Sells Like Teen Spirit : How GenZ Will Shape The Future of Email

A recent article for Fast Company outlines how Generation Z’s unique shared experiences will continue to impact the way they behave in the market. GenZ is composed of individuals born between 1996 and 2011, currently outnumbering Millennials by one million in the United States alone. These young people have acquired a healthy distrust for anything that represents “the establishment”; seeing many financial institutions, corporations, and governments as domineering, callous and disingenuous while coasting by as “too big to fail”. In short, these youngsters are cognitive rebels! Their curiosities have had very little bounds as they’ve enjoyed complete immersion in technological advancement and digital culture since birth.

Email is not dying as once predicted, in fact it continues to be a right of passage; you need an email address to sign up for social networks, create accounts, make online purchases, and to communicate more ‘officially’. A recent study shows that over 60% of teens and young adults prefer to receive communication from a business via email, making a strong case for any brand to start rolling out a future-facing email marketing roadmap (asap!)

Future-Forward Email Content Strategy

1. Think Mobile-First

If your emails are not pixel-perfect on the screen that’s viewed the most, expect to get tuned out — 2 in 3 teens are already making purchases online and 1 in 2 teens will be using a smartphone to make those purchases.

The Mobile Email Checklist

• Template to scale (single column designs works best).
• Type size matters (and so does typography), keep it easy on the eyes.
• Limit navigation (this isn’t an open-world video game).
• Strike the balance between image sizes and rendering speeds.
• Make emails rotation-friendly (responsive horizontally and vertically).
• Optimize your call-to-action buttons (i.e. how many you include, their functionality, and where they lead).
• Keep your subject lines concise, compelling, perhaps even entertaining!
• Make your preheader real-estate *werk* — just because it’s a small space doesn’t mean it can’t host a big idea.

2. Invest In Creating and Embedding Video Content

The proof is in the digital pudding: 3 in 4 teens are spending 3 or more hours watching video on their phones daily (that’s more than any other activity, and out of all the brands known to mankind, the top 3 most recognized (and beloved) by teens are related to media streaming.

3. Curate The Social Experience

To create more coordination between social and email, there are some obvious opportunities to consider whilst crafting a newsletter or promotional email:

• Include peer-to-peer social ratings of products and/or services in promotional emails — the youth today exude unprecedented levels of independent-mindedness, they’re underwhelmed by paid endorsements and inclined to consider non-celebrity ‘influence’ more seriously.
• Plugging social media buttons into the email footer is the least you can do — embed personable, innovative, branded and temptingly sharable content into the email itself, maybe even a surprise perk for hitting ‘post’.
• Feature meaningful social media content within marketing emails — 60% of young adults have taken blog or social media posts into consideration while shopping.
• Ask for Instagram and Twitter handles during your onboarding process to attain the ability to track first-hand insight into each user’s social behaviours.

By incorporating social media analysis into your multi-dimensional segmentation practices you can create multiple highly-specialized campaigns all at once. For example, Black Milk Clothing could incorporate demographics data (such as location) from social media interactions (example: likes on their latest posts) to target customers who are responding the best to their Instagram merchandise features — perhaps shorts are hitting it off big time with viewers in Japan, while a dress is charming the pants off viewers in Scandinavia. With this information Black Milk Clothing could build several versions of a promotional template, each personalized by: 1) item seen as most popular in that region on Instagram, 2) deal most historically popular in that region, 3) copy fitting to each culture. Once this is done, all Black Milk Clothing has to do is plug an SQL query into sendwithus to pull the correct sending segment and *voilà* each send is bound to be a perfect fit!

4. Your Authenticity and Creativity Are Valuable

If you have not invested in design and a creative team, you might want to make room that talent in your budget because the average attention span is down to 8 seconds, meaning plain text emails (again, unless your copy has high entertainment value) are not going to cut it. A prime example of imaginative email development would be the recent surge of designs incorporating GIF animation to craft incredibly inviting emails which boost click-through rates by 26%. Moving forward, organizations are not only going to invest more in look and feel, they are also going to develop advanced interactivity within their templates — bringing the ‘website experience’ into email has shown to increase click rates by 18% and click-to-open rates by 10%. Sendwithus gets you started with a variety of open sourced templates to choose from; the HTML is yours for the customizing! We also have an impeccable template management system which allows you to easily create, edit, and save multiple versions of an email for any campaign, helping you stay organized at scale.

Because it is imperative to create a dependable, quality experience to boost engagement and establish trust, doing A/B testing on highly specified segments of your audience can help you recognize and augment practices that prove to be valuable, while lowering the threshold of disruption (and churn). With the support of sendwithus, you can unleash your ‘inner mad scientist’ to split test anything from visual content and copy to template structure and UX design. The ability to perform testing using Connect (sendwithus’ data warehouse integration) is especially helpful if you want to identify sweet spots in regards to transactional emails, which are triggered by user activity and events.

For example BarkBox can test various aspects of this delightful abandoned cart email:

BarkBox would benefit from a split test for how many (and which) calls-to-action they include — in the email above you’ll see they include two possible interactions, that is, clicking “get my BarkBox” or clicking “select your dog size” (which is something that one goes through during the activation process already). Both of these clicks take me to the exact same landing, which happens to be their homepage. Maybe it would be better to pick one call-to-action instead, followed by a sneak peak of a treat my dog would enjoy this month? *Cue an A/B test!*

Crafting the pitch-perfect Welcome Email (plus onboarding experience) for a GenZ individual is likely to require some fine-tuning — young people today are quick to discover the phenomenon of ‘digital noise’; a never-ending barrage of information and media from the moment they gain access to a smart mobile device and WiFi. To cope with being inundated with stimulus, young people have learned to analyze and assess value as quickly as possible, filtering through the stimulus to find value ‘at the speed of sight’. This means that brands will have to spend much more time on crafting diverse, original and worthwhile consumer experiences if they want to catch and retain attention in the future.

To learn more about sendwithus and how our platform can help you surpass all of your email marketing goals, please drop us a note at sales@sendwithus.com … or if you’re the shy type, lurk our website at www.sendwithus.com