When you think about 2016, you should think ‘Email'. Why? According to Marketing Land, US companies send more than the global average of 1.38 million emails a month. Wow! And within that average, across all editions, Outlook accounts for 56% of all desktop email opens and nearly 16% of total opens in any environment.¹

What does that mean for DMO's? It means that you have a lot of competition out there! Lucky for us, the total number of worldwide email accounts is expected to increase to over 4.3 billion accounts by year-end 2016.² This is great news - more potential visitors!

When 'thinking Email' for 2016, email automation, mobility, personalization, and engagement are all ways you can keep your distributions fresh through the new year.

Email Automation

Quite simply, email automation is an automated campaign created around an individual who sets off a trigger. At a very base level, an example would be a DMO sending out a monthly newsletter that includes an article about dining. I click on the article about dining, I get added to the dining interest group, and then start to receive dining interest based emails. And these automated email messages average 70.5% higher open rates and 152% higher click-through rates than "business as usual" marketing messages.³

Going Mobile

I know there are not any flying cars in 2016, but a staggering 53% of all emails are opened on mobile devices according to Campaign Monitor. And, when an email is opened a second time from a desktop, people are 65% more likely to click-through.¹ Is this helpful? Yes! Because that means visitors need to be able to first read your email on their mobile device before wanting to read it on their desktop and commit to the click-through to your website.

So, if you can't get a mobile/responsive newsletter, then commit to some easy changes to your current one. Make your fonts larger so they will be easier to read on the mobile screens, have more white-space, and try not to make your email really wide as most mobile devices will shrink your email down to fit the largest width. And remember that one out of every three clicks within an email occurs on a mobile device.¹

Email Personalization

This goes way beyond ‘Dear first name', folks. We are talking about increasing engagement by 74% by using targeted personalization.⁴ Like taking information from forms or web habits and using this information not only in emails. You can use it in personalized subject lines where online retailers saw that emails were 26% more likely to be opened.¹ This can reach farther than your visitors to your meeting professionals. This might be a great way to look for repeat business. You have all the personalized information from the previous year in CRM - why not use it to your advantage? Personalization is all how you use the data.

Email Engagement

How much more time do you spend with your social media campaign than you do with your email campaigns? Did you know that email subscribers are 3 times more likely to share your content via social media than visitors from others sources?⁵ And that email is 40 times more effective at acquiring new customers than Facebook or Twitter?¹ Am I saying stop your social campaigns? Not at all! Just don't forget to think email!

People never have their mobile device far from them at any point in time. And they even have spent the time to set up different alerts for different senders and such which means they care, and better yet, are engaged. You want to be a part of that. Take the time to create an engaging call to action button instead of just a text link.  Doing just that can increase conversion rates by as much as 28%!¹  Just think, that's more hits to your website. SEO will be ecstatic!

Conclusion

When thinking about 2016, and what kind of year it will be, know that email will most definitely play a part, and remember that email marketing has an impressive ROI of 3800%.⁶

Additional Sources

1 - Campaign Monitor
2 - Radicati Group
3 - Epsilon Email Institute
4 - Aberdeen
5 - QuickSprout
6 - DMA