Technology Driven Marketing Drives Engagement

Marketing changes according to customer behaviour. But off late, there’s another driving force that has been pushing marketing to its extremes. Technology! In the world where digital marketing rules supreme, innovative advancements in technology has been crucial in catapulting certain brands above others. There’s a brand new engine still in its infancy, which could make everything else obsolete.

What’s the name of this new engine? HTML 5! HTML 5 has the potential to revolutionize email marketing in today’s digital centric marketing scenario. The latest version of Hypertext Markup Language the HTML is relatively new to the scenario though it’s been a couple months since its induction. But before you jump into the bandwagon here’s what you need to know about HTML 5.

Finalized in the October 2014 HTML 5 could be the new, smarter and cooler way to present web content. And it has huge implications in the email marketing industry. How? Well imagine an email that is loaded with animations and videos about your product. E-commerce brands can really bank on this new innovation. Imagine showing a video sneak peak of your latest fall collection, or the latest gadgets only you got an exclusive offer for.

One of the best features that HTML 5 brings to the table is ease for programmers to code and create really exquisite templates for your emails. Adding a new video is quite simple using a tag. Additionally you can also make textual content stand out in the mail by highlighting it using the tag. A bonus for your designers is that tag allows you to create graphics right on the page without needing a link to an external file. This makes HTML 5 incredibly powerful while maintaining good flexibility. What an exciting and easy way to integrate multimedia and graphical content without relying on flash or any other third party plugins.

HTML 5 has not yet been standardized across email clients and browser application. On some desktop email clients like Apple Mail and Entourage 2008 the videos play just fine, whereas on Windows Mail, Thunderbird, and Lotus Notes your video gets replaced with a “Fall-back image”. What’s a fall-back image? Well for those email clients who aren’t fast tracking towards HTML 5 you can also provide a content that comes in place of the video, just to keep it looking good. Email marketers should also ensure that they always have a fall-back content to replace the video in case the email clients do not support video in emails. It is also a viable of option if the video has sufficiently large size.

Why HTML 5 will make a difference?

Incorporating animations and videos can really help your mailer look cool and exciting. From the eyes of an e-commerce brand this is vital. Imagine what you can do when you can start incorporating videos in your emails. Hey even if you don’t put in a video then you can at least make the mail exciting to interact with by using animations. Unfortunately mobile email clients are yet to adopt HTML 5 so you there maybe a couple of months delay before people start streaming your email videos on their smartphones and tablets. However many brands have already begun using videos in their emails. The results? A huge difference in the number of total openers, clicks and sales conversions. Statistics also indicate that a larger percentage of tablet owners are most likely to make purchases after seeing a video in their email. Segmentation can really help you when dealing with device oriented mailing.

Ultimately you need to test out HTML 5 and see how it help layout your future email marketing strategy. Have periodic deployment and reviews to put HTML 5 to the best use. It’s time to embrace new technology.