Email marketing is crucial to a successful B2B marketing strategy. Carefully crafted emails based on trending best practices help email marketers improve their lead nurturing tactics and increase conversion rates. Recently, email marketing was ranked the number one method for effectively nurturing leads. Additionally, 59% of B2B marketers say email is their most effective channel to generate revenue.

With emails pulling in drastic marketing improvements and increased revenue, it’s critical to stay up to date with the email techniques and strategies that are proven to work well. Marketing strategies are dynamic — what worked for your team last year, may not work this year. That’s why keeping up with the tactics that are yielding the best results is necessary to continuously execute an effective email marketing strategy. To maximize email marketing efforts within the latter half of this year, let’s take a look at 2021’s top 4 email marketing trends.

1. Hyper-Personalization

The first major email marketing trend is hyper-personalization. Believe it or not, a HubSpot study showed a 202% increase in conversions when personalization was used.

So what’s the difference between personalization and hyper-personalization? Let’s look at an example. In the past, personalization typically involved putting a prospect’s name in the greeting of an email. But when companies are competing for an audience’s attention, the typical email personalization tokens no longer stand out. Meanwhile, a hyper-personalized email could include an optimized message based on a prospect’s job title, industry, and how they've interacted with your marketing materials in the past.

Let’s say your company sells software to create dynamic sales presentations. So, a prospect creates a presentation with your free online software. Once they publish their presentation you can craft an automated email to deploy directly to their inbox letting them know their presentation is ready. Based on the prospect’s industry, you can include sales tips and best practices for getting that presentation seen by the right buyers in their niche. This example of hyper-personalization elicits a feeling of understanding and trust, furthering your chances of winning a buyer's attention.

All in all, personalized emails have an average ROI of 122% and personalized subject lines generate about a 50% chance of higher open rates. With statistics like this, it’s hard to believe that hyper-personalization is just a trend for 2021. We expect marketers to continue finding creative ways to personalize their outreach for years to come.

2. Email Automation

When setting up sophisticated automated email campaigns, there are many software options like Klaviyo, MailChimp, or HubSpot, among others. Which is fantastic, because automated emails secure approximately 119% higher click rates than broadcast emails, making this another favorite email marketing trend for 2021. Besides the fact that automated emails enable email marketers to theoretically “set it and forget it,” they also ensure each recipient gets the right information at the right time sent to them based on specific criteria. Essentially, email automation saves email marketers time and ensures consistent and cohesive communication between meaningful prospects and the brand.

Consider this example. A new lead visits your website and fills out a form to download an ebook on IT automation for financial services organizations. The form contains form fields specific to the information you want to know (name, job title, company, industry, etc.). Once they submit the form, they're created as a lead in your CRM. Next, the contact is automatically segmented into a specific list based on the information collected. In this case, the contact moves into a list of financial services prospects. From here, the contact is placed into a workflow.

As the prospect moves through the workflow and engages with specific content, they accumulate points to ultimately convert into a marketing-qualified lead. This process is called lead scoring. Lead scoring helps marketers prioritize leads and engage them appropriately based on multiple attributes, including their professional information and their interaction with the company through the website, content, email campaigns, and more. Each action a prospect takes within the workflow informs the system as to which content they'll receive next, allowing for a more personalized and valuable buyer experience.

Möve Marketing specializes in marketing automation. If any of the above resonates with you and sounds like something you should be doing but need help with, reach out to us here.

3. Text-Only Emails

The internet is full of bright, bold, eye-catching images. Sometimes, less is more when it comes to garnering email marketing success in 2021. That’s why text-only emails are becoming more popular amongst email marketers. According to a HubSpot experiment on text-only emails vs. HTML templates with images, the HTML email version had a 21% lower click-through rate.

But it makes sense. These emails often read as though they were handwritten by an actual human being. Can you believe it? Not only are text-only emails humanistic, they are also highly accessible. Text emails require little to no coding which makes them easier and faster for marketers to send out. Additionally, the lack of complex HTML code makes text-only emails easier for screen readers, smartwatches, and voice assistants to understand.

With that said, we recommend mixing text-only and HTML emails into your campaigns. HTML emails are just as important as text emails. In fact, HTML emails offer better opportunities for branding, help increase click-through rates, and enable you to draw attention to important parts of your email by using bold colors and fonts. So don’t underestimate the power of either type of email — both have their advantages!

4. Responsiveness = A Must-Have

Responsive emails are constantly on-trend. The last thing someone wants to do is open an email on their phone and have to zoom in and out and scroll side to side to read the entire message. Emails should be mobile-friendly and responsive to any screen size. Basically, responsive emails adapt to the size of the screen the user is reading from.

For instance, let’s say you sent an email to three email recipients. One opens the email on a laptop (screen size: 15 inches), the next opens the email on their smartphone (screen size: 5.8 inches), and the other reads the email from a tablet (screen size: 9.7 inches). A responsive email will appear the exact same on all three screens. If your email is not responsive to one of these screens, you risk your email being deleted instantly upon opening. In fact, 7 out of 10 users delete emails that don’t display correctly on their phones. Because of this and the fact that 60% of email campaigns are read on mobile, it’s crucial that moving forward, email marketers prioritize mobile-friendly emails that respond to all screen sizes.