by Kristina Knight

Trend 1: Bringing the landing page to the email itself by making emails more interactive.

"Interactions that typically required consumers to clickthrough to a landing page can now increasingly be done within the email itself. This allows marketers to reduce the number of clicks-to-action. This also hold the promise of increasing overall engagement by taking down barriers. However, as with most trends, the hype is still a bit in front of the reality with these capabilities not being available in all browsers," said Eric Shashoua, the CEO and Founder of Kiwi for Gmail.

Trend 2: Using video content to complement the purpose of emails.

"The rising demand for and consumption of video content makes this a no-brainer. And with Apple bringing back support for HTML 5 video, its now makes more sense to embed video in emails. But as with all trends, you need to make sure you have a fallback for email clients that don't support it," said Shashoua.

Trend 3: Increased leveraging of transactional emails as opportunities to engage customers.

"Triggered emails are one of the most effective ways to market. Consumers actually want to receive them because they serve a purpose and/or deliver information that is of value. Selectively including complementary offers and messaging that is relevant to the specific touchpoint and customer can yield great results," said Shashoua.

Trend 4: Continued improvements in Personalization

"Personalization of emails is already here. And while the hype of being able to leverage Big Data to do it even more is enticing, the reality of actually implementing it in a meaningful and impactful way is challenging. Just because you CAN personalize something in an email doesn't mean that it always adds value to the recipient or improves conversion rates for the marketer. With that in mind, the trend will continue but marketers will need to become better equipped to manage the complexity and distill the overwhelming volume of data," said Shashoua.

Tags: advertising, email ad content, email content, email marketing, email trends, Kiwi for Gmail