jordie-van-rijn-interview-with-opinion-leaders
28 October 2022

Tips, Insights, and Email Marketing Predictions from Jordie van Rijn

Create exceptional emails
Table of contents
  1. Why email marketing strategy is important
  2. Automation is your new weapon
  3. Why AI is a new trend in the email marketing industry
  4. What about Stripo?
1.
Why email marketing strategy is important

The email marketing industry is as strong and popular as ever. All companies, small and large, run email campaigns to help them excel, and 89% of marketers use email as their primary channel for generating leads.

However, it’s not enough to just send emails. To outperform your competitors, you must be clear about what you are doing and follow current email marketing trends. This is the topic of this post, which is informed by the experience and advice of Jordie van Rijn.

Jordie van Rijn lives in the Netherlands, where he was born. As a consultant, he works on international projects whose target audiences often span multiple countries and languages. Jordie van Rijn is an email marketing consultant and founder of email vendor selection.

Jordie van Rijn

Why email marketing strategy is important

Email marketing success requires more than just sending out emails. A well-considered strategy should always be at the forefront.

Jordie van Rijn

 

Research indicates that more than 50% of marketers have no formal email marketing strategy. This is a shame. A good strategy will transform an ad-hoc approach by providing structure and allowing you to prioritize, plan, and create and stick to a timeline.
Strategy is about answering some tough questions and then choosing a path of action. But even more, it’s about determining what not to do. If you haven’t done this exercise, the questions may surprise you.

The main pillar of email marketing strategy

Creating a strong email marketing strategy helps you connect with your target audience in a personalized way and increase your sales. However, what should it be based on? If you think that the main components of email strategy are personalization, engaging content, and mailing frequency, you are largely correct. However, today’s guest has a unique opinion on this matter.

Jordie van Rijn

 

Business goals are the foundation of an email strategy
In companies that take email strategy seriously, all aspects of business strategy come together. Often, however, the target audience, business goals, and priorities aren’t set on the business level — where they should be, at least for the most part. Crafting an email strategy should be included in crafting a marketing strategy. That is why I often review the Business Model Canvas for Marketing. You must answer the specific questions that directly tie your marketing to your business.

Business Model Canvas for Marketing _ Marketing and Sales Process

Creating an email strategy that will push your company forward is a tricky task that requires flexing your imagination muscles. Marketers need tips on facilitating this process, so it's good that we have one.

Tip from Jordie

Understand your customers, the business, and the whole marketing plan because a great email marketer can show how email marketing contributes to reaching business goals.

Automation is your new weapon

Automation is currently among the biggest trends in many areas, and email marketing is no exception. Today, 55% of marketers use automation to boost their email marketing.

The purpose of email marketing automation is to create an email campaign by simplifying and automating routine tasks to save time.

Jordie van Rijn

 

Everyone will tell you that automation saves time. And it does. But it’s better to think of it in terms of a return on time investment (ROTI). This is similar to email marketing ROI but focuses on returns on your time. If you would otherwise be doing things manually, automation may offer a better return by allowing you to do other things with that time. Even if automation tools add to your out-of-pocket email marketing costs, they may net you great savings. Automation allows for features you cannot achieve easily by hand, like inserting favorite products and related recommendations into emails. It can do split tests with proper segment exclusions inside a flow and send daily welcome flows in eight languages. The stuff is crazy! :D.

As you can see, automation tools are designed to save marketers' time, which they can then allocate to more important tasks.

Jordie van Rijn

 

Here is an overview I made of tech-assisted quick wins, in which the tools set the rules. They give you the advantage of quickly moving to a more sophisticated (and better) email program.

Tools Overview From Jordie van Rijn

Email marketing automation provides a wide range of benefits that are hard to overestimate:

  • Maximizing email personalization. More than 90% of buyers and clients of various businesses believe that personalized content is extremely valuable for making a brand influential. Automation allows you to send personalized email chains, showing recipients that each client is special to the brand.

  • Improving marketing team effectiveness. Marketers can stop wasting time on routine tasks, such as compiling email lists and scheduling messages, using it instead to implement creative ideas and marketing campaigns.

  • Increasing audience retention. Amazingly, email marketing automation achieves 90% higher customer retention than standard email strategies.

  • Scalability. Process automation allows you to reach more customers with fewer staff.

Tip from Jordie

Think of automation from a bit broader perspective. First, see what adds value because the best productivity tip is simply to cut down on low-value tasks. Marketing automation is process automation. Where do you spend time on repetitive and boring tasks that automation can do for you, such as importing data, gathering info, and reporting? What tasks do you really not like doing?

Why AI is a new trend in the email marketing industry

AI is slowly but surely seeping into many areas of our lives, including industry. Improving and automating processes is being gradually incorporated into many workflows, but AI technology has a long way to go before it reaches critical mass.

Email marketing has benefited from the introduction of AI, which is gradually becoming a trend in the field due to its ability to improve various aspects of the process.
AI Use Cases Statistics

(Source: Statista)

Jordie van Rijn

 

I create an overview of email marketing trends each year. Some trends—such as personalization, privacy, and mobile—become more and more important year after year. I am currently very enthusiastic about AI-generated content, which is poised to break through to general adoption this year. In a few years, it will be standard, so those who fail to adopt it now will be left behind.  
AI has become incredibly good at generating text and images; if you haven’t yet seen these capabilities, they will blow you away. Working with AI tools is a skill that each marketer should embrace. I think we’ll soon hear a lot more about “prompt craft,” the art of giving instructions to AI to generate content.

Here is what AI can help you do:

  • convert product functions into customer benefits;

  • craft perfect introductions for emails and blogs;

  • use proven frameworks to write for marketing automation;

  • adapt to specific styles;

  • brainstorm, and provide inspirational subject lines;

  • write summaries.

AI-generated content isn’t perfect. Think of it as a tool—like a car—that needs someone at the wheel. 

And indeed, it is. Several currently popular tools generate content using AI:

  • Jasper is a complete AI content generator tool that creates various text templates;

  • CopyAI is an advanced platform with over 90 tools for content writing and copywriting;

  • Article Forge is an SEO content generator that uses machine learning to quickly create optimized text.

AI can also help with the following more technical aspects of email marketing:

  • Restructuring email campaigns. AI can use historical data to split your global email campaign into several smaller ones and then structure them in the ways you want. This maximizes your email marketing effectiveness by sending more personalized and targeted emails.

  • Optimizing email send times. AI can fine-tune the timing of emails to an individual level.

  • Cleaning and editing email lists. AI can clean up email databases by removing outdated contacts and automatically updating job titles, phone numbers, and other information, thus improving email deliverability.

This is not an exhaustive list. We have included only the most popular solutions. Moreover, given continued technology development and the general trend toward automation, the number of AI tools and applications will increase significantly.

What about Stripo?

What does Stripo have to do with all this? Jordie has discussed tools that give one the upper hand at quickly launching effective email campaigns. Stripo is such a tool. Of course, we at Stripo will not develop an email strategy for you or automate and report on email sends, but we will greatly reduce the time your marketers spend on tasks such as the following:

  • designing complex emails;

  • crafting dynamic email content;

  • achieving brand consistency across all email campaigns (which can be done with Stripo’s modules, templates, and brand guidelines);

  • increasing interactivity and engagement with AMP for emails;

  • exporting emails in many different ways across 70+ common ESPs and email clients;

  • fine-tuning emails (which can be achieved with Stripo’s built-in HTML and CSS code editor).

Try it and see for yourself.

Create exceptional emails with Stripo
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