Adobe is announcing or previewing several new email features today, as its fourth annual Consumer Email Study shows some movement in consumer attitudes toward digital marketing’s oldest channel.
The survey, also unveiled today, indicates that email is starting to receive some competition from new channels like chatbots or smartwatches as consumers’ preferred communication method for receiving brand offers. While almost 50 percent still prefer offers via email, that’s about 18 percent less than last year’s survey.
And, although email has been the most popular form of workplace communication in the previous three surveys, for the first time this year, email and face-to-face conversations are tied at 31 percent.
Adobe Campaign Product Marketing Manager Matt Rawding told me that email’s drop appears to be tied to the rising popularity of other forms of workplace communication, like video calls.
But email remains strong as a marketing and communications tool, and Adobe is today unveiling several enhancements on its platform to boost that channel’s efficiency.
There is a new email message designer with a drag-and-drop interface. Rawding noted that new email templates were introduced last year, and marketers previously were able to drag-and-drop some small components. But now, he said, dragging and dropping works with images, text blocks, structures like columns, footers and more, allowing a marketer to build a template from scratch. Here’s a screen from the designer:
Adobe also says that it is now offering faster and more effective delivery of emails because it can incorporate real-time feedback from ISPs on bounce rates and other factors to immediately modify an email campaign’s tactics.
And profile attributes can now be combined with campaign stats for segmenting audiences in email campaigns.
Adobe is also previewing a few not-yet-released capabilities being developed in its labs. One such feature provides the automated ability to email an individual at the most effective time within an email campaign. Previously, email send times could only be tailored to reach large groups at the most effective times.
Also in development is a new, automatically generated engagement score that measures an individual’s reactions to emails by opening, by clicking on links or by other actions. By utilizing this score, if it is released, a marketer might be able to better target individuals with incentives based on their engagement patterns.
