The most successful email marketing companies in the months, and possibly years, to come will be those which are able to respond to how their subscribers have changed in the post Covid-19 world. You might well be wondering how to plan for something so unpredictable. Read a dozen forecasts on what the new norm will be and you will find you have wasted your time. Everyone, especially experts, have different ideas.

Do we need the opinion of experts? I’d suggest we do but not to blindly follow but merely to give us ideas of how things might progress. It’s up to us to work out which one is most applicable to our setup, and email marketing has the systems to allow us to make informed decisions rather than mere guesses. It’s not just another example of split testing. Slightly different processes will be required.

The current form of email marketing split testing is binary: we are told either A or B is best for us. That gives us a distinct advantage over other forms of marketing. However, we’ve got to discover what the post Covid-19 customer wants and how their performance has changed. Initially we’ll have to make assumptions.

One assumption, which is rather obvious, is that many of your subscribers might become very careful with how they spend their money. Not only that, their funds might be restricted. The overall stats suggest people are spending less, but it is wrong to assume this goes for everyone, or even every product. Some companies have found that certain items are selling well and that there is a fair bit of spare money around. With remote working, commuting costs are reduced. I’ve recently bought two online courses, my first such purchases in over seven years.

Some commentators suggest that the current move towards greater online purchases is something that will remain post Covid, and might well increase steadily. Good news for email marketing. Not all your subscribers will increase or maintain spending though.

We need to discover which customers are spending less, which ones have discovered new priorities, and which ones are spending more and on which products. We won’t find out with a simple split test. But there are ways in which we can make evidenced assumptions and then work from that basis to discover ways to split our email marketing lists in the future.

Some of your subscribers will have already changed their purchasing habits. You’ve got historical returns. If you group those who have changed, look for anything that is common to them. If you sell B2B, you could well see a trend with types of company, or those selling certain products, one struggling or another upping its purchasing.

You can see that in the future, perhaps for a short period, you should split your email marketing lists along the lines of who is buying more, who’s buying less, and who is after something different. The same goes for B2C customers as well.

The biggest change in email marketing post Covid-19 might be the way you classify your subscribers.