Among the many innovations in the b2b marketing landscape, email retains its relevance as the basic, most widespread and effective direct marketing channel. The Marketing Channel and Engagement Benchmark Survey conducted in September 2012 revealed that in 2013, marketers plan to invest in email as much as they did in 2012.
However, email marketing itself is struggling to keep abreast of the changing times.
An evolving trend in the world of email marketing is the speed of integration with social media. Marketers now increasingly rely on social media channels to identify online influences. However, contrary to the perception that marketers would move away from email to the communication facilities offered by social media channels, marketers rather seek to seamless integrate or co-opt social media data to emails as the means to strike a two-way conversation with the prospects and customers targeted using social media.
The spread of mobile devices such as tablets and smart phones also has its impact in email marketing. Marketers are now designing email content keeping such mobile users in mind. 2013 may be the year that more people access email through smart phones and tablets than desktops or laptops. Some fundamental design changes that have already started making its way into email content is larger link tabs for finger taps rather than providing a link for a mouse click, doing way with the requirement for extensive keyboard support. However, much work still needs doing on this front, and to facilitate this, marketers would seek more control over the content also.
A key challenge for the marketer in 2013 would be to identify the right tools and platforms that would allow them to deliver appropriate and optimized content, and therefore leverage their data. At Right On Interactive we have worked diligently to stay abreast of the needs of our customers and have continually introduced new technology, like Right On’s Lifecycle Marketing map that graphically displays each prospect and customer that you are working to engage with.
