Bex Osborn
Marketing Strategist
25 Apr 2022
Our #CheersTo10Years campaign has seen us dig deep into our email archives. Prompting us to look back through the past 10 years of email, industry innovations, where ActionRocket began, and some of our key moments.
We thought it was only right to now nod to the future, what does the next decade have in store for email? So we reached out to some industry experts, asking them to look into their crystal balls and make some bold predictions about what we can expect in 2032. From flying cars, to Google glasses, here’s what they think the world of email entails 10 years from now…
What is your prediction for the world of email 10 years from now?
Guilda Hilaire
Salesforce - Director, Product Marketing
Let's get into the Jetson One flying car! Looks like emails is still one of the greatest tools for direct selling. The number of emails being sent to customers haven’t slowed down and we are seeing: A new level of technology allowing designers to be designers! The new ESPs give them the ability to create full HTML / AMP emails no limitations. There are no more Gmail and Outlook limitations!!! The creativity is on a whole another level with more engaging visuals 100% personalized messages driven by artificial intelligence and cleaner data. The future is looking bright for email!!!!
Matt McRoberts
SVP of Global Alliances at Braze
Congratulations to Action Rocket on their 10th anniversary and for the amazing work they do in helping brands to create awesome emails. In today’s world, consumers expect relevant, natural, and cohesive experiences from the brands – as a result, brands need a carefully curated ecosystem of technology to amplify their customer engagement efforts.
Moreover, the shift towards zero and first-party data is changing how brands think about leveraging data for customer engagement efforts. The latest customer engagement review found that 96% of brands plan to increase their marketing budgets, and 38% put more emphasis on zero and first-party data collection methods. As brands evolve their digital strategies and customers with new and varied touchpoints, it’s vital for brands to collect, integrate, and manage data to create brilliant customer experiences in the months and years to come.
Gavin Laugenie
Global head of content, Dotdigital
Ten years from now, I believe Google glass will make the comeback to top all comebacks. And, in the process, it will reinforce emails position as the dominant communications channel for marketers. How? I hear you cry. Well, wearables have been massive ever since the introduction of the apple watch. So Google seeing a gap in the market decided to bring back their technically enhanced glasses, packed full of new innovative features. Imagine, sifting through your inbox using nothing but clever, hands-free gestures. A tilt of your head and a message is dismissed. Double blink and you’re opening an email.
Yes, after all these years, email is still not just relevant but essential in communicating with your audience. And Google Glass is at the forefront of allowing users to open, forward, and interact with the comms they receive from trusted parties with consummate ease! You're now only a double blink and a tilt of the head away from opening your email. But all this new functionality means the new and improved Google glass relies heavily on customer data. Detailed customer data makes marketing messages hyper-relevant; wearable tech like Google glass needs hyper-relevant content to engage users. They go hand-in-hand.
So the modern-day marketer (10 years from now) has genuinely adopted a "data-first" approach to their marketing and, more importantly, their email comms. Marketers only opt to hit the send button once they've married their highly targeted audiences with the most relevant real-time content. Yes, all content is now highly contextualized. Dynamic content has gone super sonic thanks to detailed data practices. What’s more, the marketer's job has been transformed to fit their four day work week and is much more manageable as email platforms have evolved to handle complex automation and offer CDP-like insight and analysis to make managing data a doddle.
Email marketers are (by now) competent data analysts, thanks to the innovation of platforms like Dotdigital. This hyper-relevance has meant inboxes are a spam-free zone. Finally! Users have much more control of what they receive and when they receive it meaning much less clutter in the inbox. In all seriousness, since its invention in 1971, email hasn't really evolved all that much. Of course things have changed, but, in essence, email remains relatively simplistic. It's email's simplicity that has given it longevity. No matter what technological advances we have over the next ten years, I believe two things are for sure. Email isn't going anywhere, and we will all need to be more data proficient or have a tech stack that helps us to be more data literate.
April Mullen
Director of Brand and Content Marketing at SparkPost and Co-Founder and Board Member at Women of Email
I hope that in ten years email is a channel that is much more human and helpful than it is today. Today, executives still push marketers to send large volume batch emails and don't invest enough into the channel to make it as impactful and helpful as it could be for recipients. With third-party cookies going away and other headwinds on the advertising side, I'm optimistic that email will get more investment to have better data, automation and overall contextual appeal to meet recipients where they are in their journey with a brand.
Mike Nelson
Really Good Emails - Co-founder
Outlook will still suck. But all joking aside, we envision decentralized messaging built like the crypto transactions we see today - making the inbox much more safe from an identity and transactional perspective.
Anne Tomlin
Emails Y'all, Founder
In 10 years, the dark mode media query will be supported in Gmail. Support in Outlook is still sketchy.
Logan Sandrock Baird
Emma + Campaign Monitor, Director of Professional Services
The central premise of email marketing doesn't really change, I think - I give you a shot at my attention in exchange for content that's hopefully of worth to me. I don't see that fundamentally changing. But how we offer that consent and receive that content will grow increasingly accessible across a much more broader variety of devices and formats.
Jaina Mistry
Litmus, Senior Email Marketing Manager
Email personalisation will be the norm. Almost every email will feel like a 1:1 message between the sender and customer/subscriber. Data used to power the personalisation will be zero-party—because customers have a transparent understanding of where and how their volunteered data is being used. It's going to be an email utopia! I can dream, right? ;)
Avi Goldman
Parcel, CEO
My guess is that we'll see the trends of algorithms and rich content continue. AMP, annotations, and video combined with better categorization and timing in the inbox is going to enable platforms and brands bring their UX into the inbox and engage their users. Whether it's a miniature FYP from TikTok or a quick reorder of toilet paper from Amazon, we are going to see more in in the inbox.
Jen Capstraw
Co-Founder & President, Women of Email; Co-Host, Humans of Email podcast
These “predictions” can come back and bite pundit in the bum! I predicted with much hope in 2014 we wouldn’t continue to argue whether email was dead… But I think within 10 years, we should see some exciting and meaningful advances on the artificial intelligence front that will make email and cross-channel marketing even more effective. And, ideally, AI technology will be accessible to brands of all sizes. In many ways, AI is still in its infancy.
IMO, the most impressive example of AI in email today is Phrasee’s natural language processing for subject line optimization. I’ve also heard marketers rave about solutions that predict churn with accuracy and advances among solutions with product recommendation engines. Ultimately, AI will drive individualized cross-channel customer journeys, optimizing each touchpoint and all associated content along the way to maximize customer lifetime value. Concurrently, AI will solve the attribution challenges that have boggled our inferior human brains. This type of tech exists today, to an extent. Within a decade, it should be far more powerful, accurate, and hopefully, fairly mainstream and affordable as well.