Over the past few years businesses and organisations have begun to use a plethora of media to connect with their audience. From podcasts to Vines, it seems like the written word is falling out of fashion fast, but research shows that email marketing is still one of the most effective ways of reaching your users and generating leads than ever before. So why is email, this device that’s been around since the first was sent back in 1971 (yes, it really was that early), still so popular? Entrepreneur and businessman Stewart Butterfield explains that "email has many benefits, it's the lowest common denominator for official communications,"’. If the statistics are to be believed, in 2015, over 205 billion emails were sent and received each day. This is expected to reach over 246 billion by the end of 2019.
How does this benefit membership organisations like you?
You need to get yourself a CRM that can store all your member data securely and start writing to your members. Get your marketing team (or ours) writing campaigns and use a mass emailer like MailChimp or Campaign Monitor to link to your database. Experts predict that Microsoft Dynamics will take over from Salesforce as the world’s number 1 CRM system in 2016; luckily, this is our favourite too!
Read on to prediction number 2: "Desktop dinosaurs: Mobile is the new first screen"
Ask the experts - Charlotte, Graphic Designer
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What are your top 5 trends of 2016?
- Mobile first design – looking at the design for a mobile before desktop and really focusing on responsive design
- Almost flat design / Material design
- Animation –animated infographics / journeys
- User experience – thinking about the users journey through the website
- Hamburger / hotdog navigation – hidden navigation not distracting from the information on the homepage