What does the future hold for email marketing? What's going to happen in the next year and beyond? As we crack open this brand-new 2023, let's go and find out. Here are our predictions for email marketing in 2023.  Be warned - some of these things might change the way you view your marketing. Ready to get planning for an explosive 2023?SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: (0:13) Come and talk to us inside our FREE Facebook group.(4:07) The importance of having a direct line with your customers.(8:32) The tech in email is going to improve.(10:07) AI writing tools will get smarter.(14:17) Readership of email on mobile devices is going to continue to grow.(15:10) More businesses will make email marketing their top priority.(17:38) The introduction of algorithms for individual inboxes.(19:38) People who don't take email marketing seriously will be left behind.(21:04 ) Want to learn how to make email marketing work for you in 2023 and beyond?(21:38) Subject line of the week.The importance of having a direct line with your customersThe first shift we see happening when it comes to email marketing in 2023 is the fact that having a direct line with your customers is going to become more important than ever. Why? Because the social media algorithms are going to continue to throttle organic reach in favour of ads, which are getting a lot more real estate on those platforms. Advertising costs continue to increase because social media platforms have limited space and inventory to display ads. With more and more businesses advertising and usership going down as people switch to other platforms, we've definitely seen a huge shift over the past few years. Take Facebook, for example. We all used to see a lot more posts from our friends and only a few ads from big companies. But now the balance has tipped in favour of ads because that's how the platforms make their money. And the reach for organic social posting is pitifully low.  We knew it was tough before, but if you put great value out there, back then you could go viral. And if you decided to run ads, the return was a lot higher. Still, not as high as the return for email marketing, which is about $80-$90 for every $1 you spend. So having that direct line where you can talk to your customers through a channel that you own (email) and lands directly onto their phones is going to be super important.  There is no scalability issue with email marketingIn a nutshell, with demand for advertising being at an all-time high, social media has become an unpredictably unscalable business. But there's no scalability issue with email because every single person who is on your list can have a one-way conversation with you. You have as much space in their inbox as they’re willing to give you. At any point, they can choose to unsubscribe, but until then, you can have a back-and-forth conversation with your audience.  The tech in email is going to improve Another prediction for email marketing in 2023 is to do with tech. In the next few years, technology is going to allow us to put more and more interactive elements into emails, such as surveys and videos. And it's going to become more accessible too.As a result, more people are going to be attracted to the world of email marketing because of the Shiny Object Syndrome phenomenon. In fairness, email hasn't evolved much from a tech perspective for a long time - not much has changed in terms of what's possible. So the changes will come in. But we're not convinced that the advancement in tech is going to be a...