Email Experts
on Email Marketing Trends
to Look Out For In 2022

Privacy has always been an essential consideration for all marketing. In the last few years, we have seen many changes to international legislation and, in turn, consumers increasingly raising concerns about the privacy of their personal information. In 2022, the importance of communicating the value for a new subscriber and then demonstrating that will be paramount.

Furthermore, the methods in positioning the benefits that are provided for subscribing will remain as critical as ever. We should never forget that a person is at the end of an email address at every moment of using email marketing.

Brands will prioritize defining their email marketing proposition more than the tools and technology they use. Questions like “What does the subscriber receive, how does it add value to them, and the value of sharing their email address with you?” will top their pecking order. Because while email continues to stand the test of time, your subscriber will not be there forever if you do not put them in the centre of your email marketing strategy.

When we have all experienced a tremendous amount of change due to the pandemic, 2022 will be the time to understand your audience, determine what is of value to the recipient, how you can make their lives easier and provide them with a beneficial email marketing experience.

The inbox will be harder to hit in 2022

Spam filters will become more sensitive, here's what our email deliverability experts suspect will happen. Spam filters already deploy sophisticated machine learning algorithms that are adept at interpreting signals that may indicate whether people want to read your emails or not. You can expect this level of scrutiny to continue, if not accelerate.

Subscriber engagement has risen to the top of the list of positive signals mailbox providers look for. For example, spam filtering algorithms will get better at measuring whether not only when people open and click your emails but where they move them and how long they read them.

Spam filters will also make further determinations based on negative signals too, that go beyond engagement, such as the percentage of invalid addresses and spam traps you hit and volume of widely circulated addresses you're mailing to. Fear not! If you're experiencing issues, often times, the easiest and least expensive thing you can do to improve your email deliverability is:

a) protect your email list from fraudulent signups and
b) regularly hygiene your email lists to remove those problematic addresses

• For 2022, Artificial Intelligence (AI) will be the main competitive advantage for a medium-large brand with a few hundreds of thousands email subscribers. The reason is quite simple. Personalisation is already a must-have, and you can only do it effectively at scale when you have technology helping to tailor each message to each individual needs and requirements.
• BIMI authentication will have a real impact on how brands differentiate from their competitors, since Gmail is already embracing it at full steam and other main players like Yahoo! and AOL support it as well. Brands will move because of the marketing impact, but it's the result that excites me: full compliance with all the legacy authentications.
• Email as the main 1st-party data source with the end of cookies and third-party providers due to privacy concerns will elevate the value of every permission based email list.

• Trend 1: Optimizing the first impression. - Brands will focus on the first impression they make to new subscribers and customers. This means the sign-up process and first email (COI, Confirmation, or Welcome) will be scrutinized and tested for a better experience. People want to feel more connected to brands in 2022, and the best way to do this is to create a first and lasting impression.
• Trend 2: Alignment of data for experiences. - Marketers will stop talking about personalization and start using data in a meaningful way to create an experience that is true to their brand and their customer. They'll achieve this by leveraging data in a small way and building their way up to predictive AI. Often marketers want it all and struggle to get there and overlook that there can be incremental steps to progress. Customers want to feel that brands know and listen to them in 2022, and the best way for brands to do this is to use the data in a meaningful way to make experiences more personalized.
• Trend 3: Stop finding a workaround for MPP - Mail Privacy Protection is what it is; there are no shortcuts anymore, so marketers will proceed to find something other than open rates to measure their program. 2022 will be the year of the "non-open" rate to gauge email program success. There is no silver bullet in all of this, so suck it up.

Email marketing will gain increased budget as it finally begins to be appreciated for being a marvellous channel that delivers the highest ROI.

This is mainly due to these three reasons:

1: More than ever, consumers appreciate brands delivering them news, content, and offers via email.

2: Email's tech is continually evolving to be more CDP-like, and brands are now more likely to embed and integrate it with their other tech. This, in turn, means that the email tech can pull other useful data into the system to utilize - leading email to become even more valuable.

3: Collecting, accessing, and utilizing both Zero-party and 1st-party data is easily and naturally achieved using a push channel such as email. Combine the strategic use of these data types and marketing automation, and, well… you have one happy customer and one very satisfied brand.

Creativity abounds! 2022 will be dominated by brands attempting to increase consumer engagement through creative email marketing tactics such as gamification and interactivity.

Gamification - Loyalty programs and other reward or status-based incentives entice recipient actions, helping you achieve email success and increase brand loyalty while simultaneously improving your ability to gauge audience interest.

Interactivity - Technologies like AMP for Email and Interactive HTML can provide a richer, more app-like experience by enabling actions like RSVPing to events, booking appointments, even shopping and making purchases, all without leaving the inbox.

Boosting positive engagement with emails is great for deliverability. It also allows email senders to (finally!) look beyond open rates as a proxy for email success, shifting focus to more accurately measurable actions such as clicks, replies, and conversions.

But before getting creative, remember that sending email is about building a relationship with your audience and providing valuable content that they enjoy, or learn from, or that makes their life easier in some way. Think about your actual goals with email as well as the type of value you're trying to provide. Then build an email program that meets those two in the middle. Figuring out how to get creative and track your success comes afterwards.

As our customers become more concerned with what the brands they engage with do when no one is watching, I see 2022 being the year of Responsible Marketing

• Or just being a little more empathetic to your subscribers. Doing more than just selling to them.
• We forget it, but there is most definitely a human being on the other side of the laptop or smartphone. In 2022 we'll be urged to use our data and insights to better understand the customer viewpoint and think about how your marketing will affect them. It's not all about short-term gratification.

Retention is by no means a new strategy, but after a few years now of collecting new subscribers (thank you COVID) 2022 will call for a bulletproof retention program to be a must, not a nice to have.

• We cannot afford to lose the new contacts we acquire over the busy holiday period.
• Offer a service; take the time to get to know them, ask questions, actively take an interest in what they're saying and respond accordingly. What did they buy or enquire about? Always ask yourself how you can be helpful in the future.
• This need, I say, shouldn't just apply to new customers. Throughout 2022 be sure to treat every single person on your database with the care and attention they deserve. Surprise and delight, and reward loyalty

Essentially we all want to be customer obsessed businesses, so perfecting the user experience has to be on the list for 2022.

• Endeavor to make your payment process as simple and frictionless as Amazon's, remembering email addresses and payment details, etc.
• We're living in the BNPL (Buy Now Pay Later) generation where digital wallets and QR codes yes, they're back! They made a comeback thanks to touch less COVID commerce. But look set to stay well into 2022 and beyond.
• Throughout 2022 think about adding a bit of positive friction to your frictionless payment. By this, I mean asking purchasers if the address they've chosen is correct. Are the size and style right, and more importantly, whether or not they've considered the cost entirely. Considering your customers wellbeing can often be more important than making that extra sale.

AI will write your content - and your newsletters

In 2022 marketers will discover AI-based Text generation. Expect it to slowly start appearing in more email marketing services this year. So you can generate text, and get AI based text suggestions right there in the ESP.

When we reviewed landing page builders, we saw the content suggestions already becoming built in. You can write 100s of product pages in the blink of an eye. In B2B, imagine turning pain points and benefits into a convincing email and create A/B testing variants.

It's like a full-time writing assistant on tap. Software will be able to:

• Write the perfect email,
• Take an RSS feed and auto-generate a rewritten title and summary for your newsletter,
• Propose subject lines,
• Draft headlines and generate email text.

All while using proven copywriting formulas, the tone-of-voice and word count you tell it to.

This makes you think. Knowing your customer, creativity, originality, positioning and solid strategy will become even more important to differentiate yourself than pure wordsmithing. Text generation isn't perfect yet, but thanks to the GTP-3 algorithm, it is a great help and timesaver for marketers. ESPs are in the great position to train the AI based on their data of what works. At a certain point it will become just as common as a spell checker.

I'm seeing that paid ad and social media giants are becoming more restrictive. Companies are getting less traffic and conversions for the money they put in.

If you're running a small business or an eCommerce site, growing via ads is going to get a lot harder. Everyone is fighting for the same bone, and algorithms aren't forgiving.

In 2022, marketers will shift their budgets from PPC and social ads to email and SMS marketing. Compared to paid media, these owned channels are much less intrusive and work way better to build trust and evoke action. If you're worried about texting your audience, don't be. SMS statistics say that 75% of all mobile users have no issue getting SMS messages from brands as long as they've opted in to the service.

On owned media, your brand can walk alongside your customers and stay in touch. This way, you become a familiar, trusted Yoda-like guide in the customer journey. Customers aren't looking for another attention-hungry ad to distract them - but they appreciate good content and products that help them.

• Smart email marketers have always known that open rates are relative and directional, not absolute, and will continue to use them at the aggregate (not granular) level to gauge email engagement, even once iOS15 with Apple's MPP is fully rolled out.
• 2022 will see a 'back to basics' movement in email, where organizations realize that they need the fundamentals, like segmentation strategies, A/B split testing plans, message maps, and engagement tactics, more than they need the latest technology.
• Automation will continue to rule the world, with companies automating as much of their email programs as possible, to free up staff to work on strategies and tactics to boost bottom-line performance.
• The email industry will embrace diversity, with organizations making sure their hiring and promotional practices are inclusive
• Email industry professionals will recognize the value of community and continue to come together and actively participate in organizations like Only Influencers.

• We have seen a general increased awareness around the privacy concerns and implications of marketers actions over the course of 2021. This was felt most profoundly with the announced MPP changes at Apple. As a result Privacy has been top of mind for many marketers in 2021 and that is a trend we will continue to see in 2022. Issues and concerns around security, trust, data integrity & confidentiality will surface and those terms will start to enter the lexicon of more everyday marketers.
• More enterprise email senders than ever before will begin discussing or actively consider a switch to in-house MTA's for some or all of their email sending requirements. Privacy and security will be primary drivers in pushing these types of services in-house. A greater number of SaaS services and other enterprise businesses will consider the options of running more of their own infrastructure, whether that is bare-metal, private cloud or cloud hosted.
• We will continue to see a healthy amount of M&A activity in the email space, as well as seeing new innovative niche ESP services, deliverability and reputation tools being made available. Recent innovations in the space like BIMI will continue to see increasing support.

Now that most marketers have several years of email marketing experience, they have established processes and predictable results. In 2022, most brands will focus on improving these processes and achieving greater success from their email marketing efforts.

Many brands are in some stage of optimization, whether that's better data management, improving messaging and creativity, automating more communications, or improving deliverability. So their main focus will be completing these optimization tasks in order to achieve better results.

On the marketing side, iOS15 will require brands to adapt to focus on conversions, rather than engagement, as their main KPI. In turn, this will help many brands as their previous focus on opens and open rate likely took their attention away from their primary goal. Segmenting lists by iOS and non-iOS subscribers will be necessary to accurately analyze campaign results.

Additionally, utilizing segmentation and personalized messaging will continue to play an important role as marketers create even more relevant experiences for their subscribers. Over the past few years marketers have been doing this more successfully, and this rise in relevancy has likely contributed to the continued success of email marketing.

The importance of understanding how email actually works. Email-specific topics such as deliverability and sender reputation are starting to show up very prominently on senders' radars as getting in the inbox or promotions tab is getting more complicated even for legitimate senders. Finally!

#emailGeeks have known for quite a long time that open rates have not been the best singular metric that dictates the success of an email marketing program. The Apple iOS changes have not changed much when it comes to open rates, they just made a big bang as the information was marketed to consumers which in return opened the eyes of marketers who had a hard time not relying and making decisions on this metric alone.

Senders will start looking at metrics beyond the open and first click in the email campaign. They will start following what recipients are doing after clicking on an email and use this information to fix marketing decisions for example or better segment/target their recipients.

They will dive into the amazing world of deliverability, which in return will help them understand 1) what inboxes want, 2) how spam filters work 3) what blocklists impact them 4) but most importantly why the old way of doing email doesn't work anymore. No more buying lists, rotating IPs or hiding behind sub-domains and different domains. The effects of bad sending behavior can't be ignored anymore, even if senders are legitimate businesses who have been doing the same thing for years.

This means following best practices won't have as much pushback from management, as true inboxing rates will plummet if they are not followed. This is great news as senders will learn more about email & deliverability, they will restructure their framework when it comes to creating or sending emails, which will result in better emails arriving to the consumer! How great is that?

Email will continue to grow as a way to develop relationships and provide value for people through 2022 and beyond. It is more than a way to sell products or services. Brands will use it to connect at a greater level, sharing their stories, ideas, tips and free resources. When you focus on people's needs, you build trust. Trust turns into loyalty.

Dark mode is no longer an up and coming trend. More and more people will embrace dark mode in 2022. For some people, reading an email is easier in dark mode. Less strain on their eyes. Meaning, your emails must look and read well on both light and dark mode.

This is the year email marketers focus on different metrics to determine the success of emails. Placing less emphasis on the open rate. With Apple's Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) the open rate is even more unreliable. Based on some stats most Apple users have opted in to MPP. You will need to track metrics like clicks, conversion rates, and list growth to improve email performance.

• 2022 is when Media really falls in love with 1st Party Data from the Email Marketing team. Brands will have to ask for preferences in addition to permission, rather than append or assume them. This gets us correct data but also attention and not just eyeballs. If you ask people's permission to market to them, they'll listen when you do. (credit: Seth Godin, 1999)
• Open rates may not stand a chance after more robust adoption of iOS15 (without some sort of change), so tests in email marketing will have to drive clicks or conversions on brands' websites in order to be deemed impactful. Marketers should start to define what ACTION or BELIEVE they want to drive with their marketing (not just email) and then work backwards to figure out which email marketing metric indicates that progress. If you want to know if your emails are driving sales, check your website analytics.

If you don't sell online, determine a proxy for sales (i.e. product page visits, time spent on site, clicks to contact a sales rep, etc.). If you want to raise awareness or perception, you may be more interested in sentiment or content engagement (clicks in an email). When all else fails (just like above), ask. Survey your first party data (email subscribers) about how their opinion of the brand shifts over time, like your own inside brand health tracker.

Leveraging Zero and First Party Data to Improve Program Performance:

Zero and first-party data is collected with consent from subscribers -- and 2022 is when marketers will leverage this data treasure trove to improve program performance.

As new privacy measures change the data that we collect, marketers will look for and use patterns in the data we collect directly from subscribers -- zero-party and first-party data -- to improve our email program's performance through enhanced personalization and targeted experiences.

Using Predictive Analytics to Uncover Hidden Patterns that Drive Conversions:

Collecting zero and first-party data allows organizations to combine past purchases, account preferences, and historical actions in a single robust profile for each subscriber.

In 2022, marketers will use predictive analytics to analyze these robust customer profiles quickly and easily.

For example, predictive analytics techniques can provide an estimate for which subscribers are most likely to purchase or churn. And then we can use those estimates to create data-informed segments, campaigns and journeys that increase conversion.

Deeper Segmentation - Segmentation is key in email marketing. In the past, most companies' databases and CRM tools didn't have the data. As companies add to their database with progressive profiling forms and data enrichment tools, we will see more segmentation. This will allow companies to better communicate with smaller micro-targeted audiences.

Personalization - Personalization has been a buzz word for years, but we will see a much more expansive definition in 2022. Personalization won't be about adding a first name or company. It will be about creating a truly individualized journey using better data and segmentation.

Digital Journeys - The buyer's journey is one of the keys to providing a good customer experience and improving overall conversion. In the past we relied on big name consulting agencies to come in and create expensive buyer's journeys that were used for a few months then ignored. With more tools and access to data, we're able to not only create a more accurate buyer's journey, but also monitor, iterate, and improve the buyer's journey. This will allow us to provide the right messaging in the right format at the right time to all our different customer personas.

• Email is going to be focused on the customer, not the seller Marketers are starting to see the value in customer-centric marketing and the impact that can have on business results. Too many marketers think "How am I going to hit my goals? How many emails do I have to send to reach those goals?" The best marketers today think "How can I provide value for my customer? How can I educate them to solve their problems?" Those are the marketers that will win in 2022 and beyond.
• We're going to continue to see more value in the email itself rather than external links, with the rise of popular newsletters like Morning Brew, The Hustle, and The Skimm What's old becomes new again. The best practice of very short emails offering a teaser of content is rapidly going out of style. Even if it harder to track, brands are starting to include tons of valuable content in the emails themselves, rather than holding the content back for the destination.
• B2B will finally start to catch up to B2C, with incredibly personalized emails based on interest and behavior The best emails feel like they were crafted just for you. Top B2C brands understand this, you can see examples in your personal inbox. We'll soon start to see B2B catch up.

Emails will become even more effective, especially in the ecommerce space. Hence, businesses will develop a growing need to manage it all in one place. Automation and all-in-one platforms will help while also reducing overhead costs and increasing efficiency.

• More possibilities bring additional tools to adopt, learn, and manage. People will look to simplify their tech stack by adopting more powerful platforms that provide end-to-end experience.
• To handle all aspects of the business, businesses will need lots and lots of data - to understand trends and plan for the future. Advanced reporting will come to the rescue. Customer understanding will reach a new level. Predictive analytics will anticipate buyer behavior with extreme accuracy and delight them with platform recommendations. Predictive engine will make email copy optimized for high conversion and engagement.
• Text messaging (SMS) will also grow in popularity. Many will start integrating SMS with email, especially in the ecommerce space. · Due to Apple's Mail Privacy Protection, email marketers will rely more on click-through rates and less on open rates.

Typography for visual interest

Giant typography will continue to be used as a graphic way of enticing viewers and creating engaging content. Typography has form, line, shape, color, and can be a striking part of the visual language. Imagery is great, but don't forget to utilize typography as a focal point in your designs in 2022.

Design for Mobile First

The web industry is way ahead of us in email on this one. Email should be designed for mobile first when your audience is likely opening in mobile more often. This means larger font sizes that are easier to scan and read. It means adjusting spacing, buttons, columns, and imagery to feel mobile native—not an afterthought.

Find ways to use trends wisely

Nostalgic aesthetics continue to be a real showcase for brands here at the end of 2021 and likely into 2022. We're seeing branding reminiscent of the 70s through bold psychedelic visuals and rigid grid designs reminiscent of the 80s. Does your brand allow for some ultra trendy spots within it? Work with your branding team to see how you can create one-off or short series emails that capitalize on current trends without coming off as off-brand and confusing.

The last two years have been a rollercoaster ride all over the world and 2022 is looking to be much of the same. This means the power of digital marketing and client engagement is going to continue to evolve and grow in importance for the foreseeable future. In a recent study Netcore Cloud found that over 60% email marketing budgets either remained the same or increased in budget during the last two years. Showing that the importance of email marketing has been a steadfast part of the survival and growth plan for brands.

EVOLVE or get LEFT BEHIND

As metrics continue to evolve and change, marketing teams will have to evolve with them as well. Changes with image caching, prefetching and proxying related to Apple's Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) features are a glimpse into the future where hard metrics like clicks, conversations, sales, and monthly active users on the platform.

SECURITY is COOL

Adopting a proactive approach to email security is no longer just the role of your IT department. Working together Marketing and IT can build a powerful relationship to implement strong policies that help protect your brand, consumers and employees. Implementation of email authentication solutions like SPF, DKIM and DMARC pave the way for many interactive and branding solutions that put consumers first. In many cases a solid authentication plan can also help with inbox placement, email delivery speeds, and consumer engagement with your brand.

BRANDING is EVERYTHING

2022 looks to be the year of branding and interactive emails, putting your brand front and centre with the expansion of Brand Indicators for Message Identification (BIMI), Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) for email and Schema/Annotations. As the importance of designing for mobile first continues to grow, supporting multiple email clients and platforms will make the job of your designers that much more important and complex. Taking advantage of these solutions in the right message, right format at the right time will make your email program unbeatable.

Adding your logo into your email messages in the list view (on mobile devices) and in the messages (on desktop) puts your brand front and center with your customers. People process images significantly faster than text, having a known logo next to your email's "From" builds an immediate association to the brand for the consumer.

2022 will be an evolution year for email marketing programs.

"In 2021, email marketers excelled what they had learned from the challenging times. Brands even went beyond the survival mode, and became more innovative to stand out in their customers' inbox. However, it is likely that we see the behavioral impact of the highest inflation rates of the last two decades on consumers this year. Initial reports after Cyber Monday 2021 showed that the online sales decreased by 1.4% compared to 2020 according to Fast Company. Email marketers will not only compete with other brands but also the macroeconomic environment.

To convince customers and turn them into loyal fans, delivering dynamic and interactive messages will play a significant role. AMP For Email becomes more and more accessible for the average email marketer with intuitive tools. We'll see more responsive messages out there this year.

In 2022, the brands sending relevant and personalized messages at scale will advance in the competition. However, managing millions of data points with a growing number of channels and devices can be overwhelming. Modern marketing teams will leave no room for guesstimates and adopt more AI use cases such as CLV prediction, engage-time optimization, and content recommendations in their email marketing program.

Privacy awareness of consumers is on the rise, and more mailbox providers may follow Apple's move this year. Email subscribers will only give up their data for the brands which provide a valuable inbox experience for them. A purposeful content strategy, tone and empathy will remain crucial to win the hearts and minds of your audience."

1. Email open rates aren't everything. The email industry is heavily reliant on open rates and CTRs. With the new iOS15 privacy setting released in 2021, marketers will stop defining the success of emails by these KPIs only. In light of these changes, they will focus more on revenue per email, LTV, and email list growth vs. churned users.
2. 2022 is the time when brands will reap the benefits of the testing and learning they've done, analyzing every campaign they have sent out, especially during seasonal promotions. A high-quality email campaign will bring you thousands in revenue, but a well-spotted opportunity to optimize it increases it to tens of thousands.
3. More and more marketers will focus on humanizing the brand. The last 2 years of strictly online meetings made us miss personal connection. 2022 will be the year when brands won't be shy of showing their face behind the screen. Don't limit introductions to only the letters CEO in the onboarding flow. Christmas, Hanukkah, Mother's Day, and other holidays are great reasons to represent the whole team. Say thank you to your customer, let them feel valued, and really commit to it.
4. Classic is always on trend: mobile first, dark mode optimization, responsive everything, localization.

Apple's iOS15 will overhaul email marketing in 2022. We'll retool how we trigger resends, redefine parameters for re-engagement sequences, and work off reporting that leans wayyyy less on open rates. We'll probably also see more email clients adopt similar privacy features - which means that data extrapolation from weaker metrics won't be an option.

But that's how we'll work through this change internally. The real work will be customer-facing: In 2022 and beyond, we'll shift our focus to drive more clicks - so we can measure engagement concretely.

Informative newsletters will link to related blog content - or perhaps feature a "rate this email" modal in the footer. We'll see more click-through options - more instances throughout the email, more linked text, more buttons. We'll see more click triggers around buttons.

But the most effective strategy will be to redefine email communication. Shortening emails will slide the readers down the slope that leads to the button. Omitting just enough information will leave our subscribers wanting more. Including more video or feature teases will drive readers out.

Emails will cease to be standalone content - and will lean on external resources to continue the story and journey (and give us our metrics!).

2021 was the year everyone started to talk about accessibility as a major part of their emails, from design, copywriting and in the code. With Email on Acid, Litmus and EmailForAll creating surveys to learn more and sharing as much information as possible to help email marketers create more accessible emails. This is going to be a big trend in 2022, with more research planned, more techniques and guides being shared and an even bigger emphasis on accessibility.

Although we say every year personalisation is a trend, with Mail Privacy Protection, the loss of 3rd party cookies on the web and recipients being more aware of privacy, talking to your email base about what they like, how often they want to hear from you and being transparent with any tracking you are doing is going to lead to greater personalisation and a much better relationship with your audience.

There won't be a revolution in the way we design and build emails, but there are a few trends that will be more heavily incorporated in 2022.

Optimism and light-heartedness. After enduring years of restrictions, lockdowns and masks, it's time to bring fresh air and fun into our email designs. Color trends are moving towards neon palettes and bright, natural colors. Gradients will stay.

Mobile design. The design tools that we use for designing emails now offer more powerful features to control how your email will look on a smartphone. As tools evolve, so will the design approaches to create the best possible responsiveness on all devices.

Dark mode best practices. A poll by Android Authority showed that out of 2,514 voters, over 90% used some type of dark mode on their mobile devices. It's no longer a matter of dark mode VS light mode. Next year is about incorporating best practices for both into your design.

Animations. As design tools evolve and internet connections speed up thanks to innovations like 5G, we'll start to see a lot more creative animations (mainly because images files can be increased in size without too much risk).

Greater use of email design systems.

The volume of email brands are sending continued to increase throughout 2021. Unfortunately, email production time is following the same trend with most teams taking 2 weeks or longer to complete an email. With budgets remaining flat (for now), I predict we'll see a greater shift towards design systems for email in 2022.

Similar to a web design system, an email design system is a single source of truth that allows teams to quickly design and develop their emails.

Brands using an email design system will see coherent brand identity and design consistency across the email channel. This is especially beneficial for large organisations with multiple products and for remote decentralised marketing teams.

Production times will decrease, allowing teams to focus their energy on campaign ideation, better/more personalisation, A/B testing etc.

The production process will be democratised, allowing marketers with no code experience to create emails that are on brand and error free. Designers and developers can focus more time on creating and testing new components for the email design system.

What's HOT and what's NOT

1) Cleaning, always be cleaning.

In the past the latest hype was high profile engaged users, or timely delivery systems, or meta data segments. Sure, those are still reasonable attributes to be aware of and take into consideration but in 2022, brands will be more concerned with cleaning. Churn is sometimes good.

They will make their unsubscribing process as easy, if not easier than your subscribing process.

In the process, they will ensure that their unsubscribe process is intuitive to perform and does not require the user to enter their own email address. Do not use alternative syntax, use plain and simple words. You also want to send a hash url string, do not use plain text email addresses in the url strings.

You do not want to send a confirmation email for unsubscribing. Be thoughtful of the users ability to unsubscribe. Sending a user to a frequency page is fine, just do not make it more than a few options. Keep it simple. Clean, clean, and clean.

2) Privacy.

Apple's announcement of their new privacy is actually a step in the right direction.

This will push brands to protect their data and be cautious of inviting too many 3rd party vendors to sniff their traffic along the way. As a result, there's a good chance that they will go beyond Apple's new Mail Privacy Protection by using a CDN to help protect all their customers' data.

They won't be looking for new ways to thwart user's privacy, like fingerprinting browsers. Instead, they'll aim to be a beacon of privacy for all the people they email to.

3) 1%

You might think that 100% of your email list makes 100% of your revenue, but you are wrong.

Send less, make nearly the same. Of course there will be exceptions and you should never compare yourself to others, but in the wild I have seen 90% of revenue from email lists coming from 1% of data. In 2022, more and more brands will busy themselves with harnessing this 1%.

The people who are opening, clicking, and engaging on your most recent emails will become their best future/present customers.

Remember cleaning? Marketers will start to get rid of people who are not engaging with their emails, at the very least email to them with far less frequency. They will email their 1% that makes their 90%. Your percentages will be different, but you get the picture.

If you still do not understand, let me spell it out for you.

Stop mailing people who have not opened or clicked on your emails within the last 3 months. Your delivery will be better. You will make almost the same revenue. You will have less churn. You wake up every morning smelling like roses.

This could be the year more businesses finally take the personalised approach.

With IOS15 now in full swing and open rates now being a thing of the past, surely it's time that everyone took personalisation as seriously as they should. Let's get the most out of email marketing and give subscribers the experience they deserve.

It's time to utilise all that data that most ESPs contain and harness it for the greater good. For example the amount of generic emails that were sent on Black Friday offering the subscriber everything but a kitchen sink, why not tailor those offers specifically to the subscriber using what they have browsed, bought etc. Make it more personal.

And finally, I hope a major trend this year will be that email marketing won't be all about the ROI but more about customer journey, long gone are the days of spammy sales messages and offers. Subscribers and customers want real life interaction and that's where personalisation will be the absolute key. As Kevin Costner said in The Field of Dreams, "If you build it they will come". In the case of email though, "if you build with your subscriber in mind , they will stay".

In 2022, recipients will continue to enjoy animation or interaction functionality within their inbox, so organisations need to work out how to make the most of engagement within the email in a way that makes sense and adds value for their recipients.

This year you should focus on getting recipients to act on the email as much as possible. Interacting with the email in the inbox will increase their likelihood of clicking through and completing a desired action, such as a purchase for a retailer or booking a consultation for service providers. With changes late 2021 making opening metrics less reliable than ever, interaction is even more important.

Gamification is a highly effective form of bringing in brand personality to encourage interaction and will become more prevalent in 2022. Email marketing gamification is responsible for a 30% increase in the email open rate according to Econsultancy. Penguin Books have some great examples that are relatively straightforward to implement - for example using their Penguin characters sharing favourite books and encouraging you to click to see what it is. More interesting than a simple list. Scratch card animations, pick a prize and quizzes are also popular ideas that are easy to implement and you can run across multiple channels (e.g. sharing answers or winners on socials)

And it's an affordable technique to implement - just needs a little creativity. The last 2 years have been rough, so a little fun to lighten things up may be just the answer. From simple quizzes to more sophisticated gamification, the more you can get recipients to interact, the longer they will be engaged.

Email Marketing teams will play a greater role in owned channel management.

• In 2022, we will see how Email Marketing teams will take over all communications to their own databases within the so-called "owned channels". This will include email marketing campaigns and, increasingly, sending communications to mobile applications (push notifications, in app messages and message centre). As brands start acquiring successful use cases with these types of communications, the next natural step will be to integrate them into more complex programmes that also incorporate email. Multichannel campaigns will gain prominence in 2022.

Implementation of agile marketing operations management systems will increase.

• Marketing operations are responsible for creating audiences, sending tests, validating links, including tracking codes and other tags, converting layouts into HTML documents, writing query codes so that personalisation rules and dynamic content work correctly, etc. More complex marketing operations will lead to adopting agile management systems that cut down on production times, avoid errors while boosting the contribution of email marketing to the company's overall sales.

1. A focus on behavioral based sends will become key as tracking engagement by opens is no longer accurate post iOS 15. Marketers should look to track website activity so they can understand the best time to send to the individual based on their browsing behavior, not when they (supposably) opened the email.
2. Proper website tracking including product/page views, searches, add to carts, etc. is imperative so you can react in real-time with behavioral based sends while relying less on batch and blast messages. These emails constantly perform better across every KPI and provide a much better customer experience vs relying on generic batch/blast sends. This has become increasingly necessary as brands battle customer fatigue which leads to increased opt out rates and disengagement.
3. Customer retention has become a top priority for brands as it's increasingly more expensive to scale and target new acquisition, especially across paid channels post iOS 14.5 combined with overall market competition from new brands launched over the last couple years. This will continue to be the case in 2022. Brands should focus on getting those first time customers back for a 2nd and 3rd purchase. A great way to do this is by using historical behavior and transactional data to showcase new products in a previously purchased category

Email is no longer a solo act in owned-channel marketing

Developing a customer lifecycle with a multi-channel messaging approach across email, SMS, push, and in-app at key user moments will be crucial to delivering relevant, timely communication in 2022.

Multi-channel

• SMS has taken 2021 by storm with its touted high conversion rates. This invasive, yet timely channel will continue to dominate alongside the growth of push notifications, and in-app messaging.

Broadening Job Descriptions

• Email marketing positions will expand into lifecycle marketing roles as teams begin to leverage these channels. Skillsets that include HTML, and CSS will be great additives for creating custom in-app messages to align out-of-the-box templates from ESP's and automation tools closer to the brand.

Expanding AI

• As customer preferences adapt and change, ESP's and automation tools will begin to offer features like "preferred channel" and "intelligent selection" to shift the relevant message, to the preferred channel that your customer interacts with most.

Marketing is not a one size fits all approach, just because we've seen success with email, doesn't mean another channel won't resonate better for an individual user. Brands will need to lean into the unknown to determine what works best for their user.

- Accessibility: Many people are always talking about accessibility and we are getting better at it but I think there is going to be more of a focus on reading emails out loud from various smart devices that don't house screens. I have a feeling that being burned out on screens is the sole reason why Alexa and Google Home have skyrocketed in usage due to convenience in our busy lives. I think that more devices will pick up on that and development will mature a bit on the big players especially if they collaborate more with the email industry's brightest minds.

- Interactive emails: Nowadays it's become more common to find developers moving to email rather than just landing in it forcefully so that brings in some great ideas from all kinds of angles. There is newfound respect and money being poured into the channel and more interesting usage for interactive emails will pickup and while AMP for email might've never truly taken off but I feel as though it was onto something.

- Code Wise: Long time code support will again get a bit marginally better. Dark mode support will start getting more love it truly deserves from efforts that #emailgeeks have started in the standardization game.

Resetting your Email Program in 2022.

2022 is the time when marketers will reset their email marketing program. As the past few weeks have shown the pandemic is not over. McKinsey reported that over 40% of all consumers have changed their preferred brand and almost 50% have changed their shopping method during the pandemic. Over 80% of these consumers intend to continue with these new behaviors. B2B buyers have also changed, with Gartner reporting that B2B procurement specialists expect 59% of all B2B sales to come from online and less than 25% coming via sales by 2023.

Buyers and the way they buy have changed. Marketers should review their email marketing programmes. How the program changes will be specific to your business, but you can get started by looking at your BDoC (Before the Days of COVID) versus your DoC (Days of COVID) data. Look at how your customer demographics, marketing interactions and buying behaviours have changed and modify your email strategy accordingly.

In 2022, what's old is new...again. But maybe this time we mean it? I'm talking specifically about the latest privacy solutions that have caused angst for some marketers: a world with no more cookies and no more open tracking. In 1999, "web bugs" and cookies were hotly debated by privacy experts. Two decades later, we may finally see the decline of both.

Apple and others will continue to make it difficult for social ads to fingerprint, track and target users, and as a result, brands will rely less on other's data and spend less on social ads and more on first-party data collection using email.

Email addresses as a unique identifier will continue to rise making the email marketers role more crucial to collect accurate data that can be used across an organization.

Ransomware and other attacks will occur more frequently and at higher profile targets thanks to email phishing. Email and anti-spam providers will likely make it more difficult to reach the inbox through improved machine learning solutions and requiring authentication.

The text-based email will make a short comeback thanks to the death of open tracking as marketers experiment with new formats.

• The pandemic has increased online shopping behaviors and digital communication. Brands will be actively bringing the in-store or in-person experience to email. Design and craft messages with this in mind. What concierge services or conversations can you have with your audience to deepen the customer relationship? What are their specific needs? How can we add value and engagement digitally?
• Personalization becomes a must now and table stakes for email. Review what products each subscriber has bought or abandoned previously. What complementary product would they be interested in next? Marketers will guide them. Upsell and abandoned cart messages must be designed with personalized recommendations and automated AI assistance.
• Big privacy changes will affect open rates and click engagement metrics will be even more critical. What products are your subscribers clicking on? What content areas are of interest? Analyze and evaluate every click with detail.
• Multi-channel integration will continue to magnify your email messages Send SMS and social messages that complement your emails for increased conversions. Encourage and incentivize social followers to be email subscribers. Make email messaging the star with supporting players.
• Some elements of email marketing are timeless - including crafting thoughtful designs with a consistent brand image and an ease in usability, and never go out of style. Clear CTAs with engaging imagery, animation and simple messaging force you to forget the trends and go back to tried and true tactics that work, year after year. There is a reason email is the #1 ROI among all channels. Send consistently and frequently in 2022 and beyond.

We're still dealing with the biggest pandemic in the last century, and its effects will be felt in email marketing for a long time to come. Email marketing is no longer a 'nice to have', but more and more brands are making email central to their marketing strategy and doing a better job. That's because email marketing is proving once again how essential it is in our lives, and marketers have noticed. Moreover, the companies making efforts to do better will be reaping the rewards of those efforts. Here are a few trends to keep an eye on in 2022.

1) Email is Important - Companies are putting more resources into email than ever before. Don't fall behind.

2) Segmentation and Personalization is King - Delivering the right message to the right customers at the right time is the promise. Segmenting is the vehicle that'll deliver.

3) Privacy is a thing - Apple dropped the mike when it announced it would block opens by default, leaving marketers scrambling. We still haven't seen other providers follow suit, but it doesn't matter. We have to look at the metrics differently, forever.

4) Help is needed - Brands are so busy churning out emails that the gravy of testing automations, segmentation, and personalization are suffering.

5) Email marketing needs to be aware of what's happening in the world. Corona taught us the danger of being tone-deaf or worse in our email messages. Make sure it doesn't happen to you, or better yet, send perfect and timely emails. Happy Emailing.

1. Empathy marketing is not a tactic.
   An ever-changing political environment, a pandemic turned endemic, and every other headline you'll read across the world should tell you the number one thing you'll need to know in 2022: Empathy marketing is done. It's gone the way of digital marketing. It's not a capital T thing and is now the norm - just plain marketing. Companies who can't read the emotional room will suffer, and you'll have to really get to know users.
2. Data is dead.
   First GDPR and CCPA. Now MPP. All that data you've been collecting is directional at best. Data is no longer the car you're driving, it's the Garmin installed in the rental and it keeps recalculating. It'll help you, but you'll have to spend more time thinking about user experience (see #1). Congratulations. Now you're not only a storyteller as a marketer, you're also a storyteller when figuring out how to share stats within your company.
3. You're no longer just an email person. SMS is ramping up.
   Push is more prevalent. All that extra work is going to have to fall somewhere. If you ignore these channels, you'll be behind the curve. If you use them already, you're going to have to learn the right balance of email and SMS and push and referrals and direct mail and rewards and, and… Well, let's just say play your cards right and you could be up for a promotion. Update that resume quarterly.

1. Focus on Data privacy

Whether it's new legislation and regulation that is changing the ways companies can collect and leverage data in their marketing programs or specific technological developments that specifically address email marketing (like Apple's Mail Privacy Protection features), email marketers will be challenged in 2022. That said, the email channel is well-positioned to thrive in 2022. So, expect email marketers to continue to successfully adapt to changing requirements while delivering impactful and effective campaigns in 2022.

2. More Accessible Emails

One of the most important marketing trends that many companies overlook is to make emails accessible to as many people as possible. We will see marketers going the accessible way; and it's easy to do. It can include something as simple as using a large font and ensuring your graphics are crystal clear. Many consumers also enjoy having the choice of viewing emails in dark mode as they feel it is kinder to their eyes.

3. Interactivity

Expect to see email campaigns that leverage a wide variety of engaging interactivity within the content. Look for polls/surveys, games, forms, and other types of content that recipients can interact with inside the email itself, rather than clicking out to visit a website. Adding this type of interactive element is extremely user-friendly and also reduces the number of steps required to drive any number of actions by recipients. With the increased focus on performance, interactivity will provide tools to optimize campaigns to maximize recipient engagement and conversions in 2022.

I believe that in 2022 we will see a continuation of the changes that started this decade... a shift towards a more holistic approach to email marketing. I'm expecting to see:

• MarTech solutions will be consolidating functionalities under their roofs. A seamless user experience will save people's time and improve their focus. For example, Marketing Automation solutions might integrate with the best Email Verification API... and provide email verification functionalities inside.
• Technology will also give us a better view of our customers and our relationships with them. There will be better ways to capture customers' input about their preferences, interests, and needs. And better tools to visualize it - both for the aggregated view, but also for the single customer's journey.
• All those enhancements will be done with respect to people's privacy. Thus, I hope that people will have better options to manage information that companies know about them. I presume that there will also be a higher adoption of "Hide My Email and Location". Thus, when someone will be leaving us their real email address - it will be a big sign of true trust.
• Finally... when we will have better tools that save time, we will be able to focus on building real Human 2 Human relationships.