The Future of Email in 2024: 7 Up-and-Coming Email Marketing Trends
As consumer behaviour and technology are constantly changing, marketers must stay up-to-date with new trends to ensure their digital marketing strategies are effectively engaging with audiences and driving sustainable growth. In this ever-evolving market, email marketing still stands out as an effective channel to engage with your audience. In fact, email marketing revenue is expected to reach $17.9 billion by 2027:
In 2024, a number of pivotal changes are set to influence email marketing, offering innovative ways for brands to connect with their customers. In this piece, we’ll go through the email marketing trends that will define success in 2024.
Extensive Use of AI Tools
2023 was the year when artificial intelligence entered the marketing world. And 2024 will be the year marketers will harness even more advanced tools to streamline different parts of their workflow. We have already experienced the impact of AI-based tools in various marketing activities–one of them being email marketing. Let’s see how AI boosts your email marketing performance in numbers:
So, in 2024, businesses will invest in more sophisticated AI tools to revolutionise their email marketing. By analysing large volumes of data to predict customer preferences, Machine Learning technology allows marketers to send hyper-personalised emails, automate audience segmentation, or optimise send times. At the same time, advanced AI features ensure that the email content resonates with each recipient based on Natural Language Processing algorithms.
Email marketing services have already built this kind of advanced AI features to help you build unique email experiences. This includes every email element, from optimising your subject lines to producing customised graphics. Klaviyo, for example, a popular email marketing tool among eCommerces, offers an AI-powered smart send time feature that discovers the best time to dispatch emails. If you think Klaviyo is too pricey or too eCommerce-oriented, you can check out Klaviyo competitors and see how they approach AI. Let’s take Moosend, for example. The platform has recently launched a built-in Generative AI content creator that needs just a simple prompt to build inspiring, spot-on copy that converts.
But AI isn’t limited to email personalisation and content creation. AI already dominates other aspects of email marketing:
- Sanitise your email list by removing invalid email addresses, detecting duplicated ones, or predicting bounces and unsubscribes.
- Analyse user behaviour to identify patterns and make accurate predictions on audience preferences and campaign results.
- Use the audience information gathered to build as detailed list segments as possible and optimise your communication with them.
- Support A/B testing by creating more sophisticated email variations or automating multivariate testing.
Customer-Centric Email Messages
Businesses are starting to rediscover the hidden potential of email marketing. How? By revisiting their strategies to provide a memorable customer experience instead of just driving business goals. And there’s no better way to do that than sharing valuable email content.
Is this really a new trend? Not at all. It's an old-time classic that works in favour of creating a customer-centric approach. The innovative factor is to turn brand-centric messages into opportunities to build stronger customer relationships. Customer-centricity is in the spotlight, and you should aim to provide a unique experience to readers. Whatever you do, remember to talk about your business and its achievements at least half the time you talk about your customers and their needs.
But let’s move from theory to practice. There are many ways to put your customers at the centre of your emails. For instance, you could share educational content, such as how-to guides or tips and tricks, to help them make the most out of their purchase. Consider sending special offers to your loyal customers as a token of appreciation. It’s also a great idea to celebrate important milestones in their relationship with your brand. Express your gratitude for their ongoing support by offering exclusive discounts or content to mark the occasion.
Another effective way to focus on your customers is to share case studies or customer success stories to show how your products or services helped other consumers solve their pain points. You could also encourage recipients to take part in surveys or polls to detect potential gaps in your strategy and improve their experience. To make your communication more relatable to the subscriber, you could also customise your email content based on their location–for example, send invitations to local-based events, demonstrating you want to actively engage with them.
Proper Email Authentication
2024 is a pivotal year for email marketers worldwide, especially bulk email senders. With Google and Yahoo’s new guidelines, email authentication will never be the same. Every business involved in email marketing has to adapt to these requirements coming from two key players that share a large percentage of email users. And we should definitely expect most inbox providers to follow their lead before the year comes to an end.
These new regulations highlight the need for enhanced security. By complying with them, you’re set to maintain your sender reputation and improve your email deliverability. If you haven’t already taken steps to follow them, you’ll have to do so before they are enforced (starting in February 2024). So, let’s see what these guidelines entail:
- Set up the DMARC record, an authentication method that’s meant to prevent domain abuse, as well as block spam and phishing emails.
- Allow for an one-click unsubscribe feature that facilitates the unsubscribe process, thus improving the user experience.
- Have SPF and DKIM authentication protocols at place to prove your emails are genuine and sent from a legitimate domain.
- Maintain a spam rate below 0.3%. This ensures that your emails aren’t flagged as unsolicited or fraudulent.
- Keep your spam rates low by following practices such as setting up double opt-in and verifying the email addresses in your list.
Data Privacy and Protection
As email marketing evolves, so do concerns about data privacy and protection. Seeing that the foundation of email marketing is building trust, it’s imperative for brands to dive into better management of customer data. The problem is that only 22% of consumers believe that businesses are protecting their personal information properly.
In 2024 and beyond, the focus will be on transparency, stricter data collection and management practices, and user consent. The GDPR and CCPA privacy legislations, forced email marketers to adopt measures to protect their customers’ data. Some of them include getting user consent before collecting personal information, being transparent about why you need them, and staying away from excessive data collection or deceptive messaging.
Setting up a double opt-in subscription process is the cornerstone of any company’s lead generation efforts. You should explicitly mention why you need users’ personal information and include as many checkboxes as the number of purposes you’re planning to use them for.
Also, you could add a short questionnaire on your welcome email for recipients to choose what type of content they would like to receive–and how frequently. And don’t forget to include an option for them to change their email preferences whenever they feel like it. Last but not least, always add a prominent and clear unsubscribe button or link in case they want out.
A Minimalistic Approach to Email Design
We are experiencing a shift towards more meaningful connections between businesses and their customers, both online and offline. Consumers are after authentic interactions with their favourite brands. And going minimal with your email design means that readers will focus on your message.
Don’t get us wrong; it’s not that interactive emails have gone out of style. You can still deliver an unforgettable email experience with the use of dynamic visual elements. But the objective of such a minimalistic approach is to eliminate distractions. Consider things like:
- Design clean layouts with enough whitespace and minimal text to improve readability and ease visual stress.
- Invest in adding as few elements as possible. Too many graphic elements or lengthy texts lead to slower loading times, which, in turn, hurt the user experience.
- Use clean and easy-to-read fonts that fit your brand identity. Try to stick to a limited number of typefaces to make your design straightforward.
- Opt for effective colour schemes, such monochromatic ones or limited colour palettes. That way, your readers won’t get distracted by visual clutter.
Email accessibility
With more than 1 billion people living with some form of disability, creating accessible emails is more of a necessity instead of an email marketing trend. Businesses are starting to explore the best practices to build web content with accessibility standards in mind. Naturally, designing accessible emails should be an integral part of every successful digital marketing strategy. The benefits of email accessibility go beyond the ethical responsibility of making all users feel included. They involve improving your email performance and reaching out to a wider audience.
Emails designed according to accessibility best practices are easier to consume. So, let’s break down these practices:
- Add alternative text for images, captions for videos, and transcripts for audio content to ensure users won’t miss any critical information.
- Choose clear and legible fonts with an appropriate size so that your content is readable no matter the user’s impairment–or screen size, for that matter.
- Use contrasting colours to separate different elements. This not only helps readers with vision impairments, but also makes your design more appealing.
- Make clickable buttons and links bigger for users to identify them easily. Also, provide more context in your CTAs to be clear on what action they direct recipients to.
- Keep your design simple and make sure your content follows a logical hierarchy. That way, you help readers navigate through the most important parts of your email.
- For the same reason, use bulleted lists, headings, and enough white space. And consider using left-aligned text to facilitate the reading process for dyslexic people.
New year, new metrics
Well, the metrics aren’t new, but turning your focus on tracking the right ones becomes more important than ever. It all began with Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection in 2021 which prevents marketers from checking when its users opened an email. People using an Apple device can choose to hide their IP addresses from email marketing services. This update puts an end to the importance of monitoring email open rates since it could lead to inaccurate results.
Marketers turn to other key performance indicators (KPIs) to decide on the effectiveness of their email campaigns. Click-through rates will be among the most crucial metrics, according to a large percentage of marketers who focus on this KPI to find the most popular email clicks. Other important KPIs include:
- Conversion rate: It shows the number of recipients who decided to click on your call-to-action and complete a desired action.
- Engagement time: This metric tracks how long a subscriber spends engaging with your email content, which, in turn, shows if your content resonates with them.
- Customer lifetime value (CLV): CLV represents the total and long-term value of your subscribers over the duration of their interaction with your business.
- List growth rate: This KPI measures the rate at which your email list is growing. If it’s good, it indicates a healthy list expanding steadily.
- Unsubscribe rate: It shows the number of recipients who chose to unsubscribe from your email list. Tracking this metric mostly helps you measure your overall list growth rate while indicating potential gaps in your strategy.
These are some of the most important metrics to keep track of. However, your email campaign effectiveness depends on many factors, such as your campaign goals. So, make sure you leverage your email marketing platform’s analytics to have a better understanding of subscriber behaviour and make data-driven digital marketing decisions.
Stay ahead of competition with the latest email trends
Email marketing is evolving rapidly. So, keeping up with the latest email marketing trends is crucial for any business looking to stay relevant. From the increased focus on better data management methods to the need for email accessibility, there’s a shift towards improved and customer-centric email messages. By embracing the email marketing trends we’ve analysed in this article, you position yourself for email marketing success over the years to come.