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5 Key Trends That Can Turn Into Opportunities in 2023

Jan 3, 2023   |   6 min read

Knowledge Center  ❯   Blog

Congratulations for surviving the ups and downs of 2022! In 2022, digital marketers were hard at work staying on top of the 2022 trends – masterful video marketing, relatable content creation, virtual event engagement, social/influencer marketing, harnessing the power of data to drive strategies and getting next-level with personalization. 2023 will be a year of building on those 2022 initiatives to get even more traction. As we see it, risk-taking and thoughtful, measured testing will be imperative to get feedback from brands that you will need to excel. We will be doing the same ourselves!

As we enter 2023, it’s important to understand the trends that will shape our strategies as we move through the year. Here at AtData, we see five key areas to focus your attention:

  1. Data privacy, personalization and third-party cookies
  2. Economic trends
  3. Email interactivity
  4. Boosting engagement with storytelling
  5. Competition for consumer attention

Data privacy, personalization and third-party cookies

While this is not a new trend, it is taking on fresh urgency because consumers are learning to protect their personally identifiable information as well as making brands decide how to manage and respect that privacy.

Meeting the trend of capturing accurate, safe and complete first-party data will be even more crucial for achieving marketing success in the next 12 months. As third-party cookies degrade, email addresses will become even more important as the central data point and identifier for most online marketers. More than ever, your success will depend on having an email database that can meet this challenge.

New privacy laws will go into effect in five U.S. states in 2023: California, Virginia, Colorado, Utah and Connecticut. The proposed U.S. American Data Privacy and Protection Act cleared a House committee in July 2022. Although it has not come up for vote by the full House yet, it represents the first comprehensive privacy legislation that would replace a confusing patchwork of earlier laws (not including CAN-SPAM, the U.S. law and regulations that govern commercial email).

The push for data privacy and protection affects two other areas that digital marketers must get a handle on sooner than later: the expected loss of third-party cookies and the rising prominence of personalized communications, especially in email.

Marketers must understand not only the consumer data they collect but also how they use it across marketing channels. Although third-party cookie deprecation has again been delayed, that’s not an excuse to procrastinate on replacing that data.

Our advice: First, always make sure that you have clean, correct and protected data. AtData’s Email Verification can help reinvent dead, inaccurate or malicious email addresses from corrupting your list and increase delivery to the inbox with our verification services – Email Validation, SafeToSend, and List Guard.

Next, determine which data points best drive your targeting. Continue to find ways to collect data directly from your email subscribers and customers. Examples: instore data updates, ask customer specific data questions when connecting with customer service, create an annual campaign to update their data and preferences, etc.

Third, work with a trusted data partner to help you supplement and update this primary data for accuracy. AtData’s Identity can help match demographic and contact data to up to 80% of U.S. email and postal addresses for improved targeting and personalization utilizing our identity services – Email Append, Postal Append, Email Change of Address (ECOA), and Email Intelligence.

These three points will help manage your data, given the new data privacy horizon and will help you collect more of your own first party data that’s lost from the loss of third party cookies.

Also, consult your email service provider or agency representatives for advice on using data integration and automation tools. These will help you segment and personalize your email communications so customers can see their data reflected in the messages they receive from you. After all, that’s what they expect!


Economic Trends

After making it through the pandemic years of 2020 and 2021, we all could be excused for thinking 2022 would bring a return to economic normalcy. But then, we were faced with inflation, continuing supply and inventory shortages, and higher interest rates among other things. These trends will all continue to affect consumers in 2023 so how can we turn these into opportunities? Continuing to stay on top of consumer activity, any purchasing shifts, any changes in buying preferences, and more. Successful marketers find ways to quickly and easily change their marketing strategies and relay noticeable shifts to other potentially affected departments so they too can decide on optimal changes.

Our advice: Stay on top of your marketing spend and consider shifting money to more efficient marketing channels like email. Track spending and change up your product mix. Be sure your email campaigns reflect these changes. Consider revising your key selling points and value propositions for a product or service, but test thoroughly before altering your course.


Integrating email interactivity

Given consumers’ shrinking attention spans for advertising messages, you need to find new ways to entice users to interact with your emails. Interactivity can help you build the kind of engagement that keeps customers opening and acting on your emails, therefore improving on your emails’ overall performance and ROI.

Our advice: Work with your email development team to create interactive emails with elements users can manipulate without leaving the email, such as these:

Interactive elements make your emails more enticing because you give readers something to anticipate and act on. Bonus: All that opening and clicking helps you create a more active email database and enhances your sender reputation with ISPs. Result: More inbox placement!


Boosting engagement with storytelling

Interactivity by itself also requires another essential element: good storytelling. This coming year, creating a compelling story will become even more important as customers look to connect with the brands they buy from.

Customers want to know about your brand and what it stands for. Who are the people behind the brand? How do you produce your products or create your services?

Our advice: Find fresh ways to tell your company’s story and show your brand’s personality in all that you do. Take customers behind the scenes at your company by sharing your teams’ events and stories. Add your customers’ voices to your messages to create a community and a feeling of belonging.

Enhance your reputation as a reliable source of information by sharing news, resources, videos, quotes, and more that relate to your brand.

Lastly, create a campaign to various unengaged contacts. AtData can help brands recognize anonymous website visitors, segment unengaged customers for better approaches, and help win back customers to get higher response rates utilizing Email Activity Signals and Website Visitor Identification.

Incorporating strong storytelling, fresh/correct data and becoming the reliable source for the industry all helps to build relationships that help customers become brand advocates.


Competition for consumer attention

We expect to see a continuing stream of new phone apps, streaming video services, and other media options that will take eyes off the inbox. As consumers add new media channels to their daily routines, marketers must work even faster to find the right channels to reach their target audiences and the best ways to leverage each one.

Our advice: A new channel might be captivating your audience now, but that doesn’t mean you should chase after it. Ask yourself: Do we have a reason to be in this channel? It isn’t just about where your audience goes but also whether they are in a buying state of mind when they get there and whether the channel lends itself to marketing that matches your brand identity.


How AtData can help with 2023 strategies & trends

Our goal is to help you take control of your first party email data collection, accelerate revenue growth, minimize the cost of fraud and drive your data-oriented business strategies. Powered by our unparalleled email data assets, with information on 98% of U.S. email addresses, our solutions can help you achieve these objectives through our full suite of services that include: Email Validation, Email Data Appends, Postal Data Appends, Email Change of Address (ECOA), Email Intelligence, Fraud Prevention powered by email data, Email Activity Signals, and Website Visitor Identification.

Call us for a free consultation on how we can help you with your specific data needs. We wish you a busy and prosperous 2023, and we’re ready to help you crush your email data goals!

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