The digital marketing industry is in a perpetual state of transformation, with technology, strategies, and tactics evolving at a breathtaking pace. To shed light on the impending shifts and emerging innovations, we gathered insights from a distinguished panel of email marketing experts and thought leaders. We tasked them with a crucial question: how will the roles of agencies, third-party technologies, and vendors interact and evolve, and what influence will these dynamics have on their operations? Delve into their expert predictions on the future of MarTech below.
The Revenge of the Agency: Fluently Talking Automation Platforms
With the rise of DIY tools for email design, content, campaign management, and marketing automation, the role of agencies is continuously narrowing. Instead of HTML coding, many agencies are looking for flexible email builders so they can truly focus on coming up with creative ideas and designs for clients, rather than wasting time tweaking email code.
Agencies need to focus their efforts on bringing the “creative spice” into the picture and work seamlessly with clients’ desired email marketing platforms. On top of that, email marketing agencies also need to become fluent with those email platforms, since personalization and automation require a much deeper understanding than simple email blasts.
Triggered Emails Claim the Email Marketing Fame (and ROI)
The integration of data from different sources will be of utmost importance, and a top priority for both ESPs and marketers. With the relatively lowering costs of big data technology, it seems that we will finally see comprehensive ecosystems with seamless data workflow between all systems and email marketing.
On the other hand, we are facing changing jurisdictions in the EU region on the protection of privacy (RODO) and the fall of Safe Harbour, to which suppliers will have to adapt their solutions. We must assume that more and more consumers will be aware of privacy protection, and they cannot be too frightened by overly personalized emails.
According to DMA stats from 2016, marketers sent out only 5% triggered emails, yet this 5% generated over 50% of revenue. There is no doubt that more organizations will go through a digital transformation. Marketers will significantly increase the share of triggered emails to boost their ROI. This, in combination with machine learning and big data, can deliver powerful personalization in email, which will finally be sent to the right person at the right time with the right frequency.
Content Automation and Must-Have Innovations Come From Outside
- There will be more third-party platforms and agencies – these are the companies that innovate technology in the space and offer real strategic service to marketers.
- Third-party platforms will be a must-have part of every email marketer’s stack and, therefore, budget. Just having an ESP will not be enough to achieve improved results.
- Larger marketing technology companies will acquire third-party platforms. This will allow them to innovate in the space more quickly.
Marketers need to focus on how to automate content that is engaging and personalized. Automating email content is a major challenge and is becoming the biggest email marketing frustration and problem. It shouldn’t take more than three days to create, test, and send an email. When you spend all your time on business-as-usual email, there’s no time for improvement or strategy.
Content automation is achievable now; you can automate personalized email content based on a recipient’s preferences and behavior. When automated, it can be used in every email without having to build it each time, freeing up valuable time and resources. Most sending platforms have not adequately considered the content part of automation.
The Age of the Chatbot: Who is Sending Smart Transactional Email?
The chatbot space is one of the areas we are observing for changes that will impact email and marketing automation. It’s another channel we need to take into consideration as part of our marketing mix.
Making use of cross-channel data to build more defined customer profiles will allow you to create a more representative picture of your customer. Given some time, you should see a positive impact on your campaign results.
We expect to see further integration between chatbots and email. APIs will make this fairly seamless. Consumers and businesses might become accustomed to seeing transactional messages in their inbox being sent following interactions with chatbots in the not-too-distant future.
Data and Decision Systems Fight for Freedom
I see a continued movement towards openness and interoperability, with fewer marketers relying on a single integrated suite for all their needs. This will happen primarily in the middle and enterprise markets, where companies have the technical resources needed to integrate separate systems.
Related to this, I see a stronger movement towards distinct data and decision systems, separate from delivery systems like email and websites. These data and decision systems will be channel-independent, making it easier to share resources and coordinate customer treatments across channels.
That said, considerable research suggests that many marketers are unwilling to invest in central data and decision systems. So, while movement will continue in that direction, it will be slow. Companies that don’t make the investment will just stick with disconnected systems or with directly connecting a few systems to each; they won’t buy all-in-one suites either.
Demand for On-Premise and Hybrid Grows Due to Privacy Concerns and Data Control
The entire ecosystem of email solutions is moving towards the cloud. Players experience that technical proposals are flattening and overlapping. For instance, on one side, solutions are increasingly becoming similar to ESP platforms, and on the other side, ESPs are often used for functions that were exclusively for MTAs before.
But this scenario doesn’t take care of some specific business needs.
Being an ESP and MTA vendor, we notice a growing demand for on-premise solutions across all industries. Some clients need to internalize their email solution infrastructure due to several factors, such as business models, email volumes, or security and privacy policies.
Nowadays, the adoption of hybrid solutions (e.g., outsourcing of the MTAs components) is also an interesting scenario for those companies that need to satisfy needs for privacy, full data control, and high deliverability performance.
Email vendors should quickly adapt their proposals in terms of flexible and sustainable solutions to satisfy the specific needs of clients from all industries.
Deliverability Trends Shape Campaign Types and Ask for New Measurement
There are multiple changes in the email marketing ecosystem that spring from deliverability. The following are key trends:
- ‘No auth, No entry’: Authentication will become stricter, and without proper authentication, emails could be junk-foldered.
- Delivery of third-party emailings will become even more difficult, especially at major mailbox providers (Hotmail, Gmail).
- IP reputation email delivery monitoring will be replaced by domain-, content-, or URL/link-based monitoring. Especially the introduction of IPv6 will accelerate this trend.
- Bulk newsletter sending will become less effective and will be replaced by targeted, personalized emails with the right content at the right moment.
- There will be a new, complementary way to measure deliverability: next to traditional ‘recipient-based delivery monitoring’ (e.g., seed-list monitoring) there will be ‘sender-based delivery monitoring’ where every individual email transaction is monitored. At Postmastery, we are working on this topic with our own delivery analytics platform.
Market Consolidation Will Accelerate, While New Players Enter the Game
The consolidation of the market will continue at an accelerated pace. American players will lead the game, and already very large actors like Salesforce are likely to acquire relatively smaller players (e.g., Salesforce acquiring HubSpot, or Oracle potentially acquiring Salesforce). However, some important new players will appear and grow, namely due to cultural and regulatory factors.
No More BYOMT (Bring Your Own Marketing Technology)
The era of BYOMT (Bring Your Own Marketing Technology) will soon be behind us. CTOs will once again play a central role in the choice of marketing technologies. For years, several analysts have claimed that the CMO has more power within organizations than the CTO. However, they failed to see the growing complexity of marketing automation. This essentially relates to data: its availability, standardization, understanding, and protection – areas in which marketers tend to be poorly equipped in terms of their education and aptitudes. This shift will emphasize the importance of integrated, robust platforms like ACTITO.
ABM Will Start to Appear in Every (B2B) Platform
As the lines fade between different types of Marketing technology, Account-Based Marketing (ABM) is making its entry into Marketing Automation platforms, especially those that target the B2B audience. Marketo was one of the first to add it, and other enterprise and Cloud/Suites will follow. The trend is understandable after ABM has been popularized over the last few years to the point that B2B marketers and sales teams are asking for specific functionality.
Two-Directional Migration Backing Down From the Single-Stack
Many tier-one providers have recently adopted the single-stack approach; think the Marketing Clouds of Salesforce and Oracle. These solutions appeal to the top-end data giants who can afford to invest in high-risk, high-cost solutions.
Many email marketers have bought the dream of the marketing suite, only to discover that the reality is far from the promise. The pain occurs when it comes to making use of the tools. Often the accumulated technologies don’t communicate kindly with each other in practice. It’s also clear that a lot of the bells and whistles incorporated into these platforms end up gathering dust, as businesses fail to make use of them.
We’re already seeing a move back down to the mid-market from those tier-one providers.
I think we’ll likely end up seeing a two-directional migration to the mid-market best-of-breed solutions. These providers, such as dotmailer, will integrate a handful of top-spec technologies and demonstrate seamless scalability.
Specialist Third-Party Suppliers Are on the Rise
Unlike the old days when the Email Service Provider (ESP) was expected to provide all necessary features, I believe that third-party suppliers of specialist services (real-time, personalization, cart abandonment, etc.) will increase in the variety and number of services provided.
As these specialist third-party suppliers have been designed to integrate easily with all major ESPs, their adoption by clients will complicate the relationship process. Multiple email suppliers will now have a direct relationship with the client, which in turn can prove problematic as conflicting advice may be provided by these multiple suppliers. Holistic Email Marketing is one such entity focusing on integrated strategies.
Productizing AI Will Affect Email Marketing Agencies and Brands
The biggest change coming to email should be no surprise to anyone in the email & marketing automation business: Artificial Intelligence (AI). The big players are integrating it into their systems as we speak. With less fanfare, Marketo recently announced it is adding predictive email content to its platform.
Smaller companies realizing the potential of AI are productizing today. Companies such as Automizy with AI drip campaigns (in beta), Boomtrain with “Artificial Intelligence for Marketers,” and Phrasee with AI-optimized subject lines. I’m sure there are many others out there, but these come to mind.
How Will AI Affect Email Marketing Agencies and Brands?
The problem with big data is that it takes a lot of time to analyze and wring out value. AI will do the analyzing for us and quickly ferret out new marketing opportunities.
Agencies and brands will have more time to dedicate to the creative process to address these opportunities rather than digging into the numbers. Today’s overly complex automation flows could be laid out by AI without the agency or brand having to consider possible overlap. It could be handled in the background without the need for marketer intervention.
I believe we will see many more email & marketing automation companies, including those like Email Industries, adding AI to their platforms. It’s been five years since Watson accomplished the incredible feat of beating two Jeopardy champions, so don’t expect AI in email to work miracles overnight.
Account-Based Marketing (ABM) and the Rise of “Smart Outbound”
ABM will remain one of the hottest MarTech categories. Marketers are looking to deepen prospect data, enhance personalization, find an antidote to adtech inefficiency and content marketing noise, adopt a new generation of MarTech visualization, and demand greater sales and marketing alignment in the digital world.
I think we’ll see ABM capabilities implemented across a wide range of MarTech products, from platforms like ion interactive to thought leadership hubs like chiefmartec.com. The rise of “smart outbound” will accompany this as a counterpoint to inbound marketing – but a harmonious counterpoint.