Email Marketing Trends 2024: The Experts Speak Out

As we do every year, Digital Response wants to reflect on the key trends and aspects that will dominate email marketing in 2024.

We are also doing so with the participation of very prominent professionals who have wanted to share their points of view.

In 2024, we will see the consolidation of three dynamics in the fields of eCRM and marketing operations.

1. Personalisation along the Customer Journey in Marketing and CRM

In the dynamic world of marketing and CRM, personalisation has become the cornerstone of engaging consumers at every stage of the Customer Journey. The ability to tailor content to individual needs and preferences not only drives relevance, but also strengthens customer loyalty. In this context, the role of the email channel has been one of the key tools to personalise communications with users. In 2024 we will see how brands will strive to go further, orchestrating email, web and mobile channels with consistency and personalising content.

2. Integrated management of own channels in CRM departments.

As we noted in the previous section, we will see how CRM teams in companies will assume responsibility for managing all communications directed to internal databases (own channels). This will encompass not only email marketing campaigns, but also messaging via mobile apps (push notifications, in-app messaging and message centre) and web messaging. As brands accumulate successful use cases with these types of communications, the next natural step will be to embrace multi-channel orchestration across the Customer Journey.

3. Implementation of Agile Campaign Management Systems.

In such a context, we will also see brands making efforts to adopt agile systems to manage marketing operations in "owned channels". This will reduce production times, reduce errors and increase team productivity.

The year 2024 promises to be an exciting and challenging period for the world of CRM, email and marketing automation. In an ever-evolving digital landscape, interaction with users and customers is becoming increasingly personalised and contextualised. Technological advances, combined with changes in consumer behaviours, are shaping new trends and strategic approaches in these key areas of digital marketing.

Trends for 2024:

1. Personalisation driven by Artificial Intelligence (AI): So far we have been talking about personalisation. But how can AI help us improve and increase the level of personalisation? In 2024, we will see greater integration of machine learning algorithms to analyse complex data and deliver more personalised user experiences. From advanced segmentation to dynamic content generation, AI is becoming a super-powerful lever to deliver relevant and timely messages to each individual, guide their experience and tailor content.

2. Focus on Data-driven User Experience: The user or customer should be more and more at the centre, especially in a context where we have "over-information", we are constantly "bombarded" with information and messages... therefore, if you want to succeed as a brand, you must ensure that each of the messages are relevant, personalised and accurate. In this case, less is more in terms of quantity, and more is more in terms of personalisation and precision.

3. Multichannel Automation and Omnichannel: Platform integration and orchestration of campaigns across multiple channels becomes essential. In 2024, marketing automation strategies expand to encompass a wider range of channels, from email to social media to Whatsapp, for example. Synchronisation between these channels allows for a seamless and consistent experience for users and customers, and more importantly, to choose which channel works best for which type of message and user. These trends represent just a glimpse of what I expect in the CRM, email and marketing automation landscape this year. Agile adaptability and a deep understanding of changing user/customer needs will be critical to success in this dynamic and competitive environment.

As the head of CoRegistros, a digital marketing agency focused on capturing and optimising data from individuals who convert, I have seen first-hand how artificial intelligence (AI) has revolutionised our business strategy, also in email marketing. Where we used to spend hours designing and sending mass email campaigns, AI now takes care of much of the process in an automated way.

Thanks to predictive analytics, we can identify more precisely what type of content works best with each customer segment. This allows us to send much more relevant messages that increase engagement - the latest promotional email about a machine learning product launch doubled open rates compared to the traditional approach!

We have also freed up time to focus on creating quality content. Where we used to invest effort in testing and rehearsal, AI now optimises the timing and frequency of delivery by automating that work. This has allowed us to explore more original formats to engage our customers. Not only in responsive emailing designs, but also others such as Linkedin carousels.

Of course, AI cannot replace the human factor. The effectiveness of AI depends to a large extent on the quality and quantity of data available. It is important to ensure that the data used is accurate and up to date. It also depends on professional ethics. Our team continues to monitor campaigns, content and data to ensure we respect strategy and privacy, and to review mailings to maintain a friendly and creative approach. Even intuition and professional creativity are important. But it is undoubtedly the combination of automation and intelligence that is taking our email marketing to the next level. For example, where we used to do one a/b test a week, now we do it every 3 days and with more versions, so we get results sooner. Personalisation is no longer future, it's present!

We are in a digital landscape of continuous change and now more than ever we need to be informed as this can give you a competitive advantage in your sector.

We are living in a time where as users we are looking for hyper-personalised content. And that means provide relevant information and make it look as if it was created just for us.

One of the things that marked 2023 was the advance in AI and its implementation and use in the digital sphere and if we talk about 2024 AI will continue to have a lot of weight. In this case, we have seen how AI can increase conversion results in cart recovery emails by up to 82% and increase email open rates by 12%. Also, we have discovered how using WhatsApp + AI for cart recovery is a world yet to be discovered and that can bring great results. 

One of the keys remains A/B testing to see what works best in each sector and how to maximise the potential of AI for each brand. 

For this, it is vital to have innovative partners with technologies that ensure that campaigns comply with privacy regulations such as GDPR, are efficient and innovative.

In 2024 we will witness major changes in the email marketing industry. The use of new tools, customer-centric personalised communications and email authentication will be the themes of the year.

Artificial intelligence

Already in 2023 we started to look at how to fit generative AI into workflows and experimented with text and images. This year we will see more maturity in the market and probably the emergence of new specific tools such as writing assistants, topic generators, AI-assisted segmentation and dynamic content.

User-centred communications

Capturing the attention of an increasingly elusive user will be a challenge in 2024. So focusing efforts on understanding their pain points and creating personalised communications will be critical. The focus will be on better segmenting audiences and sending emails with personalised content on a case-by-case basis.

Authentication

Google and Yahoo are starting the year by raising the bar when it comes to security. With the implementation of their new authentication features, senders will have to focus on 3 aspects: Having SPS, DKIM and DMARC certificates installed correctly; facilitating one-click unsubscription; and making sure the user wants to receive your communications. The premise is quite simple: either you comply, or you won't make it to the inbox.

2024 will be a very competitive year in terms of technological innovation and user experience. 

Increasingly, brands are turning to technologies such as AI and tools that enable process automation. But it's not enough just to create something innovative. We are at a time when consumers are becoming more knowledgeable, more aware and more privacy-conscious, making them much more demanding in their shopping experiences. 

That is why it is key to adapt and create strategies with a high component of personalisation, understood throughout the purchasing process from the moment the consumer first interacts with the brand, in order to better connect with our customers and provide fundamental values with which they identify, always respecting their preferences. 

With this in mind, we must focus on omnichannel strategies and treat email marketing as part of a whole and not as a separate channel, improving the customer experience and being more efficient through automation and optimisation of communications to meet their needs quickly and smoothly, providing a unique value that can generate a greater impact. In addition, this is where the use of tools that allow us to make communications more interactive come into play, such as gamification, which is also on the rise, and which allows us to give the customer the experience they are looking for. 

This year more than ever we must focus on high quality sessions and conversions as opposed to quantity, improve our customers' engagement with the brand and retention rates, without forgetting that in all our strategies, security and the proper treatment of the data provided by our users must always be paramount. 

In short, the keys to success this year will be renewed 360 strategies that focus on user experience, provide differential value and guarantee privacy.

It is certainly undeniable that the year that has begun and the near future is focused on AI, on the ability to generate content and even design creative, images and copy through this type of technology.

It would be a lie if we did not mention hyper-segmentation and hyper-persozalisation strategies, interactive experiences within the email (APM), the care of the deliverability, the care of the authentication certificates of our senders (DMARC or BIMI) or even the new rules of customer consent as a trend.

But too often we in the industry love to talk about new "gadgets", marvel at the future, and boast about the cool technology that has taken us to the cutting edge of email marketing, which is great on the one hand, but on the other, we need to focus on what's really happening in the present.

Our inboxes are still full of constant commercial mail, which is often annoying and annoying.

From my point of view, the real revolution and trend is that, once and for all, companies should manage to give the exact relevance to the email channel, i.e. put much more focus on hyper-segmentation and channel orchestration. More (sending volume, CTAs, images, etc.) does not mean more (conversions, leads, sales, information). We must work with AI on impeccable data hygiene, simplified creative (which does not mean simplified personalisation), reliable predictive models and models based on real-time customer behaviour. There is nothing more revolutionary than being user centricbut for real. Choosing the right channel for a customer and that our beloved email opens the way to its companion channels, appearing at the moment when it deserves to be the protagonist.

The challenge and trend for 2024 is that being timely and not saturated will no longer be a conversation in 2025.

Undoubtedly, one of the main challenges in 2024 will be the impending disappearance of third-party cookies in the Google Chrome browserused by more than 60% of all users surfing the Internet. This sunset will have a negative impact on the ability of companies to segment correctly This is where email marketing and CRM strategies will be particularly relevant.

Businesses will have to shift towards strategies that focus on attracting and attracting zero- party dataThis means collecting data explicitly provided by users through preference centres in which they indicate which products or services they are most interested in. In this way Digital Marketing teams, and in particular Email Marketing professionals, will be able to adjust their offers for each customer based on the information provided by the customer.

To mitigate the negative effects of the dreaded cookieless efforts will also need to focus on the first-party data. In this case, it is implicit data that companies can store based on the behaviour of their users, such as clicks, browsing patterns or direct conversions. Because of all these needs to maintain consistency in the data stored, one of the trends this year will be that of investing more resources in building data models, lists and segmentations that allow a better understanding of potential customers and customers who are already loyal. All this so as not to lose the traceability that was previously achieved with third-party cookies.

This is the experts' opinion and predictions about the future of email marketing in 2024. What do you think, do you agree, what other trends do you think we will see?