Email marketing best practices in 2024

Email marketing 101

What is email marketing?

Email marketing is a digital marketing strategy that sends targeted emails to a specific audience. Even in 2024,  it remains one of the most effective and direct ways to communicate with your customers. Email marketing encompasses a wide range of email formats, from promoting products and services to sending monthly newsletters and updates to building relationships and fostering customer loyalty with promos and offers.

Email marketing isn’t just about sending bulk generic emails, it’s about delivering personalized and relevant content to your audience. By understanding your subscribers’ preferences and behaviors, you can create campaigns that resonate and drive meaningful engagement to increase conversions and boost revenue. 

Customer lifecycle stages that can be used for email marketing

What are the benefits of email marketing?

You can leverage targeted communication

Email marketing enables precise segmentation of your audience. A strong email marketing software will enable you to categorize subscribers based on demographics, preferences, or behavior so that you can tailor your messages to specific groups. This targeted approach ensures that recipients receive content relevant to their interests, increasing the likelihood of engagement.

It offers measurable analytics and insights

Email offers the most advanced marketing channel analytics. Campaigns can generate a huge amount of data, offering you insights into crucial metrics such as open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates. This data allows businesses to measure the success of their campaigns, understand customer behavior, and make data-driven decisions to optimize future efforts.

Brands consistently get a high ROI

Email marketing consistently delivers a high return on investment. The ability to reach a targeted audience with personalized content contributes to increased engagement and conversions. With proper planning and execution and an email automation software that alleviates time and effort for marketers, businesses can achieve substantial returns, making email marketing a valuable asset in their overall marketing strategy.

You can increase customer loyalty and engagement

It’s 5X more expensive to acquire a new customer than retain a current one. Regular communication through email helps build and strengthen relationships with your audience. Providing valuable content, exclusive offers, and personalized recommendations fosters a sense of loyalty among subscribers, and engaged customers are more likely to remain loyal and advocate for your brand.

It can be automated for efficiency

Email marketing platforms offer automation features that streamline processes and save time. Automated workflows for welcome emails, abandoned cart reminders, and personalized content delivery ensure that your audience receives timely and relevant messages without constant manual intervention, contributing to ROI.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

“Insider’s email marketing capabilities exceeded all of our expectations. Not only does the platform offer the most comprehensive segmentation and targeting features, but it’s also incredibly intuitive. We’ve launched campaigns and workflows across multiple channels within a day when it used to take us months.” 

  • Marketing Director on G2

Read more G2 reviews from happy customers

4 steps to get started with email marketing

Don’t rush the decision if you’re considering an email marketing platform. Whether you choose a smaller SMB platform or a big enterprise player, ensure you’re ticking off the following steps as you get started.

1. Define your goals

Clearly articulate your objectives for email marketing. Whether it’s increasing sales, nurturing leads, or driving website traffic, having well-defined goals will guide your overall strategy and identify the type of email marketing platform you need.

2. Build your email list

A quality email list is the foundation of successful email marketing. Implement opt-in strategies on your website, social media, and other touchpoints to organically grow your subscriber base. Use omnichannel marketing features such as gamification, surveys, and polls to increase lead collection in line with relevant data protection regulations, such as GDPR.

Discover how world-leading beauty brand, Clarins increased lead collection by 45% with Insider.

Insider Clarins Architect automated journey email web push SMS

3. Choose an email marketing platform

Selecting the right email marketing software is crucial. Platforms like Insider place email at the heart of omnichannel customer journeys across 12+ channels and hundreds of integrations. From email automation to advanced analytics, evaluate platforms based on your needs and business goals.

4. Craft compelling content

Content is king in email marketing. Develop engaging and valuable content that speaks to your audience. Segment your subscribers based on behaviors, triggers, and attributes to ensure you always send the most relevant, contextual content. Whether it’s newsletters, promotional offers, or educational content, always ensure your emails align with your brand voice and resonate with your subscribers. 

Engaging content in email to capture your audience's attention and increase the click-through rate

Email marketing best practices for 2024

If you want to reach your audience, drive revenue, and achieve ROI with email marketing in 2024, you need to be aware of the following best practices:

  1. Personalization beyond the name

In 2024, personalization needs to go beyond addressing your subscribers by their first name. Leverage customer data to provide tailored content, product recommendations, and offers based on individual preferences and behaviors.

Marketers can now:

  • Understand individual preferences: Your email marketing software should be able to analyze behavioral patterns and purchase history to power content and recommendations.
  • Tailor content delivery: Implement dynamic content blocks and adaptive messaging for a personalized experience.
  • Provide personalized product recommendations: Use advanced algorithms for smart cross-selling, up-selling, and personalized product suggestions based on behaviors, wishlists reminders, and predictive analytics.
  • Leverage behavior-triggered campaigns: Go beyond standard abandoned cart emails with personalized recommendations and celebrate customer milestones.
  1. Interactive content

Enhance engagement by incorporating interactive elements like quizzes, surveys,  and clickable elements within emails. Interactive content captures attention and encourages recipients to actively participate, creating a more immersive experience.

  1. Mobile-first design

Given the increasing use of mobile devices, ensure your emails are optimized for mobile viewing. Responsive design and concise, visually appealing content are crucial to delivering a seamless experience on smartphones and tablets. Some email platforms, such as Insider, offer a huge range of ready-made, customizable templates for every device so that you can launch mobile-first campaigns quickly. 

A vital email marketing best practice is to have a mobile-first design

4. AI-powered automation

The best email marketing platforms embrace AI to automate and personalize email campaigns. Use AI for predictive analytics, behavior-based triggers, A/B testing automation, and even content generation to ensure every email is relevant, contextual, and sent at the right time. 

5. Privacy and transparency

With growing concerns about data privacy, prioritize transparency in your email marketing practices. When collecting leads, you should clearly communicate how to use customer data. Adequate to relevant regulations and offer easy opt-in/opt-out mechanisms to build trust with your audience. This varies from industry to industry, so check the extent of your compliance requirements carefully. If you deal with medical records, for example, using a secure healthcare eFax as part of your email marketing setup is a must. This matters for customer trust as much as it does for compliance.

6. Accessibility standards

Ensure your email content is accessible to all users, including those with disabilities. Use descriptive alt text for images, employ readable fonts and colors, and structure your emails logically to enhance accessibility.

7. Segmentation refinement

Refine your audience segmentation strategies to deliver hyper-targeted content. Use advanced analytics and unify your omnichannel customer data in one platform to power more granular segments, enabling you to send highly relevant messages to specific audience subsets.

 Hyper-segment your email marketing subscribers with Insider’s 120+ attributes

8. A/B testing

There is no underestimating the impact of A/B testing. As email marketing software becomes more and more advanced, its capabilities continue to expand. In 2024, brands should continuously conduct A/B testing to optimize email elements. Test subject lines, content variations, calls to action, and send times to identify what resonates best with your audience, and use these insights to refine your future campaigns.

2023’s best email marketing campaign examples 

Discover how two world-renowned retailers incorporated email marketing into their omnichannel journeys to boost CLTV, lead collection, and achieve up to 72X ROI.

How NA-KD increased customer lifetime value by 25% and achieved 72X ROI with personalized omnichannel campaigns

NA-KD’s tech stack wasn’t keeping up with its rapid growth. Its data was in multiple platforms, unable to provide insights and power campaigns with 360-degree views. The platform turned to Insider to unify its customer data in its CDP, and power personalized omnichannel campaigns at scale across Email, Web Push, and SMS. Architect,  Insider’s cross-channel campaign orchestration tool, enabled NA-KD to deliver a seamless customer experience, showcasing relevant products and content on the customers’ favorite channels. The data-driven, personalized campaigns achieved a 72X ROI and a 25% increase in CLTV.

Read NA-KD’s story

Insider NA-KD cross channel journey

How Slazenger achieved 49X ROI in only 8 weeks thanks to Insider’s omnichannel marketing solution

Slazenger was looking for an email marketing solution that could incorporate other channels to build personalized cross-channel customer journeys and maximize ROI. Slazenger chose Insider to leverage its customer data and deliver contextual, personalized messages, such as price drop notifications and cart reminders through Architect. By leveraging customer data and putting email at the heart of its journeys, Slazenger achieved a 49X ROI in two months and increased customer acquisition by incredibly 700%.

Read Slazenger’s story

Slazenger uses Insider’s email marketing software to personalized emails and achieve 72X ROI

Email Marketing Software FAQ

How to improve email marketing campaigns?

To enhance email marketing campaigns, focus on personalization, segmentation, and engaging content tailored to your audience’s preferences.

Is email marketing still effective in 2024?

Yes, email marketing remains effective in 2024, offering a direct and cost-efficient means of engaging audiences, especially when personalized and strategically executed.

How does email marketing work?

Email marketing involves sending targeted messages to a group of recipients via email to build relationships, drive engagement, and achieve specific marketing goals.

How to start email marketing?

To start email marketing, define your goals, build a quality email list, choose a reliable email marketing platform, and create compelling content that resonates with your audience.

Katie Morley - Global Content Director

Katie is an award-winning content marketer with over eight years of experience in content strategy, development, and copywriting. As Global Content Director at Insider, she currently oversees content strategy across 26 regions. Fun fact: Katie read 64 books last year (for which she owes a long commute and two week-long holidays where she spent approximately six hours a day with her nose in a book).

Read more from Katie Morley

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