Amazon Alexa’s impact on Email Marketing

Amazon announced that Alexa will now hold the power to read, write, and delete emails from your Gmail and Outlook accounts. Although this may pose some problems with how businesses market, it will give us great opportunities to expand the world of Email Marketing.

Amazon is one of the leaders in smart home technology, with millions of Amazon Echo’s sold in 2018 alone, it’s safe to say this is not just a fad and smart home technology is here to stay.

With this many Amazon Echo users, we need to make sure our Email Marketing efforts are staying up-to-date with the new developments in voice recognition software. When thinking about technology, like smart homes, reading our emails, the concept isn’t that far off in terms of disability software. People with vision impairments have had software for many years that is able to read their emails for them. This idea is now being brought to a more mainstream platform with the development of the new Amazon Echo update.

The question is now how do we make sure we are staying ahead of the trend when we jump on the smart home bandwagon. The most important change many companies will face when updating their email marketing practices will be adding hidden descriptions. The hidden data and descriptions you put in your emails via alt tags are going to be the big difference maker.

When creating emails we need to think about what the smart home will be reading. When you have images in your email, for instance, the smart home cannot look at the image and describe it for you. You have to tell the software using alt tags what the image looks like or a brief description of what the image consists of so the person who is listening can get the full impact of your email. The image will appear the same way to those who are viewing the email on their phone or computer but those who will be relying on listening to their emails will find this helpful. If you don’t add these appropriate tags the smart home will not be able to describe it and instead, you risk the smart home listing off the source of the photos which will only confuse and annoy the recipient.

This change may seem overwhelming but it doesn’t have to be. With the expertise at Stellar Blue Technologies, we do the research so you can have peace of mind. We can help make sure your Email Marketing campaigns are optimized for the new Amazon Alexa update and any updates in the future. Contact us today to find out how we can help.