The world of digital marketing is constantly evolving. Some channels increase in popularity, as others tend to fade away. Email marketing’s strong position remains unchanged over the years. Driving $36 for every dollar spent, email proves to be the most profitable and essential marketing channel for any marketer. Though, to make your email marketing successful you have to keep up with the latest trends and best practices. Some of them have been with us for a while, while newer ones came out of recent technological improvements. Both will influence what matters in email marketing this year. Let’s look at what the email marketing trends and predictions are for 2024.
Table of contents
- Artificial intelligence
- Email authentication (Google & Yahoo new requirements)
- Email automation
- Email accessibility
- Data protection and privacy
- Hyper personalized emails
- Create FOMO
- Omnichannel
- 2024 email marketing trends in a nutshell
Artificial intelligence
After several years of existence and development, accelerated by the launch of Chat GPT in late 2022, artificial intelligence has become an integral part of our lives. We are learning to use it wisely and to benefit from it in our daily tasks. When it comes to email marketing, you can use AI to analyze and improve the structure of your campaigns as well as clean your email lists. You can also ask artificial intelligence to come up with catchy subject lines that will ensure a high email open rate or generate AI images for your emails.
Email authentication (Google & Yahoo new requirements)
This fall, we found out that Google and Yahoo introduced new email authentication requirements that, up to now, had only been good practices. From February 2024 on, all bulk senders will have to authenticate their emails to minimize the risk of sending spam and unwanted mail. To make sure your emails reach the recipients’ inbox, you will need to send them with your own custom domain, not @gmail.com or @yahoo.com, and authenticate it with DKIM, SPF, and DMARC. You will also need to facilitate the unsubscribe process. It should be only one click away if someone no longer wants to receive emails from you. This leads us to the third requirement. Your recipients should opt-in to get messages from you in the first place. With these new requirements Google or Yahoo can be certain you are only sending wanted emails.
Email automation
Email automation may not be the newest trend because it has been with us for some time now, but it will surely make your email flow more thoughtful and planned, giving you more time for other tasks. The easiest way to incorporate automation into an email flow is to create a series of customer onboarding emails. It can include a welcome email and other messages on how to get started with your product, store, or platform.You can schedule when and at what interval they will be sent, or if they should be triggered by some user action. Another idea is to automate anniversary and birthday emails. You can also use email automation to send better transactional emails, which are triggered by customer’s website activity.
Email accessibility
To make your emails accessible means to design your email content as easy to read for everyone. Accessibility is not only a matter of inclusiveness, but it is also a legal obligation. Regulations such as WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) define the structure and presentation of digital content. Not complying with these rules may lead to legal consequences and damage your reputation as a sender. But, if you put in the effort to make your emails accessible, you can also increase your reach, trust and credibility. There are many elements to consider when providing your recipients with email accessibility. You can add alt texts for images, keep your text left-aligned, incorporate good color contrast and use a simple email layout. Also, the fonts and font sizes should be readable, and the language clear and understandable.
Data protection and privacy
Maybe it is not necessarily a trend, but we cannot stress enough how crucial data protection is for your business. That’s why we decided to include it in this article. You may fear that due to tighter privacy laws, your email marketing efforts will be less effective, but this is absolutely not the case. Both you and your audience may only benefit from it. Your recipients will feel safe that their data is secured, you'll be seen as a trustworthy sender and your email campaigns will be effective and sustainable. Rules such as General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) or California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) require senders to manage recipients data more strictly, meaning your audience needs to give consent to receive emails for you, as well as know why you’ll store their data and how you’ll use it. They also need to be able to unsubscribe easily.
Hyper personalized emails
It’s time to take email personalization to the next level. Starting an email with the recipient’s name is no longer enough. Your subscribers need to feel as if the message was crafted especially for them. How can you obtain that? You can group your email lists into segments and send emails with dynamic content. It can be based on your recipient’s location, behavior, preferences, or purchase history. Trust us, it will make every difference in the world to your audience. You can also add merge fields, which are special tags that will be replaced by appropriate content in your email.
Create FOMO
FOMO, meaning “fear of missing out”, is a phenomenon that, when used wisely, may help you skyrocket your email marketing efforts. It is human nature to be afraid something will happen without us or that we will miss out on an opportunity. You can use FOMO to your advantage.. Creating a feeling of urgency with your exclusive, one-of-a-kind, or timely offer will encourage your audience to act. More importantly, to act now.
Omnichannel
Remember that the success of your marketing strategy does not depend solely on email marketing. All marketing channels should be consistent and complement each other. We all know very well that the customer journey doesn't end with reading an email or visiting a website. It takes multiple touchpoints for a conversion to occur. That's what makes omnichannel marketing so crucial. Your marketing strategies’ success depends on whether you ensure your website is well positioned and appears in organic search results. whether you maintain social media channels,create podcasts and webinars, and whether you run advertising and remarketing campaigns, in addition to the email marketing campaigns you send out.
2024 email marketing trends in a nutshell
2024 email marketing trends will definitely revolve around complying with the regulations regarding email authentication and data protection. It’s likely we will also continue to domesticate artificial intelligence, treating it as an extra hand with our daily tasks. As for the rest of the predictions for this year, we will see emails personalized beyond just the use of your name, including offers specifically designed to induce FOMO. We will also see an increase in emails that are accessible to everyone. And all of this will be in harmony with our other marketing channels. Doesn’t it sound exciting?
Ula Chwesiuk
Ula is a content creator at Elastic Email. She is passionate about marketing, creative writing and language learning. Outside of work, Ula likes to travel, try new recipes and go to concerts.
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