How I fell back in love with email marketing during 2017

With Black Friday just gone and Christmas around the corner, it's a key selling time for many businesses and many of our clients. We love the pressure of hitting deadlines and reaching targets but, it's important too, to find those quiet moments and don the thinking cap.

2017 has been a wonderful year for us at Jarrang. We've streamlined, re-calibrated our focus and got back to doing what we do best; creating amazing email marketing programmes for our clients.

For me, this process and journey, has been both invigorating and enlightening. When you've been in the game as long as I have, it's easy to find yourself jaded, weary and cynical. And I'll admit, last year I felt all of these. That's why this year has been such a tonic for me. My team have been fantastic, attacking every challenge with vigour and positivity. What's more, I feel like I've been seduced by the beauty of email marketing once again.

It's a hugely exciting time for the industry as advances in technology, the use of data and changing consumer expectations combine to allow email marketing to shine the brightest among the many marketing channels we all have at our disposal.

Here's a snapshot of some of the things that have had the biggest impact on me this year:

‍The email marketing renaissance.

I started working with email marketing in 2001. And I can safely say since then the 'death knell' of email marketing has been rung countless times. But not this year. Email marketing is flourishing thanks in a large part to the power of marketing automation, the ability to harvest and act on a huge amount of consumer data, and the ability to deliver highly personalised content. Advanced email marketing programmes allow businesses to deliver the right message, at the right time, to the right person. There's nothing in the whole marketing playbook more powerful than this.

‍Quality shines through.

‍It seems like something that's said every year, the reason being is it always rings true. Nothing beats quality, whether that's in design or content. We all deal with so much noise every day, especially in our inboxes. It takes great quality, and craftsmanship, to cut through this noise and this year, more than ever, the most successful email marketing programmes I've seen are those where quality is placed at the very top.

‍Smarter sending.

‍A trend we've started to see this year, and I expect to pick up pace next year, is customers embracing the idea of sending smarter emails. The sniper approach is delivering much better results for people than the traditional email blast. I don't want the emails we send to be a blast or a rocket, I want them to be crafted to go to the right people, carrying the right message. Again, with marketing automation, this can be heightened and refined to deliver even more powerful results. I fully expect the volume of emails people send to reduce while the revenue they make from them increases as more people adopt smarter sending strategies.  

‍It's all about the data.

‍GDPR has been the hot topic on everyone's lips this year, with plenty of confusion still surrounding it. As an email marketing company, it's something we take very seriously and is extremely relevant to us and all our customers. The big impact we'll see is on data collection techniques, use of data and data storage. At present, the key point here is to gather all of your data, find out what you have got, map it and then do an audit on where it came from when the interpretations are published. Once this is done, make a plan to update your privacy policies, re-opt-in your subscribers and ditch the no-no data. You can find out more about what we know so far on GDPR here.

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‍So as we brave the cold, dark nights, gear up for the festive season to begin in earnest and put in the hard yards to deliver for our customers at one of their busiest times of year, I find myself reflecting with a smile and relishing what's coming over the horizon in 2018.