Top 9 Email Marketing Trends for Success in 2024 in 2024

The coronavirus pandemic has shown that plans can change easily. Whatever you predict today may not be correct tomorrow. You need to continually keep up with the latest trends and projections to get ahead of the game.

Email sending volume grew 7% in 2020 over 2019, increasing nearly threefold compared to the previous year. Due to the uncertainty of the epidemic, businesses have to change their strategy and reach out to their existing customers. And emails became the primary channel to inform people of new working hours, virtual events, new online chances, etc.

So, what will be the most suitable approach for your business’s email marketing in this upcoming year? Follow our article to find out seven email marketing trends.

Table of contents

• Why Email Marketing Matters to Your Business?
  • Acquiring feedback and surveys
  • Building cost-effective campaigns
  • Communicating with your customers
  • Bringing traffic to your website
  • Reaching the right audience at the right time
• 7 Email Marketing Trends That Help Grow Your Business Better
  • 1. Plain text emails
  • 2. Email marketing automation
  • 3. Human-centric lifecycle emails
  • 4. The use of artificial intelligence
  • 5. Email Redesign
  • 6. Hyper-personalization
  • 7. Interactive Emails
  • 8. Utilizing mobile-friendly email templates
  • 9. Enhancing inclusivity in email communication
• Tips to Keep Up With the Future of Email Marketing
• Wrapping Up!

It is believed that email is one of the most powerful mediums of marketing:

• According to Statista, there were 3.9 billion people worldwide using emails in 2019. That figure is predicted to increase up to 4.3 billion by 2023.
• 31% of B2B marketers assume that email newsletters are the most effective way to drive leads.
• Research from Litmus and DMA have the same conclusion that you can gain an average return of $42 for every dollar you invest in email marketing.

COVID-19 has profoundly affected businesses, forcing many to close their doors. Most of the surviving businesses witnessed reductions in their revenue and workforces. While you may need to make sharp cutbacks in specific areas of your business, you should never compromise on your email marketing strategy.

Why Email Marketing Matters to Your Business?

Acquiring feedback and surveys

Keeping track of the customer experience is very important if you want customers to keep interacting, engaging, and purchasing from your brand.

Email marketing can help you do it. For example, you can send out customer satisfaction surveys to gain consumer feedback via email campaigns.

This is one of the most efficient ways to calculate your Net Promoter Score (NPS). This score helps you determine the percentage of consumers who are brand ambassadors and who are detractors. Then, you can leverage this information, coming up with strategies to enhance your customer experience.

Building cost-effective campaigns

While traditional campaigns like direct or print can be expensive, email marketing campaigns are likely to be fairly pricey.

For instance, you won’t need to pay for photoshoots, location fees, mailing, placement, etc. Everything you need is a copywriter and graphic artist.

Besides, it doesn’t take much time to create email campaigns. If necessary, you can create an email in one day, which is much more cost-effective than the time it takes to generate a print campaign.

As time and money constraints always impact markers, email marketing strategies can be more powerful while also driving revenue and prospects.

Communicating with your customers

As a marketer, it’s always crucial to enhance communication with your audience. When your customers feel like they can talk to you, they’re more inclined to become loyal to your brand.

People love good emails. Rewind the clock to the last time you got a marketing email from your favorite brand - was it disruptive, or did you like looking at the newest news? If it’s a brand you love, you tend to enjoy the experience, and it keeps you in touch with one of your preferred brands.

With email marketing, you can access more of your customers and easily interact with brand ambassadors. Furthermore, these emails help engage your audience each time of the year, whether it’s in season or out of season.

Bringing traffic to your website

When you create amazing content, how do you distribute it to your customers? Let’s send them an email. With email marketing campaigns, you’ll bring traffic to your website and boost your SEO.

Email is an ideal way to offer value to our customers. When you’re producing an email that links to your content, bear in mind that every email should include a call to action, so receivers can click through to your website.

Reaching the right audience at the right time

To build a useful marketing campaign, you need to access the right audiences at the proper time. Email marketing makes it easier to access your customers as they tend to check their emails every day. They can check it any time on various devices, which can increase any marketing campaign’s success.

In other words, you’re trying to get in front of your target audience regularly, so you always stay in the customer’s mind.

Learn more: 9+ Best Free Email Marketing Tools to Try

9 Email Marketing Trends That Help Grow Your Business Better

1. Plain text emails

Plain text emails have been outweighing HTML emails in some areas for many years. In 2017, Marketo presumed that your click-through rate could be 17% higher if you send a plain text email compared to the one with HTML elements.

Even though they’re less visually attention-catching, plain text emails are outstanding. These days, when someone emails you, you often expect the email to include HTML elements, whether it’s pictures, GIFs, or even emojis in the subject line.

With plain texts, there are no photos or GIFs, or CTA buttons to obstruct your message. Plain texts bring your recipients right into the main message you want to deliver. These are ideal to include in SaaS marketing email templates or product emails so that the receiver knows their next steps clearly.

If you don’t really want to give up your HTML emails, no one’s forcing you to. There’s room in your email marketing campaign for both HTML and plain text emails.

2. Email marketing automation

Email marketing automation, also known as drip campaigns, is an email marketing strategy that involves sequences of trigger-based emails rather than one-time shots. This contributes to consistent and cohesive communication between the company and the subscribers. Besides, it brings customers a sense of control over their inboxes. In the world of content overload, the lasting thing a customer wants to find in their inbox is pointless and uncalled-for email. No matter how appealing the content is, it feels intrusive and spammy when it appears.

That’s the reason why email campaigns are likely more effective than regular email campaigns. Certain actions taken by users will trigger the release of the sequence. Emails from a drip campaign are more responsive and build a friendlier interaction between each side. They aren’t overwhelming; all the essential information comes in “drips’’, saving time reading through a huge copy. Customers receive the exact piece of information they want to get.

Now there exists a conflict of interest. On one side, we have customers. Nobody wants their inbox to be clogged. People are tired of transferring tedious and irrelevant emails to the trash folder in bulk. On the other side, there are stats to show that retailers who send a sequence of welcome emails gain 13% more revenue than those who quit after sending just one. That means you’re missing a precious chance if you give up at one email.

The only feasible solution is to send emails if you ensure that the receiver reis engrossed in getting them. Behavioral-based email automation can help you create spectacular email marketing results this year, as it efficiently solves the conflict of interests.

3. Human-centric lifecycle emails

It is important to focus more on integrating empathy and establishing human connections. The disease has affected all of us and has changed the way we communicate and interact with each other.

For brands, this huge change in relationships means that they have to adjust their messaging, channels, and timeliness of their messages. There are no longer days in which marketing emails would be a series of sales pitches and overly advertising copy.

Email marketing plays its part in creating a consistent user experience and a smooth customer journey. Establishing strong relationships with consumers means grasping their demands and expectations, giving them messages that contain value, and put the consumer at the heart of the strategy.

To obtain that, brands have to consider empathy their way to better comprehend and relate to customers. Empathy only works when it’s genuine. You can’t fake it. You will need to deeply understand and care about your customers’ feelings and convert those feelings into the vital element in any marketing communications you bring to them. That way, you can establish a strong bond with them.

4. The use of artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence is beginning to spill out into areas beyond computer science. Smaller companies also now depend on artificial intelligence and machine learning. Hence, another email marketing trend is to add artificial intelligence to the generation and distribution of newsletters.

There’s much more information available online than any marketer could ever obtain and process, even if they applied advanced technology and modern software. Meanwhile, AI can handle this task with minimal effort.

Moreover, AI and machine learning can utilize predictive analytics to bring a more personalized experience for your customers. AI solutions can help you create higher-converting subject lines, defining the best copy and content and the most appropriate send times and frequency.

5. Email Redesign

Email design is one of the most flexible and dynamic parts of email marketing. It’s creative and subjective, tending to be influenced by many external factors.

Every year, fashion weeks worldwide give us an insight into what’s going to be popular in the coming seasons: the most cutting-edge colors, fabrics, and silhouettes. Similarly, web design trends vary from season to season, deciding how a good email copy should be.

Some of the following email design trends are anticipated to become trendy:

• Dark mode: As Apple launched its dark mode, the dark mode has been the new norm to offer people an opportunity to embrace their inner goths, ahem, change the brightness, and look at the screen without squinting how bright it is.
• Minimalism: Many marketers assume that the public passion for minimalism will reflect itself in email strategies. Uncluttered, properly-organized emails with a single objective and minimum unrelated information are going to be trendy this year.
• Bright and bold colors: While you don’t want to fill an email with too many images, you would prefer to grab a subscriber’s attention with daring color blocks.

6. Hyper-personalization

Because of the COVID-19, brands have become super-sensitive against implementing the age-old email marketing approaches. Creative marketers are trying to use COVID-proof message ideas to improve their marketing outreach. Hyper-personalization is a great way to build direct marketing contact, carrying the potential to leave a considerable impact on customer experience.

Plus, hyper-personalization concentrates on imparting related products/services/ content to the user. The main objective is to create an experience that boosts the possibility of converting them on an offer.

Hyper-personalized emails can:

• Require minimum efforts - A smooth experience can make the customer journey map simple and well-coordinated.
• Provide relevant information - Using AI and Machine Learning, hyper-personalization provides the most related suggestions according to personal preferences and purchasing history.
• Save time - Hyper-personalization can save us a lot of time with tailored targets and messages.

7. Interactive Emails

Another big trend that is predicted to reign supreme is using user-generated content in email marketing campaigns. User-generated content (UGC) is any type of content (text, images, videos, or audio) generated by end-users of products or services. This form of content also includes reviews and testimonials.

There’s proof to claim that user-generated content boosts conversion rates. A significant portion of customers (82%) presume that user-generated reviews are valuable and vital. About 70% of all customers make their purchasing decisions based on reviews and ratings from previous consumers. Hence, when you include these in your emails, you can increase trust in the promoted goods or services.

8. Utilizing mobile-friendly email templates

When was the most recent instance you accessed your laptop solely to peruse a single email? It’s often more convenient to check it on your mobile phone.

Given that consumers lead busy lives, they seek solutions that streamline their daily routines. Mobile phones offer convenience and portability, leading 81% of individuals to opt for reading emails on their smartphones. Nevertheless, creating responsive emails poses a challenge. Designing for compatibility across various email clients, minimizing vertical scroll, and ensuring call-to-action buttons are sufficiently large for easy clicking are essential considerations.

9. Enhancing inclusivity in email communication

Approximately 16% of the global population encounters some form of disability. If your emails are not tailored to accommodate them, you’re missing valuable opportunities for robust customer connections and increased conversions. In 2023, your foremost priority should be to ensure the accessibility of emails for everyone. Strategies to enhance accessibility in emails include:

• Incorporating alternative text for images to enable screen readers to interpret them.

• Maintaining a flashing rate for animations between 2 Hz and 55 Hz to prevent seizures.

• Guaranteeing a font size of at least 14px and using a legible font style. Adhering to a color contrast ratio of at least 4.5:1 for individuals with visual impairments.

• Steering clear of center-aligned text, as it poses readability challenges for people with dyslexia.

  Tips to Keep Up With the Future of Email Marketing

Email marketing is a dynamic strategy that undergoes continuous evolution. If you find yourself constantly adapting to the changes in email marketing, consider these actions to future-proof your approach.

Implement time-based automation triggers

Given the significant impact of Apple’s privacy changes on open rate tracking, adjusting your strategy becomes essential. If your current approach relies on open rates to trigger follow-up emails, consider a shift.

To maintain relevance, incorporate time-based triggers into your automation. Examples include sending follow-up emails a certain number of hours after the initial email, automated birthday messages, follow-ups based on user interactions with your website, and abandoned cart emails for users who forget to complete their purchase.

Time-based triggers effectively reach users at optimal moments, especially after specific desired actions are completed.

Prioritize your subscribers

In light of the 2025 email trends, it’s crucial to prioritize your subscribers. Since your goal is to encourage engagement with your business through emails, consistently think about delivering the best experience for your subscribers. Consider adding interactive elements or making subtle changes like adjusting button colors to enhance the overall user experience.

Placing your audience at the forefront of your email marketing campaigns will contribute to the success of your emails.

Conduct regular email testing

As the future of email marketing and subscribers’ interests evolve, ongoing testing is essential. The most effective way to keep pace with these changes is through thorough testing of your emails.

Testing allows you to discern what resonates with your audience and what doesn’t. Evaluate various elements, including subject lines, button colors, and image choices.

By continually testing your emails, you gain insights into your audience’s preferences, enabling you to enhance and refine your campaigns.

Wrapping Up!

In short, email marketing should be focusing on building a cohesive, customer-centric experience against the backdrop of excessive data.

Brands eventually find out that they can capitalize on AI, new design modes, and modern technologies to keep emails fresh and personalized. In the meantime, you also need to remember that the email content should also be interesting, interactive, relevant, and ensure the sanctity of the customers’ data.