ways, on some days, much to your chagrin, words will simply prove to be elusive to you. While infrequent in occurrence, there’s no downplaying the sheer anxiety and stress that writer’s block can cause. However, all of it stands to become a thing of the past thanks to AI. Now, even if you have an extremely vague idea or notion swirling around in your head, you can feed it to a generative AI tool and have it yield something around it for you. Then, you can use this rough draft to get your own creative juices flowing; isn’t that nifty! For this reason, these tools are being dubbed as the best assistants a writer could possibly ask for. Whether it is helping you get out of a creative rut or further amplifying your flow, generative AI promises to take your content creation efforts to the next level.
AI empowers small and medium businesses operating with a small content team and limited budget to go toe to toe with some of the most established players in their domain. By deploying generative AI tools in tandem with their existing content personnel, such businesses can scale up their content marketing efforts without stretching themselves thin or burning a hole in their wallets, thereby attracting more leads and creating greater brand awareness.
By taking care of the grunt work involved in the writing process, AI enables writers to hone their crafts further and evolve into master storytellers. This will eventually result in them crafting copy that is more impactful and mature than ever before. Moreover, AI-driven copy will inevitably lose its novelty once it becomes the norm, which it is all set to be. When that happens, it will only push brands to strive toward making their communication more personable and intuitive to stand out from the crowd. On the whole thus, AI tools promise to improve the overall quality of brand communication.
4. Leveraging Chatbots
If chatbots aren’t a part of your email marketing automation strategy yet, you ought to rectify that as soon as possible. AI chatbots can give a leg up to your email marketing campaigns in the following ways:
By engaging your site visitors in real-time conversation, chatbots gather a plethora of crucial customer data, such as the customer’s demographic information, their past purchases, their website interactions, and their interests and preferences. This information, in turn, will help you prepare a highly granular segmentation framework. Consequently, that will put you in a position to win over your customers by sending extremely personalized and relevant messages their way.
Compared to traditional methods of building an email list, like employing sign-up forms, chatbots can prove to be a much more effective alternative. By attending promptly to the queries of a new visitor, conversational chatbots can convince them to share their email address with relative ease.
Collecting feedback is indispensable to improving your performance, and with chatbots you can do so rather effortlessly. Send an email to your subscribers with a survey link and have it redirect them to a chatbot; this chatbot will then conduct the survey in a conversational manner, making the process highly engaging for your customers.
5. Implementing Hyper-Personalization
Implementing mere personalization will no longer allow you to hold your customer’s attention in 2024; you must transition to hyper-personalization. Leverage AI to transform the vast historical and real-time customer data at your disposal into elaborate customer profiles. Doing so will allow you to have an in-depth understanding of their requirements and preferences, empowering you to devise highly targeted messaging. The customers of today long to be heard and understood by the brands they do business with; hyper-personalization is the only way through which you can stand up to this expectation.
Wrapping It Up
The more ingenious your email marketing automation strategy, the greater your chances of tasting email marketing success. We hope the insights shared above will help you shore up your existing blueprints and drive your email campaigns to dizzying heights of success. Are there any other marketing automation trends you see occupying the discourse in 2024?