Years go by and the digital marketing landscape continues to evolve, but email marketing remains a stalwart of successful online campaigns. According to the DMA (Direct Marketing Association), as of 2023 email has an average ROI (return on investment) of 42:1 in the UK, which means that businesses can expect an average return of £42 for every £1 spent on their email marketing strategy. 

Want to get to grips with email marketing this year? Adapt to these trends and success is bound to be yours in 2024. After all, being innovative in your business practices always pays off when it comes to attracting new customers.

Keep reading to find out what’s hot and what’s not in the world of email marketing in 2024.

Prioritise Privacy

Less of a trend and more of a legal obligation, a focus on data privacy and protection are going to be huge in email marketing this year. 

Back in 2018, the launch of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) redefined email marketing as we know it, outlining new guidelines against cold emailing and mailing list building. However, even with these regulations in place, only 8% of consumers actually trust brands to keep their information safe.

Because building trust plays a key role in retaining customers, it’s important to hone in on data privacy in your email marketing strategy. For example, give subscribers the option to unsubscribe to emails or change their preferences. Let them decide what content they will receive from you and when. 

This simple change effectively kills three birds with one stone:

• More data to segment your subscriber database with.
• Neater mailing list, as uninterested subscribers can easily unsubscribe. 
• Improved email marketing performance, as recipients get what they expect.

Hyper-Personalisation 

Of course, the end goal of any email marketing campaign is to generate more revenue. Over the past couple of years, it’s become common knowledge in the digital marketing sphere that one of the best ways to do this is through complete personalisation of the user experience (UX)

Impersonalisation can be a big drag on the outcome of  your campaign. When receiving an impersonal or mistargeted email, 94% of customers take one of the following actions:

It’s clear to see from these stats that this is a particularly big trend to watch. Here are some ways that you can make your email marketing campaign super personal to your customers:

• Tailor messages and promotions by audience segments.
• Recommend products or content by audience segments.
• Send triggered emails based on visitor behaviour.
• Recommend products or contents by the individual. 

The AI Advantage

In keeping with the theme of email personalisation, using artificial intelligence tools, like ChatGPT, is a great way to make this happen, as it allows you to not only pull more data about your customers, but also do it faster. 

Many marketers are still apprehensive about incorporating AI into their marketing strategies because they don’t understand how much they can benefit from using it to their advantage. If this is you, it’s important to remember that AI isn’t meant to replace your expertise, but instead optimise your workload and help you scale your email marketing efforts. 

Here are just a few of the tasks AI can perform:

• Write subject headlines.
• Allow you to send personalised emails to each prospect.
• Restructure your email campaigns to make them more effective.
• Clean up and build your mailing lists.

Apply Automation

Email marketing automation ensures that there’s consistent and cohesive communication between your brand and subscribers. Plus, it gives customers a sense of control over their inbox. Let’s be real: in an age of content overload, the last thing someone wants to see is yet another pointless email in their inbox. 

Drip email campaigns tend to outperform more standard strategies, with automated emails generating as much as 320% more revenue than those that are non-automated. Emails sent out as part of a drip campaign are much more responsive, which helps to establish friendlier communication between each side. They also aren’t overwhelming, as all the necessary information is delivered in ‘drips’, saving the reader the effort of having to traverse through hefty amounts of copy. 

So, what can you automate? Here’s a quick rundown:

• Make use of email templates.
• Automate mail list scrubbing.
• Send automated transactional emails to customers.
• Automate the onboarding process with a series of email drips.
• Automate email lead nurturing.

Interactive Content

This trend might have been around for a while, but it’s still going to reign supreme in 2024. Interactive, responsive emails are the holy grail of email marketing. Not only do they enhance customer engagement, but they also massively increase email interactions. Some interactive email features that are expected to be popular this year include:

• Animated buttons and calls to action (CTAS).
• Interactive image and product carousels, controlled by the user.
• Rollover effects to highlight product offerings.
• Surveys, polls and user-generated content. 
• Accordion features designed to make long emails more concise.

Above interactive email hover effect example. Elements can change appearance or reveal additional information when the cursor is hovered over them. This can include text changes, colour changes, or image swaps.

Deliver Your Message with Bigg

This year is gearing up to be yet another interesting year in the digital marketing world, with plenty of brand new trends emerging and many older ones still in full force. If you want to make  2024 the year that your business takes their email marketing campaign to the next level, Bigg can help. 

As a digital agency that specialises in email marketing, working with us makes it nearly impossible to fail at growing your business. We use a scientific approach to email marketing that leverages opens, clicks and conversion data to improve results and increase your profitability month after month. 

From purposeful content to quality design and efficient tracking, we are proud that our bespoke email strategies have helped many of our clients not only meet their targets, but exceed them. Want to find out more about what we do? Speak to a member of our team today to get started.