How has email marketing changed over recent years?
Email marketing is still growing despite social media being a prominent focus for most businesses. Although social media is lucrative, exciting and growing, email marketing has been around for a much longer time with established outcomes. It harvests honest and direct conversations with your audience, which is considered a weakness for social media, as users have become savvy with its sales and marketing techniques. Are you focusing on your email marketing in 2024? We think you should be, here’s why…
The Highlights of Email Marketing in 2023
In 2023 alone, there were 4 billion daily email users, which is a huge user count that you should be communicating with. As a result, 37% of brands increased their budget for specific email marketing campaigns, did you?
It has been researched that smartphone users prefer to receive brand communications via email, due to it being considered a trustworthy source of information. This supports honest and direct communication with your audience over that of social media channels.
It has been seen that the correct segmentation produces 30% more opens and 50% more click-throughs. Emailing your master list rather than segmenting out your audience will see more users unsubscribe, so if possible avoid emailing your master list.
Email marketing revenue is projected to grow to an estimated 12.33 billion by the end of 2024. Is your business using email marketing to its full effect?
(Source: Hubspot)
Do you tick these Email Marketing Boxes?
Hyper personalisation
This has been an email marketing tactic for many years and is mainly focused on adding personalisation that connects with your audience, without having to go through and manually email your audience by name.
The email subject, heading and body of the text should be personalised with the user’s name, location and specific promotional offers. Personalised images are key for hyper-segmentation as this allows marketers to target directly with fresh exciting content. This helps avoid individually mailing a few hundred contacts by manually updating each piece of content. In 2023, hyper-personalisation and segmentation allowed marketers to save time in their email automation process and create an increased amount of engagement with their target audience.
The rise of AI tools for content
Over the recent year, there has been an influx of users using generative AI tools from Google, Microsoft, ChatGPT and others. They are paving the way for content marketing improvements but are coming at a cost, as they lack originality and emotion in writing. Many are leaning towards using this as a viable way to write content. However, without the correct prompting and human intervention, it will produce basic content that doesn’t connect with your audience.
Creative, persuasive and personal content is still best when written by humans as it produces meaningful content with a personality and brand voice. Generative AI tools follow a pattern and are not original in the language they use. You can prompt them to follow guidelines but they lack the emotion and intuition to delve deeper than what you’ve told them to do. Significantly, they can search the internet for valuable resources in a fraction of the time we would, making them a great tool for research.
At Pixel Kicks we recommend you to specifically write content with the aid of generative AI tools for research purposes. The benefits you can see are planning content structure and generating ideas from useful resources more efficiently.
Email users can tell if AI has written something… Does it sound like a robot? Emails are all about emotions… and exclusive discounts of course… It’s recommended to use AI tools with a pinch of salt, not everything is correct or well-worded.
Mobile Friendly
Mobile optimisation modes continue to rise, with the introduction of dark mode, dynamic text and folding phones, which have changed the way users interact with their applications. The primary method for those reading emails is via their mobile device. The best practice is to make sure your emails are one column and simple to read. We use Stripo to design templates and export the HTML to Active Campaign, this allows us to be efficient with new designs and edit the code for specific client requests.
In 2023 over 50% of emails were opened on mobile devices, this shows the importance of optimising your emails. Research in 2021 by MailChimp saw that if you have a mobile responsive email design then you can increase the unique mobile clicks by 15%. Are your emails mobile-friendly?
You might think that there are only a few mailing platforms that you need to optimise for. Wrong…it goes beyond Gmail, Outlook and Yahoo. Apple’s native email app has the highest market share which shouldn’t come as any surprise, due to how popular the iPhone is and its user count.
Growing and Nurturing Your Audience
Lead nurturing strategies have been important over recent years as market penetration is down and acquiring new leads has been difficult post-COVID and during an economic crisis in the UK.
Automation is being used to great effect and has found its place in many businesses’ sign-up processes and hyper-segmentation lists. This has helped businesses to engage with their audiences much more often. Automation saves you from writing new content multiple times and creates an engaging customer journey process with minimal effort. You can send welcome emails, grow lists, increase engagement and directly target audiences with new content, while it all runs in the background so you can focus your time elsewhere.
Email Marketing Trends in 2024
Overcomplicated email marketing designs and tactics are starting to fall by the wayside as user experience is diminishing. Additionally, complying with emailing protocols has become a lot stricter. HTML exports are still the best markup language for email design, streamlining design, functionality and user experience.
Direct and honest communication can cut through the digital clutter that plagues most users’ phones. The most effective way to communicate with your audience is through email marketing.
Mobile responsive designs are essential, as 81% of people check their emails using their mobile devices. Equally, it’s common for users to check emails on tablets which requires emails to dynamically scale for different screen sizes. A single-column layout will make sure your content is displayed consistently across all devices, and improve conversions.
Interaction Email Experience & UGC Emails
Gone are the days when you would get emails that fly straight into your junk, email comes with more added value, whether that’s exclusive content, release dates or personalised encounters. Clothing brands are locking sites and products behind an email-exclusive password to encourage sign-ups. This 2024 trend can be seen from UVU, Drama and Represent to create a premium and luxurious brand, many others are following suit. They are creating powerful mailing lists to apply strategic digital marketing.
Email Authentication and Security
Gmail and Yahoo have started to crack down on improving the authentication process for emails and where email senders come from. The once-best practices have now become a mandatory requirement, especially for those who are sending an email to a large list. They came into force in February 2024 and are set to make a pivotal change to the industry standards. It’s important to comply and add a DMARC directive to make sure your emails are delivered.
BIMI enhances authenticity by displaying your logo in the inbox and creates an improved user experience. The average email delivery rate for Google is 95%, 91% for Microsoft, 81% for Yahoo and 76% for AOL. Comply with the standards and see your emails have an improved user experience and open rate.
Focus on Privacy and Complying with Data Protection
Privacy has become stricter on mobile devices and across applications. This has seen ethical marketing become a focus for many businesses which has evoked a trend in 2024 and CSR improvements. As the population becomes more socially, environmentally and economically aware, so do businesses, to appeal to their interests, opinions and beliefs. Make sure your emails are following this trend and don’t let your customers catch you out!
A Shift Towards Reliable Metrics
Open rate causes inflated results because it’s an inaccurate measurement. It works by tracking either the loading of a tracked pixel or when you download external content such as images in the email. There are potential risks associated with the metrics and internal servers can block images, voiding those email open rates, as well as users accidentally clicking on them.
Additionally, it tells you that it was opened and doesn’t provide any information on whether the receipt read the email, clicked on links or took any desired actions. If you match this with inconsistent challenges across devices and email platforms, you have an abundance of false values making it a loose metric.
Use consistent metrics such as click rates, unsubscribe rates and conversion rates as they provide solid results from specific outcomes. These are reliable metrics as they represent value from the user and the reader’s desired outcome. If they are clicking on a link for more information on the site, you know why they have clicked it. If they have clicked a ring button, you know they want to speak to someone. Make sure you are reporting on accurate metrics and then see value in your emails.
Email Times
It’s no secret that there are researched times that will increase open rates and understanding that can improve your engagement with users. Hubspot has taken the time to research the best times of the day to send emails, they are as follows:
Emails are best received early in the morning and will drop off at the end of the day. Despite this study being carried out in the US it applies to Europe, as the census took into account users behaviour. In 2024, it is important to get the send time of your emails correct as there aren’t any excuses not to, with proven data points backing this up.
The average social media screen time is 143 minutes per day. Most users in 2024 will use their phones to browse the internet, check emails and catch up with the latest news and post on social media. It is important that your email campaigns are ready for mobile and you are sending them out at the most optimal time of the day to cut through the digital clutter.
In summary, there has been an increase in the need for new email marketing techniques in 2024. Following these steps can help optimise your email campaigns and improve their effectiveness with your audience.
Reach out to Pixel Kicks and leverage your email marketing lists…
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