Five Trends Shaking Up the Email Industry in 2024

Learn what email trends will shape our industry in 2024 and how you can make more sales with your email marketing this year.

Will AI change the email industry in 2024? How can you better personalize your campaigns to get more clicks? How can you make the most of automation tools? Our guest Jaina Mistry of Litmus answers these questions – and more.

With an ROI of 36:1—that’s $36 in revenue for every $1 spent—email marketing is a critical channel for business, regardless of which industry your brand is in. 

Crafting an effective email marketing strategy that capitalizes on that epic 36:1 ROI requires marketers to lean into creative tactics and trends that are proven to drive results.

Email trends to be aware of

There’s a never-ending list of which email trends you could explore, so to help you out here’s a list of five trends we expect to shake up the email industry in 2024—and the ones you should lean into for more effective email campaigns. 

Trend #1: Hyper-personalization of email

Email personalization is no longer a nice-to-have tactic—it’s a must-have. According to HubSpot, 23% of users rank the importance of personalized experiences as one of the biggest changes in marketing this year. 

But email personalization is challenging to implement well. One of the biggest barriers to personalization is often having access to clean, reliable data. 

Personalization using data isn’t the only way to create hyper-personalized and effective emails. Leaning into dynamic content that provides up-to-date and contextual content at the time of the email open is a proven way to increase conversions. In fact, Litmus Personalize users have seen a 52% increase in conversions by using dynamic content personalization. 

Try adding a sentiment tracker, countdown timer, or live poll to your email campaigns in 2024 to provide more effective personalized emails to your subscribers. 

Trend #2: The rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Email marketers are constantly being asked to do more with less. And with marketing teams spending on average of two weeks or more to create a single email, email marketers need more help to keep up with the relentless pace of the industry. 

While generative AI is making headlines with tools like ChatGPT and DALL-E, AI-powered personalization is what can truly help email marketers create more effective email campaigns. 

Imagine if you knew what products and services your customers need—even before they do. AI-powered personalization puts the power of your audience’s shopping behaviors to work for you by delivering the right products to the right customers with every send and increasing email ROI by up to 70%. 

Trend #3: Integrations to boost performance

On average, marketers are using more than 12 different tools, and some are using more than 31 tools to manage campaigns and data. That’s a lot of tools! And with that comes the challenge of connecting the data from disparate tools to help fuel effective marketing campaigns. 

The most important tool for any email marketer is their ESP (email service provider). Your ESP will have a treasure trove of data you can use to personalize your email campaigns. Also, it provides data to help you understand email marketing performance. 

By integrating your ESP with your customer relationship management (CRM) or Business Intelligence (BI) platform, you’ll get better visibility into high-performing email campaigns that are driving revenue for your business—and in turn, giving you more data to help craft a stronger email marketing strategy. 

Trend #4: Do more with email automation

While standalone and manual one-off sends still have their place in every email marketer’s playbook, so should the humble email automation. 

Email automations are typically triggered by an action a subscriber or customer makes or is time-based. 

Some common email automations include:

• Re-engagement campaigns, sent to dormant subscribers
• Welcome email series, triggered when someone first subscribers to your emails
• Abandoned cart emails, sent to customers who don’t complete their purchase

You can even chain multiple email automations together to create email campaigns that touch a customer throughout their lifecycle with you:

Trend #5: Embrace emerging technologies

The four previous trends mentioned all culminate in one key trend email marketers must lean into—embracing emerging technologies. While email marketing is a tried-and-tested marketing channel, it is only most effective when marketers are continuously experimenting and testing ways to improve performance. 

As you look at the email campaigns you’re planning for 2024, identify where you could introduce hyper-personalization or experiment with AI to help you future-proof your email program. 

Pro tip: Did you know that 23% of your email list dies every year? See how healthy yours is.

Author: Jaina Mistry is the Director of Brand and Content Marketing at Litmus. She leads a team that strives to create captivating and educational content for email marketers of all stripes. An #emailgeek to her core, Jaina’s worked in and around email for over 15 years and is now taking her email expertise into the world of brand and content marketing.