It can be tricky to keep an eye on what’s happening in the fast-paced world of email and digital marketing, so to save you time we’ve provided you with a quick round-up of the latest and greatest digital developments of the week that we think will be useful to power your campaigns and future planning.

So, what’s been going on in the digital world this week? Let’s find out!

Avoiding the dreaded ‘abandoned trolleys’

’Tis the season of holiday shopping, and e-commerce retailers will be focusing on ways to maximise sales during the festive season, and particularly target that whopping 87% of consumers who abandon their carts mid-shop.

Clickz have produced four simple strategies to help encourage these wayward shoppers to follow-through with their purchase, helping incentivise purchases without it costing your business. If you’re busy gearing up for Black Friday and the festive onslaught, this is a useful article for you.

Keep it quizzical

Speaking of holiday campaigns, how are you planning to engage your readers this Christmas?

We’ve touched before on the idea of including yes/no questions in your marketing campaigns to gather customer intelligence, so how about taking it one step further in your next campaign and including a festive quiz to engage customers with your brand?

This article from Entrepreneur magazine provides some fantastic tips on the most effective ways to include a quiz, how to create shareable results and design lead captures, as well as information on ways to utilise the results to your benefit in follow-up campaigns. It’s well worth a read, so check the article out here.

Let the machines take it from here

To continue along the path of email campaigns, Return Path’s recent article addressed the issue of a decline in inbox placement since 2014. Advancements in machine learning mean that there is scope for greater personalisation of emails as the algorithms automatically adapt strategic models for your email campaigns as their understanding of content and user behaviour evolves.

Get smarter with your segmentation and see if your machines can learn to improve the number of emails that land slap-bang in your customer’s inbox, and not the feared junk folder. Yes, the machines are getting smarter. Use it to your advantage!

Emojis everywhere!

On a different note, you might have been surprised to hear that the Oxford dictionary have, in a thoroughly modern move, named the “face with tears of joy” emoji as their word of the year.

The rise of emoji culture has allowed us to convey sentiments without getting wordy, and is heralding a change in the way that we communicate. Whilst more likely to appeal to millennials, they’re a simple way to make your email stand out from the crowd, so it may be worth testing an emoji subject line in your next campaign.

Word is, they increase open rates by around 56%…

On that note, we’re going to love you and leave you. See you all next week when we’ll be bringing you another weeks’ worth of digital delights!

Until next time…

Komal

Komal Helyer
Head of Marketing

Stay in the digital loop: Follow Komal on Twitter

p.s. – Remember to download our recent Pure360 Email Maturity Benchmarking Report to learn how you can be part of the 1% email elite who get email right.