In 2024, email is still king of outreach. In the mid-2010s, there was talk for a while of email being replaced by IM software, and while this prediction had some merit, it ultimately fell flat. Most businesses will likely reach out to you via email first, to thank you after a purchase or let you know you left something in your shopping cart. In other words, business is still being done through email marketing.
But the field has changed dramatically. We live in an era of increasing computing power, AI, and tool integration. Naturally, each of these technology trends has a major impact on email marketing. Here's what you need to know on the subject:
- Choose your mail host more carefully
The first thing digital marketers need to get serious about in 2024 is choosing an email host.
Modern email marketing has become extremely demanding. With email automation, email marketers no longer send hundreds of emails every day, but hundreds of thousands. So even a small difference in uptime can mean huge losses for your marketing team. High uptime and reliability are top priorities.
Plus, email marketing is international, and your host needs to comply with regulations like GDPR and CCPA. Automation is getting out of hand, so you won't be able to handle everything manually (if that was even an option in the first place).
Finally, we talk about the importance of performance: again, the differences can be quite significant and should be taken into consideration.
According to Krishi Chowdhary, a technology expert at Techopedia, choosing an email hosting provider for your business or personal needs without doing proper research is a reckless move that no digital marketer should take. So, before settling on a provider, think carefully about what you want from a provider.
- Industry Adaptation
Email marketing campaigns should be tailored to your specific industry: Email services treat different industries differently, and may subject you to throttling or mark you as spam for more subtle activity than normal.
For example, if you promote Anonymous Casino in your email marketing, you are more likely to be marked as spam if you are not careful enough about the regulations, promotion terms and the information you provide. Misleading information may be treated more harshly, so you will have to moderate your content more carefully.
The same goes for email timing and schedules, especially since different industries handle overload differently. Different industries need to choose the best send time, which may vary based on your usage.
Remember, too, that you're not just trying to please email providers, internet service providers, and regulations. Your email marketing campaign needs to be effective with the message you're trying to get across. There's research from e-commerce and other industries that addresses how many emails your audience receives before they decide it's too many, and what type of content they want to receive.
- Using AI in Email Marketing
The next thing to tackle is the future of AI in email marketing.
First, it's important to understand that this trend will enable a level of personalization never seen before. Sure, there were already templates that could be automated with CRM integrations, but using AI with a powerful NLP system is something entirely different.
In fact, you can leverage NLP and generative AI to create completely unique emails for each recipient, and if you already have information about your recipients in your CRM database, the results can be pretty impressive.
Even if you don't go the route of full automation, you can at least use an AI assistant when composing emails yourself, with highly predictive capabilities that can complete your sentences with a single tap of the “Tab” key instead of typing them out in their entirety.
Until now, the biggest problem with AI automation has been the fact that people prefer to talk to other people rather than bots. Now, in 2024, AI is closer than ever to passing the Turing test. This may be a disturbing thought for some, but for many email marketers, it's a lifesaver.
- Focus on integration
The key to any email platform is integration of email marketing with other services. For example, we've already mentioned the importance of integration with your CRM, which is probably the most important on the list. This ensures that your automation system has all the information it needs to segment and personalize your email content.
Integration with your e-commerce platform is important: post-sale follow-up emails are usually sent this way, and with the right system, you also have the opportunity to retarget customers with a fairly high success rate.
Third, integration with social media platforms. While it's not something that many brands openly brag about, the reality is that social media is a source of massive amounts of customer data.
Finally, take advantage of all the benefits of using the right analytics and reporting tools, as this will give you great benefits when it comes to gaining insights and allowing you to implement changes more quickly. Email marketing requires in-depth reporting, and with the right integrations, reporting becomes a lot easier.
- Great segmentation
Segmenting your audience is a key outreach tip, and nowhere is it more prevalent or relevant than in the field of email marketing.
Imagine a hypothetical scenario where your entire audience is made up of a 50/50 split between 10-year-olds and 90-year-olds. The average age is 50, so imagine your brand messaging is created to target people who are 50 years old (the age you have chosen for your customer persona). This age group is way off the mark in every way, so the message you send out will not resonate with anyone.
Modern email marketing tools are designed to identify and profile these segments more precisely, meaning you can create multiple groups that share the same commonalities and create separate email marketing strategies for each of them.
Sure, modern techniques in personalization and AI make it possible to target people on an almost individual level, meaning all users or customers are treated like a group and each can have a separate strategy. But the majority of small businesses don't have the technological capabilities to make this happen. In these situations, segmentation is enough.
Email marketing is becoming more and more powerful over time
All of the trends mentioned above will cause your email CTR to skyrocket. Think about that for a second: you can choose the best email host, tailor it to your industry and your customers, and send emails handcrafted like 18th century love letters. In other words, if your email doesn't get clicked and read, it won't be clicked no matter what. And with these services and technologies now available to businesses of all sizes, even the smallest brands in your industry have a chance to win.
