Email is a tried and tested method of email marketing. Cost-effective to run and with the highest ROI of any form of marketing, it’s become an essential part of many companies’ marketing strategies, especially as it’s possible to grow huge subscriber lists over time. However, with more consumers now preferring other forms of communication, like texts, private messaging and app notifications, email is having to move with the times in order to keep recipients engaged. Here, we’ll look at some of the ways email marketing is expected to develop in the near future.

1. Personalisation on the rise

In an effort to increase opening rates and conversions, many companies are now turning to personalisation in order to make marketing emails more relevant to their subscribers. The solution that makes this possible is the use of cloud-based AI and machine learning applications. Their ability to carry out big data analysis of customer behaviour provides insights that can be used to trigger automated, personalised emails, sent out at the optimal time, to improve the chances of conversion.

2. Intelligent campaign analytics

Email software used by webmasters has always included some metrical data on email campaigns, providing information about opening rates, clickthroughs and so forth. Today, however, technology has moved forward. With more campaign data being collected and AI and machine learning used to analyse it, companies are able to run far more successful campaigns. Even better, much of the work needing to be done is automated for them. Now, not only is it possible to track how effective a campaign is; you can also use the data to make automated optimisations throughout, enabling the campaign to be constantly tweaked in order to improve its effectiveness.

3. Email reviews

Customer reviews are now essential to the success of a company, with over 70 per cent of all purchasers reading them before deciding to buy. What’s also true, is that the same proportion of customers are also likely to leave a review if you ask them to do so. Email offers a great way to do this as links to review sites can be built into the email copy. Indeed, feedback forms can also be embedded into the emails and the comments received here can be used as user-generated content to send out to other recipients. Not only will more companies do this; we’ll see them using AI to choose the customers who are most likely to write positive reviews.

4. Interactive email content

While getting a user to open an email can be challenging enough, to be of any use, you really need them to read it and take action. With competition from other forms of marketing, emails will need to be far more engaging than the standard text, image and call to action content that most currently contain. Today, more companies are beginning to create emails that have dynamic content which can keep the user engaged and motivate them to click on the CTA, these include embedded videos, hamburger menus, product carousels, rollover images and even animated CTAs.

5. Alexa mail

While efforts to improve the content of emails with dynamic visual content will work with many, an increasing number of people are beginning to abandon the visual email interface in preference for having them read out by smart speakers and voice assistants. This makes it more convenient for users who want to open messages while driving, walking around with their headphones on or wanting to multi-task while making dinner.

With the boom in the number of these voice-enabled devices being sold, an increasing number of emails are going to be opened in this way – though one can imagine that not all users who choose this method will use it all the time. This leaves marketers with a problem of how to communicate effectively with these users. If you send a traditional email, they won’t be able to see any images (only hear the alt-tag read out) and they’ll be unable to click through to any landing page. At the same time, neither you nor the user might know how the email will be accessed, until the moment it is. Overcoming these issues will be a major challenge to email marketers as the number of smart speakers grows.

Conclusion

While alternative modes of communication are challenging email as the preferred means of receiving marketing, the future promises to deliver some important developments that will make it even more appealing to both company and customer alike. Personalisation and interactive content will make emails more relevant and engaging and data-driven analytics will improve campaign performance. On the negative side, however, email needs to adapt to the smart speaker era.

The post Watch Out For These 5 Email Marketing Trends appeared first on anteelo.

Virtualisation is one of the most exciting technologies being used by businesses today. It has revolutionised the IT world, bringing a range of benefits to both service providers and their customers. In this post, we’ll look at how virtualisation can help your company.

1 . A cool and eco-friendly IT solution

A server can generate a lot of heat and when it is not properly cooled it has the potential to overheat. This can lead to power outages, hardware failure and a resulting loss of data – all critical events that businesses strive to avoid. When you have banks of servers sitting in the same datacentre, the potential for disaster is even greater. One way to reduce the amount of heat generated is to reduce the number of physical servers being used and this can be done effectively by creating multiple virtual servers on each physical machine.

Not only is this a cooler solution; it’s also an eco-friendly one. Businesses are not only lowering the energy consumption needed to run so many physical machines; they are also reducing the energy required to power air-conditioning. As a result, virtualisation can help your drive to become carbon neutral while bringing about less expensive energy bills at the same time.

2. Less expensive to deploy and maintain

The capital expenditure required to create an in-house datacentre can be very expensive when you add up the cost of the hardware. Servers are not cheap. With virtualisation, the number of physical servers needed is fewer, thus lowering the overall investment needed. Similarly, virtual servers require much less maintenance than their hardware counterparts and this lowers costs even more.

Those who opt to use virtual machines hosted by a service provider will also notice a significant difference in the price.

3. Blisteringly fast to deploy

Deploying a new virtual server is a swift and simple process that enables companies to get on with necessary tasks without disruption. This attribute is also excellent for preventing downtime. If a physical server crashed and there wasn’t a redundant backup available, getting back online could be a time-consuming process with a costly outcome. Using virtualisation, a new server could be online in the time it takes to boot up.

4. Faster up-to-date backups

Today’s virtual backup tools, like Veaam, enable not just the data stored on virtual machines but the entire virtual server to be backed up swiftly, securely and at automated schedules, ensuring that what you store is always up to date. As it is possible to migrate these virtual servers between physical machines, any necessary redeployment can be undertaken very quickly.

5. Disaster Recovery made simple and quick

Being unable to recover quickly from a disaster situation can have a catastrophic impact on a company, potentially putting them out of business. Despite this, a 2019 survey discovered that 82% of businesses were not fully prepared for a DR incident, with only 27% confident they could ensure continuous availability and only half of them confident of restoring all their data. The majority believed it would take over 8 hours to fully restore services.

In a virtual environment, however, the DR process is both simplified and quicker. Regular backups ensure your virtual server and data are up to date and these can be migrated to another location to be restored within minutes of going offline.

6. Easier and safer DevOps and testing

For those developing new applications or testing new environments, there’s always the risk that if something goes wrong you would have to restart the testing process from the beginning. The ability to create backup clones of virtual machines at any point during testing means that if the worst happens, you can restore the last working stage of your project almost instantly. As a result, testing is less arduous and can proceed at a quicker pace.

7. Avoid vendor lock-in

Reliance on the hardware configuration provided by your vendor can tie you to their services and prevent you from seeking better provision elsewhere. Virtual machines, however, work independently from physical servers so there is no reliance on any specific server type or platform. As a result, many of the complications that arise during migration to a new vendor are removed, meaning you can be free from vendor lock-in.

Conclusion

As you can see, virtualisation brings many benefits to businesses. It safer, greener, requires less energy and needs less capital expenditure and maintenance. Additionally, it offers swift backups, quick deployment, it simplifies and speeds up disaster recovery and makes testing easier. It even removes the potential for vendor lock-in.

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Personalisation is not the latest trend in online business. In fact, it has been around for a while. It is, however, becoming the norm, with more and more companies adopting personalisation as a strategy. Those who haven’t yet begun to use personalisation not only fail to reap its benefits; they risk losing customers and sales to their competitors. Here’s why you should consider personalisation for your business.

Why personalisation is important

Today we are bombarded by marketing messages. We find them on websites, social media, emails, television, radio, on the sides of vehicles, on street hoardings and tons of other places. There are so many fighting for our attention that, despite the millions that are spent on them, the majority go ignored. Personalisation has been proven to make customers take more notice and take more action, vastly increasing the effectiveness of marketing campaigns.

To give some substance to that claim, a recent article from SmarterHQ showed that over 90% of consumers would be more likely to buy from a company that provides them with relevant offers and recommendations. What’s more, they also discovered that, in 2019, more than 70% of customers only engaged with marketing messages that met their individual interests.

Since companies like eBay and Amazon started introducing personalisation, consumer expectations have increased. Indeed, if a website doesn’t offer relevant suggestions, almost half of its visitors will head to Amazon before making a decision. Overall, 70% of consumers feel marketing is too impersonal and 36% want even more personalisation than at present. Importantly, where personalisation makes buying less expensive or easier, 90% of consumers are willing to share their data to obtain those benefits – and it is that data which makes personalisation achievable.

The value of data

Websites are able to obtain vast quantities of valuable data from their visitors. This gives marketing departments the ability to know when people shop, what and who they shop for, how much they spend and even why and how they shop. This, however, is just the tip of the data iceberg. Today, businesses go way beyond tracking website behaviour and create end to end journey maps that collect the data on every single interaction an individual has with the organisation, including customer service interactions, emails and responses, product ratings and reviews, social media interactions and so forth. This helps the company to know their customers better than ever before and thus provide them with a far better customer experience.

The insights gained from analysing such data can help a company procure the products their customers want and market them in the most effective, personalised ways. It can even help them send out marketing communications via the customers’ preferred channel and do so at the time that will have the greatest chance of a call to action being followed. And, of course, when the consumer arrives at the website, they’ll be greeted personally and find all the products they are most likely to be interested in and be given offers which are both relevant and appealing.

How to add personalisation capabilities to your website

The growing demand for personalisation means there are an increasing number of plugins, tools and third-party services you can use to help implement it. The key tool is a Customer Relationship Management application that will enable you to do the essential collecting, tracking and analysis of your customer data as well as providing you with the ability to personalise recommendations on the site and send personalised marketing communications. Chatbots are another popular AI tool that act as personal shopping assistants to recommend products based on customer data.

Personalisation tools vary considerably in price. The WordPress Repository has several highly rated plugins with free and premium versions. More advanced tools dealing with bigger quantities of data can cost hundreds of pounds per month. A third-party provider will cost even more but will take the burden of managing the system off your hands and remove the need for in-house technical expertise.

Don’t forget your hosting

Do remember that if you choose to offer personalisation, you will need the capacity to store all the data you are collecting and the processing power to run the apps that will analyse it. This means you may have to consider a more powerful hosting solution for your website, such as VPS, dedicated server or cloud.

At the same time, collecting large quantities of personal data means you will be obliged to ensure its safety and so you may need to enhance the security features that you use to protect your website and online storage.

Conclusion

Personalisation is becoming a necessity for competitive businesses, especially in the eCommerce sector. Offering personalised interactions improves the customer experience and makes marketing strategies far more effective. To do this, however, you need the right tools to collect and analyse the data and to generate the personalised content. You also need the hosting capabilities to deliver personalisation and maintain data security.

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