Email Marketing has been around for decades, but the fact that it’s still one of the go-to digital marketing techniques nowadays speaks volumes about how effective a strategy it truly is. Email, after all, is still going strong, as evidenced by data that shows most people spend more than 6 hours per day to read through their emails.

Why does email marketing work so well? Email marketing benefits derive a lot from the freedom that it provides to strengthen your relationship with your target audience. You get to connect with them on a wholly personal level, as long as your message is always attuned with their needs. This could not be more obvious in the latest email marketing steps plenty of savvy marketers and business owners are taking.

Such facts display the power perfectly crafted words, which can resonate with your audience. And to resonate and engage in email marketing are pretty much two sides of the same coin. Practicing them properly yields highly favorable results in the form of better leads and conversions. Is it at all surprising then that present-day email marketing is leaning towards that route more?

Email Marketing is Evolving to Newer, Smarter Heights

Indeed, another veritable sign proving the continuous growth of email marketing lies in the fact that it is getting smarter. Smarter in the general sense that marketers are focusing more on actively engaging their audience via their emails.

Very few now rely on shot-in-the-dark email blasts that only end up in the Spam folder or get ignored altogether. The same can be said for email marketing done without much research into how your audience will react to your emails and their overall behavior and needs.

Now, individuals and companies are focusing on creating content that engages each customer over time. And they do this even if their total audience volume is fairly low. The platitude, “Quality over quantity,” comes closest to providing a good analogy of this approach. After all, it hinges on the reasoning that it’s better to just continually engage people who show interest in what you have to offer rather than collecting as many email addresses as you can and sending emails to them.

Which makes sense once you think about it. How can you make the most of email marketing benefits if the people you’re trying to reach aren’t showing the remotest sign of interest? Most of these contacts end up ignoring your emails in the first place, which translates to time wasted.

How Automation Assists in Ensuring You Target the Right Audience and Keep Them Engaged at the Same Time?

Smarter email marketing makes good use of automation platforms because not only do they help you pinpoint contacts that aren’t interested (or unengaged) but they serve as active engagement tools, too.

They do so by helping you fulfill one vital step in smarter email marketing: pinpointing and understanding the behavior of leads. You may do this yourself, but there are definitely tools out there that assist you in promoting better engagement. They’re effective because most of them are easy to add to your email marketing campaigns and give you invaluable data about your target audience.

What are the best examples of these tools? Here are but some that are continuously being used by digital marketers nowadays.

1. Forms – Just look at how marketers are using forms to build and foster relationships with their audience. They can be sent to all the persons you have already engaged, and you have all the freedom you need to add as many fields as you can when gathering information and feedback from them.One effective strategy marketers use is that they don’t add the forms directly to the emails (considering the risk of being banned) and opt to send their clients to a landing page where the form can be accessed instead.
2.  Tracking Visits to Your Site – Using tools that track the specific users that visit your site will allow you to narrow down your list of people who are engaged in the content you are sharing. Site owners have all the default tools to use to do this, with Google Analytics as one of the best. They just don’t choose to use them properly (i.e. track and study each visitor).
3. Using Media Center links – These links, after all, can often be made trackable, allowing you to gain insights into what content could help improve conversions. What’s good is that most Media Center links can be easily added to most landing pages and tracking of data can commence immediately once everything is properly setup.

All three of these tools will all you to polish and improve your list, to the point that you will come up with a solid collection of leads that have the highest chance of converting. They also make it easier for you to know the type of content you should be creating (for instance, forms alone can be sent as surveys, which a highly interested audience would not mind completing every time).

Why Smarter Email Marketing is the Way Forward

As an added boon, this approach is actually also crucial in safeguarding your domain. How so? Why do most email marketers end up with emails in the junk folder? Isn’t it because they just haphazardly send emails to their lists in the hopes that their headings will catch the attention of their recipients?

Always keep in mind that, however effective your message is, if it only ends up in the junk or spam folder, it will always be an exercise in futility. You only risk getting your domain totally ignored, or worse, blacklisted in the long run, too.

Conclusion

AI may have, more or less, permeated the email marketing field as well. But the facts stated above prove that artificial intelligence is not the sole catalyst that is “smartening up” the field. It truly is a wonder that email marketing continues to gain traction in the online marketing world, considering it wasn’t too long ago when talks about it being overshadowed by other forms of digital marketing strategies were circulating in the industry.

This only goes to show that email marketing is here to stay, and it’s high time for serious online marketers and business owners to include in their arsenal (at least, the most sophisticated and smarter version of it). Who knows? Email marketing may very well give their other digital marketing techniques a run for their money once the outstanding results roll in.