Do your customers delete newsletters from their inbox without even opening them?
Do your emails often end up in the spam folder?
Do you feel that your database lacks interest in receiving your communications?
Perhaps it’s time to reformulate the way you publicise your products and services.
Learn about the newe-mail marketing trendsfor 2024 and increase trust in your brand and inbox!
Kath Pay, CEO ofHolistic E-mail Marketing, expects the email experience to be the trend that will define marketing in 2024.
The expert identifies new approaches that help prove the value of e-mail as one of the most powerful tools for communicating with customers. Many of them related, as you might expect, to Artificial Intelligence (AI) – and always centred on the consumer.
7 e-mail marketing trends
- Inbox Visibility: Trust and Authentication
- Using Generative Artificial Intelligence
- More Complex E-Mail Automations
- Better Organisation and Access to Data
- Using AI to support A/B testing
- Dark Mode E-Mail Design
- Hyper personalisation
As early as 2023, Rock Content had signalled how AI would innovate – in content and form – in the communication of our products, services, news and messages.
In the midst of so many automations, interventions and technological developments, however, all the experts stress the importance of maintaining authenticity and personalisation in all aspects of marketing.
Email marketing continues to prove its worth in leads. But that value has skyrocketed in the last 10 years.
The cost of acquiring new customers has risen 222% since 2013, from $9 per customer to $29 in 2022
The trend towards working smarter
When companies work smarter, they can serve their customers better.
They develop better products, manage the shop more efficiently, offer more customer support and transmit more relevant and effective messages.
This evolution should also be reflected in the mailbox. These are the topics where you should shine:
- Quickly identifiable sender name (avoid a no-reply address)
- Strong subject line
- Customization
- Interactive emails with animations
1. Inbox Visibility: Trust and Authentication
To ensure that your email does not end up in the SPAM box, you need to convince both your subscribers and your suppliers.
How can you guarantee that your senders are trustworthy and authentic? Use these tools:
- BIMI (Brand Indicators for Message Identification)
More than 3.4 billion phishing emails are sent every day, causing huge damage.
BIMI is an email standard that sets a standard for the display of logos across various mailbox services.
This standard not only requires the sender to verify authorisation to send emails with a certain logo, but also guarantees subscribers that a message is coming from an authentic sender, thus avoiding brand forgeries.
- DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance)
Authentication protocol designed to strengthen the security and authenticity of emails.
It allows senders to define policies to indicate how receivers should treat unauthenticated messages.
In short, it uses domain-based authentication to verify that an email is genuine and has not been tampered with by a third party.
2. Use of Generative Artificial Intelligence
Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) is an extremely powerful tool on many fronts in society, including marketing.
– OpenAI’s ChatGPT allows ideas and texts to be generated, drafted and optimised.
– DALL-E helps to create and optimise images from prompts and text descriptions.
Other technologies such as Jasper,WriteSonic or Bard have dominated attention all over the world.
Have you realised what these tools can do for your company’s email marketing?
Among other tasks, you can:
- Create dynamic content.
- Draw up a campaign briefing.
- Optimise sending times.
- Perform predictive analysis of customer behaviour.
- Segment and target automated emails.
- Conduct A/B testing and optimisation.
Around a sixth of companies have been using AI for content creation and optimisation for more than a year. Around a third have recently started using AI to generate content for SEO, social media and email marketing.
3. More Complex E-Mail Automations
Email marketing automation has moved on from one-off sends to optimised series that involve more and more subscribers.
These series are driven by cloud-based platforms, segmented automation tools, easier access to real-time data and the need for greater efficiency from marketing teams.
81% of marketing organisations use some form of automation. An investment that results in higher revenues and greater customer retention.
Automation makes it possible to automatically collect and manage individual preferences, providing more relevant and personalised communications, thus improving the customer experience via email.
The increase in automation functionalities in Email Service Providers (ESPs) also allows for huge time savings and an increase in conversion and retention rates.
4. Better Organisation and Access to Data
The trend towards working smarter in marketing means better organisation and access to data.
The Customer Data Platform (CDP) is becoming mainstream, with revenue forecasts reaching 2.3 billion dollars by 2023.
The CDP functions as a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Platform, which unifies data from various sources to provide a complete view of the customer.
It promises a better customer experience through personalised messages and reduces the effort marketing professionals put into creating and sending campaigns.
It is foreseeable that more brands will use CDPs and give due value to a unified customer view. This is based on access to substantial amounts of data from isolated sources, such as customer service contacts.
For some companies that do not manage so much data, however, CRM platforms remain the best alternative.
5. Using AI to support A/B testing
According to Kath Pay, A/B testing will become more common thanks to two developments:
- More testing tools integrated into e-mail sending platforms.
- Use of generative AI to create test controls and variations more quickly and accurately.
Many email marketers use ChatGPT and other language modelling bots to create A/B tests.
These bots suggest alternatives for Subject fields, CTA (call to action) or blocks of text.
A/B tests modify, for example, word or character count, word choice and sentence structure; or make more sophisticated variations based on an emotional approach, elements of persuasion or the selection of audiences for the tests.
6. Dark Mode E-Mail Design
Dark mode on screens attenuates colours, brightness and contrast, which minimises glare and makes it easier for the eyes to adapt to the surrounding light.
The result is less eye strain, which makes reading more comfortable and easier.
- 40 per cent of iPhones have dark mode functionality activated (Litmus)
- All Office applications (Microsoft 365) allow this alternative.
However, this trend poses a challenge for web designers. Colours, for example, can appear different or even invisible on a darker background.
The solution is to create different templates that adapt to both white and dark screens and send the most appropriate version to each client.
7. Hyper customization
Increasing sales and engaging the customer is one of the objectives of any business. To do this, they use increasingly tailor-made emails. With the help of AI, it is possible:
- Refine the message and make it more relevant to the consumer.
- Access specific data to develop communication strategies.
- Segment the target audience according to their personal interests and stage in the purchase funnel.
- Provide more meaningful user experiences.
In a campaign using the Jasper scripting tool, iota-ML Machine Learning and the Playable video system,Volvo managed to triple annual engagement and increase sales of new products by 47 per cent. The “most engaged subscribers” segment grew 4.5 times and the segment interested in content about electric cars grew 6 times.
–SmartLinks is the ideal partner for companies with e-mail marketing campaigns. Letâs talk!
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