Emails for E-Commerce: How Effective Are They for Any Business?

Responsive or Fluid Hybrid: Which Technique Would You Use to Reach Your Customers?

There are numerous marketing techniques coming around, but none of the marketers should forget the email strategy as it has become one of the most key elements in the world that is ruled by mobiles. Younger generations too realize the importance of the same and hence make their way into the inboxes of people with the help of solid deliverability strategies. This technique has adapted itself to the smartphone presence too and has emerged to be an extremely flexible channel. This strategy is an independent one and also a supportive one too for the print and digital channels.

This is one channel that helps in interacting with all generations equally. Its presence has become omnipotent for the consumer carries the device with him and the email can reach him.

Why is the spend of time and money on email increasing?

There are quite a number of factors that are trending in emails.

• Majority of the companies have a strategy to allocate more time on this marketing technique.
• They are significantly increasing their marketing spend too.
• It has been found that a whopping percentage of marketers are spending around one hour to five hours developing typical email campaigns.
• This trend is expected to increase where they would spend an additional time per month in email marketing.
• Many people anticipate that this strategy development will have a great impact on the overall email marketing program this year.

For all those who may have thought that email has lost its charm as an effective marketing strategy, they have been proved wrong as it is now far from being a dead channel. Though social media has emerged to be the latest trend, marketers have not given up on email marketing for it still remains the primary communication channel.

Strategy development was found to be a key factor in making this option a success. The email development process takes extra care and caution to ensure better success of the strategy. One ideal way is to start off with an email template. You have a readymade starting point in the form of templates which are mobile responsive too and have been tested thoroughly. One needs to change the graphics and the text.

Personalization is yet another important aspect in email strategy as it offers contextual relevance to the campaign. One has to go beyond first names and use more creative elements like geo targeting and dynamic messages that change from time to time.

Developing emails is definitely a challenging task as some of them generally do not support the common CSS or HTML. The email has to display perfectly in Gmail, Yahoo and Outlook and this skill calls for a lot of practice that needs to be acquired.

Big organizations and business conglomerates will have email development teams or a few of them may choose to outsource too. As smaller companies may not have internal dedicated resources, they will generally get into hiring independent email developers. This could be on a contract basis too.

It has been found that most of the email marketers, designers and developers are not making use of fluid hybrid templates or responsive templates. A responsive design in email would make it look good definitely on screens of varying resolutions. Fluid hybrid design helps achieve that aspect.

What is fluid hybrid design? It helps in building an email which does not make use of CSS yet instills the responsiveness component so that the content is scaled successfully on the mobile devices. It comes in such a way that the design will automatically adjust to the screen in which it is being viewed, be it a tablet, phone or desktop. Technology is completely overlapping with almost all aspects of email designing. Email technology is getting smarter and is becoming a more viable option and an indispensible marketing channel. Email is here to stay!

Current Trend: Responsive email templates or Fluid Hybrid Design

It has been found that marketers are choosing responsive email templates over the fluid hybrid design and a certain percentage of them using both. The latter is an up and coming trend that mitigates the dependence on media queries that is required for the former. The trends show that the fluid hybrid design is being used by less than 10% of the marketing professionals and majority of them go ahead with responsive templates. An in between percent of marketing professionals use both.

The leading trends for the year 2016 in email marketing suggests that fluid hybrid design will be the latest and happening formula for successful campaign. Another leading trend is found to be the interactive features followed by contextual relevance and personalization. For more detail view our blog.