How to Simplify Social Media Ad Creation

For most organizations, social media marketing is an important piece of the overall strategy.

For good reason, too. The audience on these platforms is extremely active – and it’s constantly growing. Some data shows that by 2018, we can expect to see as many as 2.5 billion social media users around the world.

And while there’s a large audience here, for many marketers, the obstacle is getting content in front of the right audiences. Thanks to algorithms that limit who sees what content and when they are now turning to advertising on social media to specifically target their ideal customers.

Let’s take a deeper look at the growing adoption of social media ads, as well as some of the common obstacles and problem-solving tools being used to get the most out of it.

The Rise of Social Media Advertising

Last year, companies spent more than $24 billion on ads in spaces like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and Twitter. And this spending is only expected to grow. According to eMarketer, in 2017, analysts predict a 26.3% global increase on spending for social media ads.

Why? A couple of important reasons:

For one thing, they’re battling decreased organic reach. On platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter where reach of posts is limited by a company algorithm, organic exposure is at an all-time low. In order for companies to get their messages in front of the right people, they’re paying for more targeted ads on these platforms.

Then there’s the simple fact that advertising here works. As more companies see positive results from their ads (think boosted website traffic, higher sales, more customer engagement), they’re investing more in these channels. On Facebook alone, ad spending increased 50% from 2015 to 2016…which means companies must be seeing strong results.

So while social media advertising is producing impressive results, many marketers are facing the same point of struggle when it comes to advertising (and content creation in general) in these spaces: Graphic design. 

Graphic Design & Social Media

Social Media Examiner tells us that 74% of social media marketers use visual assets in their social media marketing. Why? Because Facebook posts with images see 2.3X more engagement than those without images – making a pretty strong case for using visuals.

But there’s a problem: Designing these images can be difficult. And without Photoshop skills or a graphic design degree, many marketers are having to hire graphic design help to create post-worthy graphics on a regular basis. It’s just one more expense on top of advertising that cuts into the company’s ROI.

When it comes down to it, difficult and expensive is not what we’re all about… so that is why we created our own solution – Social Studio FX.

Social Studio FX is an all-in-one, social media graphics tool that puts creative control directly in your hands. Using this tool, there’s no need for hiring a freelance designer, learning Photoshop, spending $100-$500 per design, waiting for designs, working through editing processes, and not being able to fully communicate your vision.

With this easy-to-use toolkit, marketers are finally able to design, create, and share the exact social media images they need. And with more than 180 fonts and 8,000 royalty-free graphics, this tool can help save time and money. From ads to everyday posts, this tool is helping make graphic design simpler than ever before.

How it Works

With this social media design toolkit, there’s no guesswork…just three simple steps:

1. Select a design/start from scratch

Browse the library of more than 13,200 templates and designs from 23 niche categories, or pick from over 200 done-for-you templates and 66 pre-sized social media layouts.

2. Customize your design

Using simple drag and drop tools, you can customize your content in a few simple clicks.

3. Download and publish

Once your design is complete, just download the material in PNG, JPEG, PDF, or TIFF format and use it on your preferred social media platform.

Simple, right? This tool is already being used by social media managers, affiliate marketers, bloggers, and ecommerce store owners alike because it’s cloud-based, powerful, and professional–and doesn’t require hours of initial training. In minutes, you can design high quality graphics for social media that can be launched right away.

Social Media Marketing: Don’t Let Graphic Design Over-Complicate

With Social Studio FX, you too can start getting the most out of your social media marketing presence without spending a fortune on graphic design help. Get empowered to take control of own design work and make your advertising and posting efforts look and feel the way they do in your mind. In no time at all, you’ll be creating ads and connecting with the engaged audience in spaces like Twitter, Facebook, and beyond with beautiful, professional visuals that are seen and shared.

Speaking of engagement, please take a moment to like, share and comment below. We’d love to know how you simplify your own social media ad creation!

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How to Use Instagram Analytics to Grow Your Following

Did you know Instagram has more than 500 million active users and counting? Are you using Instagram to build a following for your personal brand, blog, or company? If so, you might be wondering how you can grow your follower count without engaging in odd tactics such as buying followers.

The best approach lies in Instagram’s native analytics platform, known as Instagram Insights. This platform is only accessible to users with an Instagram business account.

Here, you can find information about your followers, content, and Stories. By knowing how to interpret and implement this data, you can develop a quality growth strategy for your profile.

To find Instagram Insights, navigate to your Instagram profile on your smartphone – this feature is not available in the browser version of Instagram. In the top right-hand corner of your screen, you will see 4 vertical bars of varying sizes. Click this icon to access Instagram Insights.

Navigating Instagram Insights

Instagram Insights offers surface-level analytics about your followers, posts, Instagram stories, and promotions. This data is communicated through metrics including:

• Impressions: The total number of times your posts have been seen
• Reach: The number of unique accounts that have seen your posts
• Engagement: The number of times a post was liked, saved, and/or commented on by users

Additional metrics include profile views, website clicks, email clicks, and directions clicks.

When you first open Instagram Insights, you will be presented with a 7-day view of your account. Here you will find the number of impressions, reach, profile views, website clicks, and email/call clicks for the most recent week.

Under this section is Followers. This is where you can find information about your followers, such as:

• Gender
• Age
• Location
• Activity (Categorized by hours and day of the week)

Directly below Followers, you will find a section full of your Posts. In this area, you can look at various metrics for your content, including reach, impressions, and engagement. You can also organize the posts by date range, metric, and type of content.

Following the Posts section is Instagram Stories. If you post regularly to Instagram Stories, you will find details about their engagement here. In addition to impressions and reach, this section provides insight into the following metrics:

• Taps Forward: The number of taps to see the next photo or video
• Taps Back: The number of taps to see the previous photo
• Exits: The number of times someone exited your story
• Replies: The number of replies (to your Inbox) a photo or video in a story received
• Swipes Away: The number of swipes away from this photo or video to skip to the next account’s story

Lastly, Instagram Insights also shows information about any promotions you may have launched on the platform.

Play around with the various sections of Instagram Insights. Once you know how and where to find specific information within the tool, it’s time to utilize the data and grow your Instagram following.

4 Ways to Leverage Instagram Analytics and Grow       Your Following

After becoming comfortable with the built-in analytics platform, use the data to test out the following growth ideas.

1. Determine When Your Audience is Active

Instagram does not serve content to users in chronological order, meaning there is no true “best time to post.” However, you can discover when your audience is most active. You can find this information in the Followers section of Instagram Insights organized by day of the week and time of day.

Using this insight, plan to post your Instagram content within these time frames. Be sure to track the success of each post and time and adjust your schedule if necessary.

2. Appeal to Your Target Audience

When reviewing the Followers section in Instagram Insights, does the age, gender, and location information align with your target audience? If so, you’re doing something right! If not, you need to examine your posts and identify why you’re appealing to a different market than initially intended. Adjust your content accordingly to attract attention from the right audience.

On the other hand, if you’re unsure about who your audience is, Instagram Insights will tell you. With the audience demographic and geographic information in mind, you can craft relevant and timely content to appeal directly to this particular segment of your market.

3. Understand the Type of Content Your Audience Engages With

Users won’t want to follow your account if you don’t post content they are interested in. Using the Posts section, look at the engagement, impressions, and reach data for your Instagram Stories, photos, and videos. Out of the three content types, which tends to generate the best results? You can also organize your content by certain metrics and time periods. This is beneficial in determining what type of content your followers tend to interact with most.

For instance, use the tool to organize your posts by engagement over the past year. What do you notice? Did you do something similar in the copy? Did you use a specific hashtag that generated a lot of likes? Perhaps your image was stunning. Or, maybe your video asked viewers to comment below. Identify the commonalities between your top posts and implement them throughout your upcoming content.

By having a consistent and engaging presence on Instagram, you’ll attract more followers within your target market as time goes on.

4. Analyze Your Call-to-Action

Data from Instagram Insights is an excellent way to determine if your call-to-action (CTA) is working or failing. For instance, many accounts tell users to “click the link in their bio” for more information. In addition to the traffic acquisition data from Google Analytics for that particular webpage, Instagram Insights can tell you how many people clicked on the link in your bio over the last seven days. This information can help you test which calls to action work best to drive a specific action, such as website or call clicks on your profile.

Another commonly used call-to-action asks people to comment or tag a friend. By organizing your content by comments in Instagram Insights, you can see how many followers completed that action.

However, since you’re interested in growing your followers, asking people to follow your account (if they don’t already) is a beneficial call-to-action to use. Monitor your follower account to see if this CTA works well with your particular audience. If not, use the information from Instagram’s analytics to pivot accordingly!

How to Calculate Growth Rate

While Instagram provides basic metrics, such as follower count, it does not offer in-depth insight such as growth or engagement rate. You must calculate this information on your own. Alfred Lua of Buffer provides excellent insight on how to calculate growth rate and engagement rate using data from your Instagram Analytics account.

To find out how much follower growth your profile has experienced, perform the following equation:

[(Followers Then – Followers Now) / Followers Then] x 100

This results in the percentage change in growth over a particular period of time.

After adjusting your Instagram content strategy using the tips provided above, use the Growth Rate calculation to determine how well these tactics have performed in increasing your overall follower count.

How do you use Instagram Insights and metrics to grow your following? Share your thoughts and experiences with us by commenting below.

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10 Pro Tips for B2B Marketing on Pinterest

We think of Pinterest as a lifestyle social network, chock full of party ideas, crafts, home decor inspiration, recipes, and fitness routines. But Pinterest is so much more than that. It’s become an asset to marketers who want to show off their visual content and drive traffic to their sites.
And here’s a notable benefit of Pinterest marketing. According to this infographic, the half-life of a Pin is a whopping 3.5 months. That’s 1,680 times longer than the half-life of a Facebook post. And don’t even get me started on the 24-minute half-life of a Tweet. Which means that the effort you put into your Pinterest presence will pay dividends for a long time.
And the value of Pinterest marketing isn’t limited to B2C businesses. Pinterest can supply fresh traffic and leads to B2B businesses as well. In this post, I’ll share 10 tips for B2B Marketing on Pinterest.

1. Pin a Variety of Visual Content

Pinterest is for visual content. That’s why so many B2B businesses often think Pinterest isn’t for them. They feel like they don’t have enough—or in fact any—visual content to share.
So, first of all, if you don’t have any visual content, it’s time to get cracking. Content marketing is the future of marketing, and the sexiness of visual content is undeniable.
But don’t wait until you have a fresh bank of visual assets before you dip your feet into the Pinterest pool. Trust me, you have more visual content than you realize. Here are some ideas to get you started:

• Product images. Post your product images and link back to your site’s product pages.
• Quotes. Create graphic quotes that would inspire your target audience. Canva makes the job quick and easy.
• Blog posts. Pin your blog posts to drive people back to your site.
• Events. Pin photos of company and industry events.
• Employees. Show off photos of team members. Let your unique company culture shine through pinned photos of your inter-company social events.
• Marketing materials. Pin the covers of your e-books, white papers, and brochures—with links to where the materials can be downloaded.
• Presentations. Put your decks to work for you. Create a board for each presentation and pin key slides to the board.
• Industry-related topics. Share infographics and other pieces that are relevant to your industry.
• Tips and recommendations. Be helpful to your prospects and clients. Curate tips and recommendations to make their lives easier. Create boards on books you recommend, great blogs for them to follow, podcasts, and apps.
• Targeted boards. Create specific boards that cater to the needs and interests of individual industries and your different personas.

2. Balance Quality and Personality

When you create a new board, aim to make it the best board on that topic, and include a wide variety of quality pins. But while you target quality, don’t be afraid to show your personality. Quirkiness and humour can be very effective at making you stand out on Pinterest.

3. Use Pinterest to Find Great Content

Don’t limit your Pinterest presence to your own content. Round out your boards with content that your audience will enjoy, from other sources.
Don’t have time to scour the Web for that content? Follow relevant Pinners to fill your feed with quality Pins that you can conveniently re-Pin to your boards.

4. Use Great Images

Attention-grabbing imagery is key on Pinterest. Make sure you’re using the optimal image size for your Pins, board images, and profile images.
Use stunning photography, beautiful fonts and place subtle branding in the corners of your images. And make it easy for your site visitors to pin your content right from your site. Make sure that all your posts and pages contain at least one Pinnable image.

5. Write Quality Copy

Of course, great imagery that your Pinterest audience wants to click is key. But don’t forget to make your copy work for you too. Think of your descriptions as ad copy. Make them engaging enough to earn a click. And add compelling calls to action to help convert visitors to your site.

6. SEO Your Boards and Pins

Pinterest can be an asset in your SEO efforts. The more people re-pin your site content, the more backlinks your site earns. And social signals can improve your rankings.
To help people find your Pins on both Pinterest and Google, optimize your profile, boards, and pins. Search Engine Watch offers up some great advice here on how to do that.
But how about the Pins that are created directly from your site? You can’t always count on Pinners to enter a keyword-rich description on those pins. Many won’t enter a description at all. Give Pinners a hand by enabling Rich Pins, which automatically pull some of the post content into the description.

7. Get the Data

To help you decide what new content to create and post to Pinterest, you need to understand how your current content is performing. And for that, you’re going to need to get the data. Here are three great sources of analytics data for Pinterest.
To start with, access the analytics data for your Pinterest business page here. You’ll find a variety of engagement insights about your pins.
Next, remember that not everyone pins from Pinterest. Find out what content people are pinning directly from your site by visiting pinterest.com/source/example.com. (Substitute example.com for your domain.)
Finally, use Google Analytics to monitor engagement and conversion metrics for your Pinterest traffic.

8. Research Your Ideal Client

Are you trying to get a better understand of who your ideal client is as a person? Pinterest can provide a wealth of data. Just check out the boards of your clients and people who have repinned your pins. What else are they pinning? What insights can you glean from their boards?

9. Research Content Ideas

If content creation is a priority for you, you’ll hit occasional droughts in content ideas. (It happens to the best of us, believe me.) Pinterest’s guided search is effective for unearthing content ideas and curation opportunities around a topic.

10. Get Inspired by the Greats

Why reinvent the wheel when you can follow the lead of other great brands? Check out these great Pinterest business pages to see how it’s done:

• Hootsuite
• Intel
• General Electric
• IBM
• Fedex
• Marketo
• Hubspot

11. Bonus tip: Collaborate with Clients and Partners

Ok so this isn’t really a marketing, so consider it a bonus. Pinterest is a fantastic tool for collaborating with clients.
I use it whenever I build a visual asset for a new client – whether it’s a video, presentation, infographic or Website. So that I don’t waste time building a piece my client won’t like, I strive to get into my client’s head before I begin. I try to get a sense of the design styles that resonate with them.
Sure, I could have them fill out a client brief. But that exercise feels too esoteric to some of my clients. What’s worked brilliantly for me instead is to create a secret board on Pinterest, and add my client as a contributor. My client then spends time Pinning images, photos, colour palettes, fonts, and websites they love. Before long, I know exactly what they’re after and can deliver on their vision.

Over To You

Have you been using Pinterest in your B2B marketing? If not, why? If so, have I missed any key points? I’d love to hear from you. Please share in the comments.



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How the GDPR Affects you: Consent

 Starting May 2018, the GDPR will affect how you can collect email addresses in a big way. Don’t wait until then – act now, otherwise everyone you are currently sending emails to will need to opt-in again!

What is going to change?

A desire to collect as much data as possible has led to businesses and marketers making use of tactics such as pre-ticked checkboxes to assume consent. This is known as ‘implied consent’, and will no longer be justifiable. Up until now, it was acceptable to pre-tick a checkbox when asking for permission to send regular newsletter or marketing emails, but as of May 2018, there must be a positive action made in order to sign up.

What about my data?

If your existing processes and records meet the standards required by the GDPR, then there is no need to acquire any further consent for your data. It is important that you don’t store unnecessary data so the data you have may need to be reviewed.
If your records don’t meet the standards required, then you are not alone. Unfortunately, as of May 2018, you will need to have standards compliant consent from every individual on your list. You may want to start emailing your list to request consent, in a GDPR compliant manner. Providing an incentive to opt-in can go a long way here.
Our Maxservices team can help with this – contact them for assistance.

Why is this happening?

These new regulations are designed to reduce the risk to consumers in the event of a data breach by only collecting the data that is required, and only keeping it for as long as is necessary. When asked, you will be required to prove that you have consent to email an address. In the event that you cannot prove it, there may be legal action – including fines.
This further complicates the opt-in process, because it is still debatable whether a “single” opt-in can be proven.

What do I need to include?

A data collection page must include:

Your company name, and any third parties who will be using the data

A clear explanation of why you are asking for the visitor’s data

What you are asking the visitor to sign up for

What content the visitor will be sent

Assurance that the visitor has the right to withdraw their consent at any time, and how they can go about doing this

The consent should be unbundled, meaning that it should be separate from other terms and conditions. It should not be a requirement of signing up for a service unless it is necessary in order to use the service.
Ideally, you should also unbundle the consent for each method of communication, eg. for email, post, SMS, and telephone.
The opt-in must be ‘active’ rather than ‘implied’. Use unticked opt-in boxes so that an action is required to give consent.

What is the difference between a single and double opt-in?

A single opt-in process is completed when a visitor enters their email address on a page and clicks submit. At this stage, they are added to a newsletter or marketing list. However they could have made a mistake in their address, or intentionally entered an incorrect address.
A double opt-in process resolves this by adding an additional step. After entering and submitting their address, they must respond to an email in order to opt-in. Sounds lengthy, but this gives us proof that they did sign up, and we are able to store this along with a timestamp for reporting and auditing purposes.

Will we see a reduction in signups due to this process?

Unfortunately, there is no doubt that this will slow the growth of your email lists. However, there is a quality over quantity benefit here – these double opt-ins are far more likely to engage in future.
To counter the slower list growth, there are a few options to try and improve your signup rates. Some examples are:

Popup forms

Offering the visitor a chance to opt-in before being provided with an article or download

Using inbound channels such as social media to send visitors to forms

What else do I need to be aware of?

The rules apply to email addresses that you have been given in real life, too. The correct way to collect email addresses requires that people have given you the same positive affirmation required for collecting addresses online. You must be able to prove it if necessary. One possible solution for in-store or exhibition data collection is to use a tablet with a correctly designed sign-up form.
It is worth noting that you can still email addresses with no personally identifiable data – such as info@oxfordstones.com.

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Reasons to Ditch “Batch and Blast” and Get Started with Email Marketing Personalization

We all like to believe we’re special. Or as anthropologist Margaret Mead wryly put it, “Always remember that you are absolutely unique — just like everyone else.”  
That belief (or state of denial) is why so-called “batch and blast” email is usually less effective than email campaigns customized to your unique market. In a recent study of marketing professionals by Experian Marketing Services, 62 percent said a personalized email subject line is crucial.
The study also revealed that personalized promotional emails generated transaction rates and revenue per email six times higher than non-personalized emails. The personalized mailings had 29 percent higher unique open rates and 41 percent higher unique click rates. For triggered email campaigns (in which emails are triggered by a calendar event, a business action or an action taken by a website visitor), personalization doubled transaction rates.
Because today’s email marketing services allow for more detailed data about customers, users can implement some pretty impressive personalization that likely wouldn’t have been possible a couple of decades ago. Logistics like fully optimized mobile applications and time-delayed messaging are now par for the course, as is message micro-customization based on consumer behavior.  
“With so many available tools, businesses of all sizes can now employ the best email strategies for reaching customers,” writes Jayson DeMers in the Huffington Post. “When used correctly, these tools let businesses of all sizes compete with even the largest corporations. As more marketers discover the value of personalized marketing, businesses that don’t personalize their efforts will likely find their campaigns are largely unsuccessful.”



“To get started with such customization, conducting customer research is imperative,” explains Vertical Response Senior Content Marketing Manager, Linzi Breckenridge. “Your success with email marketing lies in understanding as much as you can about your contacts so you can better communicate with the groups of people likely to find your message relevant,” she says.  
Since personalizing messages for a world’s worth of potential customers is probably still out of technology’s reach, here are tips for identifying whom to target in your next campaign.  

• Identify your target market(s), segmenting the groups of customers most likely to buy your goods and services. Think about which segment of the population has a problem your product is able to solve. Narrowing that down keeps you from wasting time and energy, and maximizes your chance of gaining and keeping customers, growing profits and expanding market share.
• The most common ways to segment are by demographics, geographic location, purchasing behavior and/or psychographic segmentation (interests, hobbies, lifestyles, values and attitudes). The most common demographics used are age, gender and income level, notes social media blogger Lisa Furgison, all of which can be collected from your customers and embedded for reference onto your website or blog platform.
• To help you form your messages, some marketing professionals recommend identifying common themes among your best customers and conceiving of actual “personas” that represent them in their various forms — including their shopping objectives and possible objections to buying.
• Further fine-tune your target market by analyzing email data to identify customers who answered calls to action, like clicking to open windows announcing new product arrivals. “Knowing if, when and how contacts engage with your email is useful in determining which contacts find the message relevant,” notes Breckenridge. “You can continue the communication with those who respond, and tweak or completely change the message for those who don’t.”
• Limit your target market to a manageable size. Warns Furgison: “If you overdose on segmentation, you could get frustrated and make your email marketing strategy more complicated than it needs to be.”
• Consider rewarding loyal customers with discounts or special sneak peeks of products. “With a marketplace overflowing with options, repeat buyers are a much smaller segment than they once were,” Furgison notes.
• Identify, target, and maybe reward brand advocates — customers who praise your products on social media or provide you positive feedback.  
• Make an effort to bring back inactive customers, possibly with a promo. Such emails have titles like “We miss you!” or “It’s been a while,” notes Furgison, who also advises that surveys should find out why customers have strayed.  
• Place the customer’s first name or user ID at the top of the message to quickly capture attention, advises Kevin Gao on targetmarketingmag.com. “If the user took the time to register with your business, then there is some implicit trust between both of you,” he says. “Remind them of your relationship by promptly showing their names. This tactic is especially important for consumers on mobile devices as the limited space means brands need logical personalization right away.”
• Ask customers for information so you can provide even more apt customization in the future. “But avoid being greedy,” warns Gao. “Customers don’t want to spend time with a detailed registration page that asks for demographic data or other personal information. Ask for the minimum, use that in personalized emails, and expand your data as the relationship grows.”
• Messages to customers triggered by real-time behaviors — such as reminders that items have been left in a “shopping cart” — can be very effective. “Even if the visitor receives it minutes after leaving the site, it does help the brand to stick in their mind,” states Gao. “Personalization should also be included in standard messages, such as shipment confirmations, where companies can suggest additional products or services, perhaps at a discount.”
• Consider customizing email messages to arrive at the optimal times for your customers depending on demographics and time zone. For example, emails to student customers could arrive in the evenings when they’re most likely to be browsing via computer.

Lastly, always test your email campaign before sending. Having more than one pair of eyes review the email reduces the chance of suffering from an error. After making the effort to boost open and click rates with personalization and segmentation, the last thing you want is to waste it on a typo.

Conclusion:  Move beyond the old-fashioned and ineffective approach of “batch and blast” to get the best results with email marketing.

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The Biggest Email Marketing Trends in 2017 Will Be…

 Well, we weren’t really sure. So we asked more than 1,200 email marketers, letting them choose between six promising email marketing trends in 2017:

• Automated emails
• Big Data personalization in emails
• Email encryption
• HTML5 video in email
• Interactive emails
• Omnichannel email experiences

None of those trends got the majority of respondents excited, but a few saw sizable interest.

Without a single mega trend to rally around, we thought we’d explore all six of those trends. In addition to sharing our own thoughts, we’ll add in the opinions of some of our Email Marketing in 2020 ebook contributors, giving you even more reasons to be excited about these email marketing trends in 2017, all of which we think will be impactful.

INTERACTIVE EMAILS

With more than a quarter of marketers saying, “2017 will be the year of interactive emails,” this was our top trend. We like Rebelmail’s definition of email interactivity:

AN ACTION TAKEN IN AN EMAIL THAT TRIGGERS AN EVENT WITHIN THE SAME EMAIL.

Interactive email elements can take many forms, including:

• Hamburger menus and other navigation
• Carousels, image galleries, and sliders
• Hot spots (product tour)
• Offer reveals
• Quizzes
• Reviews
• Search bars
• Add-to-cart functionality

Email interactivity brings some of the interactions that would normally take place on the landing page and pulls them into the email. By allowing more to happen inside an email, it reduces barriers to engagement and makes clickers have even higher intent.

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The two biggest issues that hold back adoption are:

1. Tracking and attribution changes. Since interactivity pulls action from the landing page into the email, click rates become a little less important and in-email engagement becomes more important. And you need to measure that in-email engagement using new metrics like email interactions, which are special opens that are triggered by engaging with interactive email elements. This change in email success measurement can be the trickiest issue when trying to get buy-in from executives to do interactive emails.

But no matter how uncomfortable these changes make email marketers, this change is coming all the same because it improves the subscriber experience.

BIG DATA PERSONALIZATION IN EMAILS

The “right content” portion of the “right content to the right person at the right time” equation for email marketing in many cases equals personalization. Translating the Big Data trend into actionable signals for email marketers starts with breaking down silos and integrating data across channels, which many large brands have been focused on in recent years.

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Once all the data is pooled and the dots are connected—which is no small technological or political feat—brands can build the most detailed views of individual customers that they’ve had to date, using a wide range of reinforcing data points to inform messaging.

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Marketers have largely embraced the inevitability of personalization driving most of the content in emails. However, the process of enabling Big Data personalization is so complex and involved that it’s never likely to be a huge trend in any particular year. Instead, it’s probably truer to say that we’re in the half-decade of Big Data personalization.

HTML5 VIDEO IN EMAIL

In January 2013, I made what seemed like a not very radical prediction at the time: “Video in email will finally take off.” Then Apple dropped support for HTML5 video in all of its email clients, slamming the brakes on this promising trend.

Now, with the launch of iOS 10, HTML5 video support is back! As of November, more than 53% of emails were opened in Apple email apps, which is more than enough to justify trying it. Just be sure to build in a fallback for subscribers using email clients that don’t support HTML5 video.

While the marketers we polled were more excited about interactive emails, it’s hard for us here at Litmus to not see HTML5 video as a form of interactivity. Moreover, video in email is straightforward and easy for subscribers to understand—and for that reason is likely to be a catalyst in making both marketers and email users more receptive to other forms of interactivity.

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AUTOMATED EMAILS

Even if this isn’t the year of automated emails, marketers clearly know the importance of this trend. Triggered emails, like welcome emails and cart abandonment emails, already generate the majority of email marketing revenue at some brands, even though triggered email volume typically comprises about 5% of overall email volume.

The outsized productivity of such a small percentage of email volume presents huge opportunities for brands to better engage subscribers. It also calls into question all the time and resources that are currently spent on broadcast emails, the volume of which continues to climb every year.

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OMNICHANNEL EMAIL EXPERIENCES

Consumers expect brands to recognize them across channels and to treat them consistently. Brands are racing to catch up to consumer expectations.

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Piecing all of a consumer’s interactions together to create a single view of the customer is the holy grail…and is difficult. Equally difficult is then acting on that single view. Being able to nimbly send the right messages to each consumer via the individually appropriate channel will require major integration. It will also require a lot of machine intelligence.

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EMAIL ENCRYPTION

2016 was a great year for email marketing, but it was a horrible year for email. Hillary Clinton’s emails and her use of a private email server were a major campaign issue. Yahoo revealed that 1 billion user accounts were hacked in 2013 and another 500 million in 2014. And then the Russians hacked the Democratic National Committee’s emails.

While encryption wouldn’t have prevented the hacks at Yahoo or the DNC, email security is top of mind for many right now. With emails becoming more personalized and powered by data from many channels and Internet of Things devices, the call for greater security to ensure privacy will only grow.

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Gmail already highlights which emails are encrypted, using a little lock icon to flag which were sent using transport layer security (TLS). If another major inbox provider follows Gmail’s lead, then encryption will gain serious momentum toward becoming a best practice.

While it’s unclear which trend or trends will dominate the year, it’s guaranteed that 2017 will be the year of email marketing change. It always is.

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