The Growing Demand for Next-Gen Email Managers

Effortless communication, meaningful conversations, and valuable engagement always delights customers. Back in 1971 when the first email was sent, little did we know that the email management market would grow this huge. Today, there are over 250 million emails exchanged every minute. Along with this evolved the roles of Email managers. AI-powered email management tools are already playing a prime role in automating repetitive tasks, providing data insights, sorting, filtering, providing pre-written templates, and running email campaigns seamlessly.

In the future, email management is expected to evolve further and shape the path of email managers as it will have the next-gen features and functionalities with AI capabilities.

This blog will highlight the growing demand for next-gen email managers, and the role of the modern-day email management software solutions.

What is Email Marketing?

Email or electronic mail is a method of sending messages via electronic devices using the internet. When leveraged for marketing, it acts as a direct, cost-effective and measurable method to reach customers and offer customer support seamlessly. Email marketing is a form of direct marketing, a high-conversion channel that facilitates sending promotional emails to a targeted list of subscribers/customers. Businesses use email marketing methods to promote products, connect with customers, and provide updates to achieve marketing and sales goals, such as boosting revenue, reaching out to new customers, increasing leads, and spreading brand awareness. This type of marketing leveraging a powerful email system is known as Email Marketing.

The Conceptual Representation of the First Ever Email Generated:

Email Marketing at Present

From a mere static communication model, email marketing has evolved into dynamic, one-on-one content including hyper-personalization, AI-driven automation, predictive algorithms, and seamless omnichannel integration. From manual, it has moved towards automation. As the inbox gets crowded, the attention span of the readers are reducing, hackers are getting better, and security policies are tightened, the need for next gen email management is growing high.

What is Next-Gen Email Management?

A marketing guy has to deal with a large number of emails on daily basis to run campaigns, influence target audience, generate leads, and stay relevant to collect new email addresses from potential clients via conducting survey, offering free guide and other strategies is called email management and using futuristic technology, tools, trends, and strategies to stay ahead in the market by being competitive can be considered as Next-Gen Email Management.

Why is the demand for Next-Gen Email Managers Rising High?

The demand for next-generation email managers is rising high due to the growing demand for next-gen email marketing activities. Let’s understand a few aspects of this.

1. Hyper-personalized AI

Email management has become one of the core concepts of marketing strategies, where tons of emails are managed by an organization to achieve the goals of sales and revenue targets. But, with the progression of modern technology and drastic shift in trends, no traditional methods have been delivering the outcomes matching current demands. To address this issue, AI-driven email marketing & management has been introduced to fill the gap between traditional approaches and modern trends to achieve desirable outcomes with email personalization triggering human emotions.

Hyper-personalized AI is something that helps businesses to connect with the audience individually by adding specific elements that trigger their emotions based on previous patterns, data, and prediction analysis.

How Amazon is winning with its recommendation engines….Here is a sample;

Netflix too has its own machine learning and AI algorithms which helps in recommending personalized views based on the viewing behavior, content preferences, and contextual signals.

So, How to go about this:

Scenario: A local bakery has been sending monthly newsletters to attract customers with a default template content to the overall audience might not deliver the same result as AI-driven personalized content with segmentation divides teenagers, adults, and senior citizens, delivering newsletters with cake & pastries for teenagers, breads and pies for adults, and soft cookies & soft puddings for senior citizens adding particular elements to personalize the experience.

2. Email Generation with targeted audience

GenX, Millennials, Generation Z, and Generation Alpha have different approaches towards a brand, and generating attention from these types of audiences in the upcoming days will be challenging for businesses. Managers who can see through their audience’s desire and understand the audience with their purchasing power, necessities, impulse, pleasure, and buying motivation can attract the customers by managing and creating robust campaigns. AI-driven tools & technologies have transformed the way email managers used to create strategies, set up campaigns, and track the campaign for email marketing.

So, How to go about this:

Airbnb's city guide email campaign is one example of a data-driven hyper-relevant campaign.

“We used to just help you find a place to stay,” CEO Brian Chesky mentioned during an event.

Scenario: A pet walking & pet sitting service business has to target a specific group of people who own a pet, and create a campaign by adding a day trial for free or discounted subscriptions to attract the customers by allocating them in segmented groups according to age differences, such as

By providing tailored email marketing campaigns for each generations’ preferences brands can easily connect with the audience.

3. Interactive and Dynamic Email Strategies

The upcoming days of marketing will be interactive and engaging with real-time communications between business entities and customers due to advanced techniques, AI-powered tools, and technologies. Use the interactive form of polls, forms, reviews, surveys, and image carousel to assist customers. Offering a 360° product view to the customers with advanced technologies can help them in experiencing the product in real-time virtually. Creating an interactive email by analyzing which type of interactive templates has delivered the best outcomes and what areas of copywriting have triggered the audience to immediately respond to the email campaigns can help email managers to design result-oriented strategies.

So, How to go about this:

Scenario: A small T-shirt store has been facing challenges of returns due to size issues, so conducting a survey of interactive quizzes and polls helps in avoiding further shipping costs by diminishing the requests of T-shirt returns. And frequently using interactive email campaigns enables the managers to know more about the preferences of the customers, and deliver the best results.

As we can see in this marketing email of Goodfirms above, there are interactive features like multiple-choice question response, likes & dislikes, emoji ratings, and quiz surveys that offer real-time engagement between sender and receiver.

4. Data-driven & AI-Enhanced Email Campaigns

Using data insights of your customers to understand their behaviour, patterns, likes, dislikes, and personalities to create different channels for various groups of audiences can help in bringing customers to the website easily. This method is highly targeted and personalized, enabling businesses to connect with the audience more precisely and boost sales and revenue. Creating a specific group for the audience and targeting them with their personal choices, likes, and dislikes can help in getting the desired outcomes. Data could be of demographic, behavioral, transactional, previous-purchase history, engagement, preferential and so on.

Click here to know how Starbucks is leveraging data and AI to connect to its customers.

“We operate at the intersection of two rapidly evolving spaces: technology and consumer retail. That makes our work both dynamic and deeply relevant, requiring us to move at the pace of innovation while staying grounded in the needs of our partners and customers,” Bhagyesh Phanse, chief data and analytics officer at Starbucks said in a report.

So, How to go about this?

Scenario: An Ecommerce Outgear brand sending the same email templates to all their audiences can drive better results by creating segmented groups where they can allocate a group channel of mountain climbers, campers, cyclists, and hikers to target them specifically by data insights of their likes and dislikes sending different emails to the different audiences.

5. Advanced Email A/B Testing and Conversion Optimization Skills

A) A/B Testing

Email A/B testing (Split Testing) is a method of using two forms of content in email marketing to find out which one appeals more to the audience. Create two forms of content with different approaches, styles, and strategies, naming version A and Version B, to find out which strategy performs better and gives the desired results. This way, brands can easily find out the best way possible to connect with the audience, generate sales, and revenue. This helps in finding out where to put the Call to Action (CTA) Button in order to optimize the conversions.

Email A/B testing best practices include;

You can test the subject line, word count or the length of the mail, order of the email, and different parts of the content.

Scenario: A Gym Fitness center facing challenges to get more subscriptions can use A/B testing method in which they can apply different approaches to connect with the audience, such as

Template A	Template B
With Countdown	Without Countdown
Free Ebook Button	Subscribe to Newsletter Button
Conversational Tone	Formal Tone

This enables the gym to find out which template performs better.

B) Conversion Optimization Skills

Any elements or features that encourage users to perform a specific action can be considered conversion optimization. Comparing hooks and headlines in order to find out which performs better can allow businesses to maximize conversions. For example, if a mail is sent to 1k customers and gets 200 clicks, the conversion rate is 20%. AI-powered tools enable comparisons of subject lines, CTAs, body, layout, and visuals through data insight to enhance performance.

Scenario: A digital product created by a startup uses tutorials, demos, and feature functionality videos in its email marketing campaigns to motivate users to like, share, and subscribe to the brands’ social network.

6. Prioritize Security and Privacy

Email is one of the most favourite zones of threat actors to target any business for malicious activities. Spam, Malware, Data Exfiltration, URL Phishing, Lateral Phishing, Spear Phishing, and Account takeover are some of the common email security threats businesses need to look out for. Hoax Coca‑Cola email is a classic example. Next-gen Email Managers focus on security and privacy, ensuring that the tools they are using have implemented Domain-based message authentication, reporting, and conformance (DMARC) compliance, Sender Policy Framework (SPF), and Domain Keys Identified Mail (DKIM).

Google Mandiant and Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) recently revealed a “high volume email campaign” threat generated to hundreds of compromised accounts. This threat is linked to a financially motivated threat actor Cl0p. Lack of enterprise SSO controls and MFA could be the reason, says the report.

Apple's Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) is a feature that prevents email senders from learning information about your mail activity.

The CAN-SPAM Act imposed recently is believed to set baseline standards for commercial email marketing.

So, how to go about integrating security and privacy:

Scenario: Ecommerce retail store has an intern employee who exports 25k customer emails with sensitive data like names, order history, location, and email addresses. The advanced tools and systems set up by Next-gen manager automatically detect unusual behaviour, and system alerts are notified with multi-factor authentication, access verification, and role-based restrictions before any data is shared.

Here’s how to integrate security and privacy

Train your users on security best practices.
Use unique passwords and change them within a specific period (Quarterly or Half-quarterly)
Assign clear roles and utilize multi-factor authentication.
Beware of email attachments and spread awareness.
Use tools and platforms with integrated DMARC, SPF, and DKIM.

7. Eliminate Frequent Emailing

Bombarding promotional emails in the mailbox makes it challenging for the users, and this can only lead to subscriber fatigue. . Because of this, organizations miss out on potential customers. Professional email management experts advise businesses to invest smartly with modern technology and human intelligence to enable them to send only meaningful and relevant messages to consumers.

So, how to balance email disbursement, and fight email fatigue?

It is critical to understand the perfect email marketing cadence.
Closely monitor and analyze the unsubscribe rate, spam complaint rate, delivery rate, click rate, and the conversion rate.
With the help of AI, understand customer patterns and preferences.
Test daily, weekly, bi-monthly, and monthly email frequency.

Scenario: A digital marketing agency managing multiple clients simultaneously has to ensure its time and efforts are invested properly to manage emails for the clients. Due to this, agencies have to create numerous partitions to save time, cost, and effort by investing in AI-powered tools and smart algorithms.

8. Automate Emails With the Default Template

There are numerous usual emails organizations have to attend to, such as internal messages, transactional emails, follow-up, customer support, etc. This type of email response takes too much time and effort from human resources, which is why a default template can reply to all these messages appropriately in the inbox through AI-powered email templates.

Email management professionals have expertise in modern tools and technologies with features like prioritization automation, channel creation, integration, predictive analytics, and smart sorting. Using these tools, managers can send and manage automated replies to common emails so that extra time can be directed towards productive work.

Scenario: A house cleaning services business gets a lot of common inquiries and requests to schedule their booking, and using default reply templates with advanced tools helps the business to respond quickly and assist them by directing them to a certain cleaning service booking page to schedule a visit.

9. Email Timing for Utmost Impact

“Starbucks for Life" emails on the game and reminders about its holiday menu was a grand hit during the busy holiday season in December 2024 basically promoting its festive beverages and merchandise. The company has never failed to capture the attention of its customers with timely email marketing.

Scheduling specific content at a specific time helps in attracting the relevant audience that takes desirable action. While time zones are different for the global customers, Next-gen email managers create specific channels and perfect timing to send emails to connect and improve engagement. Also, seasonal emails for different festivals and times can help businesses in connecting with their customers to deliver the correct message.

Scenario: Email Managers run a campaign offering a free trial for a month during Christmas can find future potential customers and get an unusual hike in traffic.

10. Understands Customer Lifecycle:

Customers always have a lot of questions and queries before buying a product, service, or subscription. Precisely, their buying journey involves 7 stages of infinity cycle:

Awareness: Getting first impression of the product/service
Consideration: Thinking about the buying product/service
Decision making: Research about the product/service to firm up their decision
Purchase: Buying the product/service
Engaging with the brand: Connecting and engaging with brand through customer support emails and social networks
Being Loyal: Trusting and relying on the brand
Advocating: Referring and advocating the product/services

Next-Gen Email Managers can find out in which stage their potential customers are and build strategies and email campaigns accordingly to target them.

Scenario: Typically, an IoT product company can prepare their campaign targeting audience like in the table below;

11. Use the Right Email Management Tools:

The digital competitive era has introduced smart and advanced email marketing and management software that allows small businesses to get digital marketing advantages.

Top Verified Email Management Software

Freshdesk

Freshdesk is a robust email management tool that offers 14-days free trial of the software with a 75% reduction in time resolving tickets, 3 months of payback period, and 54 hours per agent per year. Freshdesk is the popular email management software among 75k+ businesses worldwide, including Decathlon, Pearson, Bridgestone, Orderin, and BIGBUS. The software provides 4 exclusive plans of Growth, Pro (Most Popular), Pro + AI Copilot, and Enterprise, starting from $15.

(Source: Freshdesk)

Features

Online ticket resolution
Omni-channel Support
Shared inbox access
Enable threads and tasks
Customer portal
Advance collaboration support
Comes with multilingual helpdesk
Multilingual conversations
AI-powered analytics & insights, Self Service, routing & SLA
Administration and security backed by AI

UniOne Email API

Unione Email API provides a four-month free trial, including 6k monthly emails and 100 email address validations. Unione is an API-powered solution that makes communications effortlessly smooth and lightning fast.

(Source: Unione)

Features

Live chat support Prioritization 24/7/365
HTML Email editor backed by AI
GDPR Compliance
Two-factor authentication & Microsoft 0Auth support
More than 200 ready-made email templates
Quick email sending within minutes with SMTP API
Visual email builder with drag and drop functionalities
Tracking of unsubscribe numbers and real-time events
Comes with SPF, DKIM, and DMARC authentication

Intuit Mailchimp

Intuit Mailchimp is an AI-powered email automation, marketing, and management tool that allows you to engage with your customers through emails and social networking platforms. Mailchimp was founded in Atlanta in 2001 by Ben Chestnut, Dan Kurzius, and Mark Armstrong with a goal to help small businesses access the advanced digital marketing advantages. In 2021, Intuit acquired Mailchimp and rebranded the tool as intuit mailchimp, helping small businesses grow further.

(Source: intuit mailchimp)

Features

Get free and paid plans
24/7 Email & Chat Support
Unique custom-coded templates
Marketing automation flows and Premium migration services
Comes with 300+ integrations
Email Scheduling and Dynamic content
A/B Testing and Anomaly detection
Unlimited Bandwidth and SEO Tools
Advanced audience management

Zoho Zeptomail

Zeptomail is a reliable and fastest transactional email service platform from Zoho, known for affordable email marketing solutions. Zeptomail’s delivery time on Zoho mail, Gmail, Apple, AOL, and Yahoo is 3.20s, 3.24s, 7.40s, 4.93s, and 4.90s, respectively. Zeptomail’s 1 credit allows a user to send 10000 transactional emails.

(source: Zoho Zeptomail)

Features

Extensive dashboard and Email segmentation mail agents
Comes with email sending and tracking suppression
Properly maintained shared IPs allow email to be delivered to the inbox instead of the spam folder.
Singular attention to transactional email delivery for better optimization.
On-time delivery boosts customer satisfaction and trust.
24/7 call support from support staff
Detailed Email performance logs and reports for troubleshooting
Comes with pre-built templates and Email template editor

What skills to look out for in an individual when hiring a Next-gen Email Manager?

A blend of technical knowledge in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript
Expertise in creating unique result-oriented strategies
Soft skills such as communication, leadership, attention to detail, and time management
Flexible and adaptable to modern technologies and tools

Next-gen Email Marketing Trend

Email Marketing at present is the most effective way to connect with audiences for businesses. The companies build relationships by connecting with their audiences through email to share updates, upgrades, and often to promote products.

1). Smart Segmentation to connect with the right people by triggering their likes and dislikes.

2). Ensuring data privacy and protection helps businesses to gain the trust of their customers.

3). User-generated content, like reviews, ratings, survey responses, and testimonials, is the new norm in modern marketing approaches. Making a thorough research on these factors will help in generating email newsletters that can connect with the users.

4). Using omnichannel marketing in order to connect with customers by creating a strategy that resonates with the audience.

5). Lifecycle of email automation creation to improve customers’ journey with the brand at different stages.

6). Gamification and interactive elements to encourage the subscribers to take specific action and improve engagement.

Conclusion

From AI-powered tools to human emotion-oriented strategies, email marketing and management require a blend of both aspects. It allows brands to move ahead of rudimentary messages towards data-driven conversations.

Next-gen email managers are evolving with the modern day AI-powered email management tools to connect with customers and drive results.