45% of scientific marketers report a 10-20% average email open rate for 2021 (fig 1 below). Does that seem about right or are you surprised by those figures? It certainly fits in with other industry email marketing reports that we’ve seen, such as those done by Mailchimp and Campaign Monitor.
Email marketing remains an important tool for the Scientific Marketer and will continue to play a big role in the 2022 marketing mix. 65% ranked email marketing as a high or very high priority for 2022 and 75% of respondents were utilising email marketing tools to help them enhance their email marketing efforts.
Whether your goal is to increase open rates, click-through rates or simply engage your audience within the email platform, there are a number of tips that we use at AZoNetwork that can help marketers to achieve their goals.
*All stats taken from The State of Scientific Marketing Survey 2022
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Email Marketing Tips for 2022
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Focus on the copy of your email
It might sound like an obvious one but are you putting a lot of focus on what goes into your emails? This tip goes back to understanding your customers and their needs. How do you engage them in the subject line, the preheader text, the first sentence of the email? A useful way to look at this could be to ask yourself: does my email subject make people want to open this email, does the first sentence motivate readers to read the second sentence and so on.
There are more emails being sent than ever before so standing out in the inbox of your customers is more challenging than ever. Avoid the email ‘hacks’ like including FW: in your subject header and focus on authentic copy that will encourage your audience to read on and take the next action.
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An omnichannel approach to email marketing in 2022
Email is just one touch point that you have with your subscribers. A personalized omnichannel approach to your marketing could be pivotal in 2022. Providing a consistent, integrated and branded experience across your channels will help convert more of your customers.
As an example let's say a customer has read an email about a product release and clicked on the CTA button taking them to a landing page. They then took no further action. You could retarget that person with an additional email talking more about the product or with a social media ad that highlights the key benefits. In this example the email is just part of an overall personalized experience for the customer.
As mentioned above in point 1, email marketing is competitive but it also suffers from a poor reputation due to the tendency of some marketers to use it for spamming their customers. Personalizing your emails might be the answer for you in 2022. Think about your own experiences and the emails that you click on. What resonated with you? Adding personalization to emails shows the reader that you are engaging with them rather than spamming a large cohort of subscribers. Segment your audience so the messaging can be more specific to the individual and write emails as if you are talking to an individual rather than to the masses.
Email Marketing trends to consider in 2022
Dark mode for email is becoming increasingly popular and is available on most of the popular email clients. This trend looks set to continue into 2022 so optimizing our emails so that they look and feel right in dark mode is important. Here are a few tips to consider:
Use transparent images in your email. If you include graphics with a background colour then it might not fit well within dark mode.
Consider your logo. If the colour(s) in your logo don’t fit with dark mode then consider including your logo in your email banner image or create a logo banner where your logo sits in a white background.
You can also code your email so that it avoids the default settings for dark mode within the email client. Eg. you could code your CTA button to appear 1 colour in light mode and another in dark mode. A word of warning here - this technique may not be consistent across the different mailing clients so be sure to run extensive tests before sending.
Ensuring that your email and the information in it looks great, regardless of the device it is being viewed on, is of course extremely important.
59% of Millennials primarily use their smartphone to check email, while 67% of Generation Z scans their inbox on mobile. (Bluecore, 2021 - cited on HubSpot) With that in mind here are a couple of tips for ensuring your emails are mobile friendly:
Put as much focus on how your email is viewed on a mobile device as you do for desktop emails. Consider the amount of copy in your email, utilise white space effectively and think about the size of your graphics.
Ensure your landing pages are also optimised for mobile. If your goal is to get people to click on a call-to-action button within your email then ensure that the ‘next step’ also provides your audience with an experience optimized for the device they are using.
The key to ensuring you are not negatively impacted by points 1 and 2 are of course to test your emails with various email clients, dark/light mode and across different devices (desktop, mobile, tablet).
Of course there is a legal obligation to follow the data privacy laws of the countries in which you operate, but how you manage data can also be a competitive advantage. Companies like Apple are increasing their focus on how end users control their data and this is a trend we suspect will continue to increase in importance going forward. Here are a couple of thoughts.
Respect your subscriber base. Make it as straightforward as possible for someone to unsubscribe from your lists or to select the mailing lists that they want to be on. There is nothing more infuriating than a complex unsubscribe process. Making it easier for your subscribers to select what they want to subscribe to also helps you to segment your audience and better personalize the content which they are receiving.
In 2022 Apple's Mail Privacy Protection may well make your open rate metric inaccurate. This means that using open rates as a metric for email success will likely become redundant. Using clicks, website traffic & unsubscribes will give you a clearer picture of your email quality.
Conclusion
Email marketing remains an important tool for the modern Scientific Marketer and we suspect that email marketing will be as popular as ever in 2022. The tips in this blog should provide you with some ideas for how your emails can stand out in the inbox and enhance your overall marketing effectiveness.
You can read more trends within Scientific Marketing by downloading the 3rd edition of The State of Scientific Marketing 2022 below.
