Email Marketing Trends for 2021

Email marketing trends for 2021 across all industries (including the cannabis industry) will be heavily influenced by the impact of COVID-19 in 2020. With more people working from home last year, entire states were banned and quarantined the new normal, communications changed – including email communications.

Email inboxes were flooded more than ever, but email communications also became more important than ever. For marketers, communications will not revert to pre-pandemic status (whether by choice or need) in the near future, and maybe never.

Hence, marketers need to adapt, and understanding email marketing trends for 2021 is an important step in improving email communications and marketing results. Hence, here are five key email marketing trends for 2021 that all cannabis companies and cannabis companies should consider when developing email marketing strategies and plans for the next 12 months.

1. Greater focus on finding the right tools and resources

Email marketing isn’t easy. It takes time and a deep understanding of copywriting, consumer behavior, design, data intelligence and manipulation, strategic planning, and more. As more businesses relied on email marketing in 2020, a greater number of businesses of all sizes began to realize how time consuming and strategic email marketing really is if they want great results.

Of course, any marketing tactic always focuses on ROI. Email marketing has always been a viable investment as it is inexpensive when compared to other marketing investments. As a result, companies often invest in fewer resources and fewer people to manage them.

Unfortunately, this is a recipe for failure when it comes to email marketing. You could give keys to a car to anyone and they could probably drive it, but they won’t all have the same skills, knowledge, or ability to win a race. And they may not even drive comparable cars – just as you may not use an email marketing tool like your competitors.

The phrase “you get what you pay for” applies not only to the email marketing tool you use, but also to the people you hire to use the tool and maximize your return on investment.

For example, some databases are available for cannabis license holders, but none have the depth of information or the quality of reliable data that the Cannabiz Media License Database does.

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2. Improvement of airtime optimization to increase recipient engagement

Since email inboxes fill up faster, optimizing the send time is essential to ensure that your email marketing messages are actually seen by the recipients. Additionally, optimizing airtime is vital so that you can send your campaigns when recipients are most likely to open them and engage with them.

Commitment is so important for two reasons. First, the more people positively engaging with your messages by opening them, clicking links, putting them in folders, forwarding them to other people, etc., the less likely your future email marketing messages will be of the spam -Folders of recipients forwarded to email service providers (ESPs) such as Gmail, Outlook, and Apple Mail. ESPs equate a lack of commitment to unsolicited messages, and ESPs consider unsolicited messages to be spam. As simple as that.

Second, engagement is critical to your email marketing results. If people don’t open your messages and click the call-to-action (CTA) links in your messages, you’re not getting the conversions you need for a positive return on investment.

Note that conversions happen across the buying cycle and the marketing funnel; B. Conversions in the middle of the funnel, e.g. B. downloading an e-book to learn more about a topic related to recipients and your business, or conversions at the end of the funnel, e.g. B. requesting a software demo or contacting a seller.

Against this background, the importance of airtime optimization in 2021 cannot be underestimated. Be sure to choose an email marketing tool that has advanced features to optimize airtime.

For example, the Cannabiz Media License Database offers two advanced features for optimizing airtime: list-based optimization and recipient-based optimization. Both use artificial intelligence and machine learning based on your account and the behavior of your previous recipients to make sure your email campaigns are sent at the best time to maximize openings and engagement.

3. More focus on integrated lifecycle marketing (including email marketing)

Today consumers expect a seamless brand experience from one experience to the next. This includes email marketing. Therefore, in 2021, email marketers will be working closely with various team members to ensure that the branding experience in email campaigns is consistent with all other branding experiences.

Email marketing has become an important part of the entire brand history. Hence, it is important that you invest time to fully understand your current and potential customers in order to create the right branding experiences for each target audience.

The first step is to create buyer personalities for each target audience within your broader current customer and potential customer audience. Once you understand who to communicate with, you can segment your email lists accordingly and create the most relevant and valuable content for each segmented audience.

Ideally, integrated lifecycle marketing follows consumers as they progress through the consumer buying cycle, from knowing they have a problem that needs to be resolved to the final buying decision and beyond.

However, you can’t create an integrated life cycle marketing strategy if you don’t know who your target audiences are. So create your buyer personalities!

4. Additional considerations for email fatigue and inbox congestion

Beatriz Redondo Tejedor, Head of Content at MailJet (owned by Mailgun), wrote recently: “To avoid a drop in engagement metrics, companies need to make sure they are adding value and sending emails that their subscribers really want to receive . ”This reflects the number one thing Google expects from email senders (and the best way to stay away from spam) of only sending messages that others want them to.

Email fatigue was a problem before 2020, and now it’s an even bigger problem. Inbox congestion is rampant these days, so companies have to work harder to send messages that are highly relevant to laser focused lists.

Relevance is the most important thing. List segmentation doesn’t mean breaking a list into smaller lists and then sending the same generic message to everyone.

Email service providers have declared themselves gatekeepers to keep unsolicited email messages out of users’ inboxes. So the days of sending general messages to large lists are over. Not only are your results bad, but email service providers are also starting to associate your sending domain with spam. This means that more and more of your email messages are being sent to spam.

To avoid spam, increase engagement, and get the best results from your email marketing, you need to send unique content tailored to each niche audience.

5. Growing importance of emotional connections beyond transactional relationships

Transaction relationships are a thing of the past. Most businesses today cannot survive with transactional relationships. Instead, emotional connections that lead to trusting brand relationships are the key to success in the marketplace in 2021.

“Long gone are the days when marketing emails were just a collection of sales pitches and overly promotional copy,” warns Mailjet’s Tejedor. It is 100% correct. Sales pitches are spurious and consumers no longer accept this type of impersonal self-promotion.

Instead, you need to develop an email marketing strategy that will take your audience through the marketing funnel by building brand awareness and trust, cultivating the relationship, and then soliciting a sale.

Email marketing requires an initial customer strategy in 2021 where every message adds intrinsic value to the recipients’ lives.

Key takeaways on email marketing trends for 2021

Email marketing is growing in popularity, and with the 2020 coronavirus pandemic, it has evolved a little differently from what could have been expected last year. To be successful in 2021, you need to understand and adapt to the trends that will directly impact your results: find the right tools and resources, improve airtime optimization, focus on integrated lifecycle marketing, watch out for the inbox congestion and build emotional connections.

If you want to see how to use the Cannabiz Media License Database to contact cannabis and hemp license holders for sales and email marketing, schedule a demo and see how your business can grow in 2021 and beyond.