Optimising your team’s time and effort is so easy with marketing automation! The software essentially takes over all tasks that are mechanical and monotonous, automating them. It begins sending emails, posting social media content, and creating ad campaigns.
With so many benefits, you are sure to be using email marketing automation already. But we are shifting into the new year soon, and with that, we wonder what it holds in store. How will the marketing landscape change? Will we deal with prospects, customers, leads, subscribers, and their behaviour differently?
Here are our top five things to know about the future of marketing automation:
1. Customer feedback will continue to drive content
Personalization is essential at two levels: individual and group. When you receive feedback from your customers and use that to create content, it boosts response rates.
This is User-Generated Content (UGC), which refers to content of any type that is somehow influenced by the preferences of the audience. This includes text, images, and audio-visual content, among others. A common form of using UGC is collecting and displaying customer feedback and product reviews on websites.
The key here is to decide when feedback must be collected. You can use simple modules like upvote and downvote buttons embedded in marketing emails. Or you can lead the customer into a longer survey after asking more straightforward questions.
2. Emails will become more interactive
People have minimal attention spans, which is why it is vital to get them to engage with your content from the get-go. The coming year will see more responsive emails that customers can interact with from their mobiles.
They will be able to do actions such as promotional engagement and clicking from within the email. This will make your emails appear more professional and valuable.
Some interactive elements to look forward to are:
- Surveys and polls that drive UGC
- Product carousels controlled by customers
- Accordion features for email compactness
- Animated buttons and call-to-action features
- Rollover effects for product showcasing
3. Content will become more accessible
Advancements in technology are bringing smart devices closer to people. The coming year will see more smart devices and voice assistants with the capacity to read out content to customers.
By keeping this in mind, marketing automation providers are designing content that can be read by auditory CTAs.
Besides the growth potential, it is important to consider customers with accessibility problems such as vision impairment. Designing content and code that these customers can access improves your relationship with them and earns your company goodwill.
Some ways to make your emails more accessible are:
- Concise email content
- Replace in-image text with real text HTML
- Make your email content hierarchical
- Keep text-alignment in mind, and avoid justified text
- Make font sizes larger and line space freely
- Add in alt-text for images that must be included
- Use semantic HTML
- Make it easier for a screen reader to access the HTML tables
4. Tech support will become available for all issues
Automation software is a little complicated. It can require a fair bit of training to master, and even then, there is a high chance you will run into something you can’t solve yourself.
What do you do when the internet fails, or there are glitches and bugs in the software? You need technical support. And this support must be functional.
More prominent providers provide full tech support at additional pricing, but it is not all-encompassing. Customers must be able to use tech support regardless of their pricing plans.
The coming year will bring more supportive tech teams, which will employ chatbots and live chat systems to help you out all times. If they use more automation themselves, they can keep you up-to-date through social media and email auto-responses.
This way, if you get in touch with them during out-of-office hours, or holidays, you still get some solutions immediately. Only if the problem persists, you will have to contact an actual person.
5. AI will remain the underdog but will be very important in the coming years
Marketers are eagerly looking forward to having more AI-based personalization. This doesn’t seem to be a priority in the immediate future. This is because marketers are currently more interested in customization rather than implementing AI.
A current feature that uses AI is chatbots. However, the software is robust and growing. It can provide great insights into customers and predict industry trends. An immediate application is using AI to generate better content.
Now, chatbots are seen as more annoying than helpful, but this is due to change. AI is advancing rapidly, and this feeds back into the reputation of chatbots.
Customer service is also due to improve in leaps and bounds along with AI. This is because customer insights from AI help determine the best course of action to help your customers. This is done by sending them email promotions that are tailored to their interests and keeping them engaged through content generation.
Marketing automation in a longer-term
Why restrict ourselves to the coming year only? As businesses, it is crucial to have more foresight. In the next few years, marketing automation is only going to grow. Here are some important insights from experts:
- The development of AI will lead to a lot of decision-making becoming automated.
- Using custom subject lines will help in brand distinction.
- UGC will cause better automation and intelligent email creation.
- There will be a movement away from screen-based content towards voice-interactions.
- Within-email actions will be commonplace and remove the need to access websites through browsers.
Summary
Marketing automation will continue to grow in the next year, and after that. Our top trends are User-Generated Content (UGC), interactive emails, accessible content, better tech support and AI-driven technological changes.
These are guaranteed to catapult you into success. If you aren’t already using marketing automation, what are you waiting for? Sign up for a free trial with us today and see your business grow!
