The long goodbye: how departing features will impact email marketing services
Here are some of the major items we said goodbye to last year, as well as some email marketing tips on how to make the most of what stayed behind.
This is the final part of our series covering the State of Email Report 2018 produced by Litmus. Litmus’ annual State of Email Report provides you with a comprehensive look at the data, trends, and innovations that shape the email industry. For a look at the news coming out of major email marketing companies and organisations last year, don’t forget to check out the previous articles.
Windows 10 Mobile is set to go
If you run an email marketing platform you’ll know that offerings from Microsoft have a tiny share of the market at the moment, with single figure percentage market shares for Outlook and Windows Live Mail.
It came as a surprise to very few people in the email marketing world, then, when it was announced that the company would no longer focus on creating new features for the mobile side of Windows 10.
What would be a more helpful move on Microsoft’s part now would be to focus on improvements in an area that would drastically boost the experience of users and functionality for marketers, such as the popular business webmail client which comes as part of Office 365.
Goodbye to Google Ads
In a major step, Google has announced that it will no longer be automatically reading over the content sent and received by users of its one billion-plus free Gmail accounts in order to show them targeted adverts.
For those working in email marketing services, this is likely to work out well. It means that Gmail users will suffer less marketing fatigue, and be more likely to focus on the content you send them as there’s less alternative commercial content to distract them. What’s more, it’s likely that this decision will substantially improve the user experience of many Gmail users – which gives us a heads-up that Gmail’s market share might well be about to surge even further, following a 6% market share rise to 26% in 2017 on the previous year.
Changes at AOL
Those who are familiar with AOL’s Alto Mail app may be surprised to learn that it has been pulled from app stores.
Although it was well designed, many people within the industry were aware that Alto never really took off – and it found itself unable to enjoy the large market shares that other platforms did. Again, that means it’s likely that the share of the current major players will increase – so those with email marketing platforms will find themselves building content around the features of the industry giants for a little while longer.
But things ended for Alto on a slightly positive note at least. “It’s been an amazing journey, and we are grateful for your help in making Alto your go-to mail product,” the Also team wrote as they closed the app down.
Thanks for reading the last in our four-part series on the Litmus 2018 State of Email Report. We’ve enjoyed having you along for the ride and reviewed the data, news, best practices and hands-on how-tos you need to create, send and manage great emails. Now it’s time to put it all into practice with the help of iFactory.
