Dive Brief:
- A panel of 20 email marketing experts cited increased personalization as one of the biggest trends that will impact the channel through 2020, according to a new report from Litmus.
- The panel was assembled by Litmus to find out where email marketing is heading over the next five years and included experts from ESPs (email service providers), agencies, consultancies, and research and education firms.
- The report included research from Fluent that found 70% of consumers believe email will still exist in 10 years, compared to 60.2% for Twitter, 51.5% for print media and only 46.6% for landline phones.
Dive Insight:
Consumers today increasingly expect personalized communications and advertising from brands. While the trend will impact all areas of marketing, the panel of experts assembled by Litmus predicted it will have a major impact on email marketing in particular.
"While marketers will still send a lot of broadcast messages, the vast majority of their email revenue will come from these much more targeted messages," Chad White, research director at Litmus, wrote in an article on Marketing Land.
When Litmus broke down the age demographics on consumers who believe email will still be around in 10 years, core millennials aged 25-34 had the most faith in email at 72.1%. The findings reinforce the belief that email is a channel that will be around longer than the latest social network.
From the report: “Support for email is particularly strong among two key demographics. First, older Millennials, a group thought to be hostile toward email, are the most optimistic about email’s longevity. And second, consumers with above average household incomes are also bullish on email. Such optimism among younger, well off consumers is a sign that email marketing will be strong in 2020 and beyond.”
The other email trends that the experts cited include interactive email; voice interfaces rather than screens, particularly for engaging with email via wearables or while in a smart car; increased regulations around spam and other unwanted email; and the possibility of social networks becoming open platforms.
