What Are The Hot Email Marketing Trends For 2024?

What's the latest in the email marketing world? Let's find out about the email marketing trends for 2024 and beyond. What can we all do to make our emails work even better for our businesses?

(And yes, we'll talk about AI, but probably in the way you expect us to).

Ready to go?

SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS:

(0:12) Join our FREE Facebook group.

(4:57) Let's pay more attention to deliverability and verification.

(7:35) The technical bits that are important for validation.

(11:11) We need to focus on engagement with our list.

(13:30) Put more emphasis on converting your subscribers into customers!

(17:02) Use AI for analysis and to inform your decisions for list building.

(20:27) Stand out by humanising your content.

(24:02) Come and find out more inside The Email Hero Blueprint.

(26:44) Subject lines of the week.

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Let's pay more attention to deliverability and verification

In 2024 and beyond, email deliverability is going to become more ‘problematic’. And verification is going to be more important than ever. These two elements go hand in hand. And we recommend you have all your ducks in a row to make sure your emails get into the inboxes of your subscribers.

Email marketing platforms are tightening their belts around deliverability and engagement monitoring. They're doing this so we're not all building mammoth lists of people and bombarding them with emails whether they're reading them or not.

Kennedy did a little experiment recently. He had a look at the emails he receives in his inbox and was amazed at how many big brand names whose emails he hasn’t opened for ages are still emailing him. These marketers aren't taking their list hygiene and verification as seriously as they should!

The technical bits that are important for validation

Now more than ever, you need to focus on validation. So make sure you set up your DNS SPF and DKIM records. If you’re not familiar with these, look for some simple tutorials on how to set them up. It’s a one-time job, and yes - it's boring. You can pay someone to do it for you if you want. But get it done because people need to know for sure that the person sending emails is who they say they are. And that’s why these measures are coming into force.

A few years ago, anyone could have opened an account with an email marketing platform and pretended they were an ex-president of the US. No one would have batted an eyelid! But we now live in a world where people are being scammed left right and centre. So these measures exist to protect us all. You’ll have noticed how many scams you receive via text message compared to email. That's because the world of text messaging is still unverified.

You can't just ignore validation because you know you’re a good, legitimate person who isn’t scamming anyone. So do that piece of work! It's similar to what's happening on social media. You can now pay a monthly fee to receive a blue tick and show you're a verified account. More people are choosing to do this because they’re genuinely finding that others are cloning their profiles!

We need to focus on engagement with our list

If you’re a customer of ours, we give you all the resources when it comes to re-engagement campaigns and processes to make sure the people on your list are those who are paying attention to your emails. Don't end up with subscribers who haven’t looked at your stuff in years!

We might even start tightening up the window of time that we allow people before we consider them disengaged. We'll then put them through our re-engagement campaign, and if they don't engage we remove them from our list. Permanently.

If you’re a member of our programmes, as part of our monthly calls, we’re going to keep you up to date with the latest email marketing trends for 2024 and beyond. If things change in the email marketing world, we'll tell you!

For example, when we started a few years ago, we would measure engagement based on open rates. At the time, that worked because they were fairly accurate. But now we measure engagement based on clicks. As always, we develop and respond to what’s working.

Put more emphasis on converting your subscribers!

The next thing to consider when it comes to email marketing trends for 2024 is the cost of ads. A lot of us are building our lists using paid advertising on various channels. And you’ll notice that the cost of advertising is the highest it’s ever been! This means that the cost of getting new subscribers is going to increase. And the one skill we all need to master is our ability to monetise the subscribers on our email list.

First of all, we need to build the skill of converting subscribers into paying customers for the first time. And then we also need to maximise how much we're able to earn from the subscribers on our list because if we’re paying more for each person we bring in, we have less time to make that money back. The marketers who are going to survive and win the ad game are those who manage to win the customer (not just the subscriber). The same goes for organic reach, as these costs are expected to increase as well.

Use AI for analysis and to inform your decisions for list building

We can't talk about email marketing trends for 2024 and not mention AI! If you work with media agencies or pay-per-click advertising, we believe they'll also change the way they work and focus more on the creative. This is because, with billions of dollars invested in Google AI, they'll always do a better job of figuring out what ads to place in front of whom, on what devices, what times, etc.

There are lots of different criteria that you need to get right – it’s a complicated cocktail. But AI is going to be able to do a better job than anyone else because they're collecting data from advertisers that are way bigger than any of us. And then they use that data to optimise the process.

The money in media buying is going to go to people who are good at figuring out creative artwork. And a lot of them are going to use AI to make it more engaging. It all comes down to humans with AI replacing humans without AI (rather than AI replacing humans).

The big opportunity here is in your ability to use AI to analyse which ads are likely to perform best. For example, you can use AI to look at 10 bits of creative, 10 headlines, and 10 bits of body copy and work out which combination will perform the best. It’s all going to be about AI informing the creative!

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Stand out by humanising your content

With more development in AI, we’re going to see a proliferation of content and profiles that are non-human. So humanising your email marketing is the way to go.

One of the greatest opportunities we have with content is to be human. It’s about creating things that AI cannot create, such as personal stories about what's happening in your life and how you feel about them. It’s about expressing your personal opinions - something AI cannot do (yet) because it's not in your head!

AI is a content factory that’s pumping out this bland "How-To" content that might have some personality and may sound like you. It's certainly going to get better over time at understanding your style, but it's never going to know what you experience daily. Not in 2024 anyway!

So when everyone on your email list is receiving so many AI-generated emails, which send people to AI-generated sales pages with AI-generated sales videos to AI-generated products, you have a huge opportunity to stand out by being human. By sharing things that aren't AI-generated. You can be different from all those content factories that create their emails, landing pages, sales videos, and even products at the push of a button.

Maybe there will come a day when even podcasts will be completely AI-generated. We had an idea a while ago to start another podcast that used a combination of text-to-speech to introduce different sections and then grab bits of content that we created elsewhere and put them together. We didn't do it. But just remember that something real is going to stand out among a lot of that type of content.

Come and find out more inside The Email Hero Blueprint

Email marketing has been around for a long time and will continue to be in 2024 and beyond because it's the highest return-on-investment marketing activity you can do in your business. The level of engagement you get through email marketing has not been equalled by anything else that anyone’s ever attempted. It enables long-term growth and sustainable scaling.

In 2024, email remains central to everything we’re doing. We believe we all need to double down on building smaller, more engaged audiences. Our job is to deepen the relationship with our subscribers using AI where possible but never at the risk of replacing or butchering those relationships. And this could easily happen if you remove the human from the messaging.

Focus on deliverability...