Email and digital marketers can be excused if they have been feeling a bit stressed over the past year. Beyond the immense challenges presented by the pandemic, there have been ongoing developments in the data privacy landscape and changing technologies to deal with. But it’s good to remember that challenges also often provide opportunities. Let’s take a look at a few big changes that could impact email marketing in 2021 and in the future — and how marketers can adapt and identify new opportunities.

Evolving Consumer Engagement

Consumer behavior evolves constantly. Some changes can occur suddenly and require quick decisions, while others allow marketers the time to adapt more gradually. Over the past year, email marketers have been dealing with largely unprecedented and sudden changes in consumer behavior.

Just one example was the shift to working from home that impacted workers around the U.S. and the entire world. People who had previously never had the option of working remotely were now scrambling to set up home offices with no certainty about when or if they would return to a traditional office setting. While marketers had already seen a shift toward more remote work in years past, according to Global Workplace Analytics data (via Business 2 Community), the massive acceleration of the change was a game changer for many companies. Consumer needs for some products and services skyrocketed while the need for others plummeted, and many marketers found that all of their existing campaign performance forecasts and benchmarks needed to be reevaluated and potentially tossed aside as organizations pivoted on long-standing strategies.

More people working from home means more people spending more hours in front of their desktop or laptop in a home office setting. Marketers may be seeing this shift in the form of increased desktop email activity and decreased mobile email activity.

Read more: Three Digital Marketing Industry Challenges That May Positively Impact Email Marketing