Email marketing has provided businesses with a channel to keep their customers informed with service announcements or deals. As many companies see email marketing as an important communication channel, they must stay up-to-date with the latest trends and changes in best practices enforced by email providers.

Focus of Data Protection and Privacy

2018 saw the launch of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) which outlined rules on data protection and communication to prevent unnecessary communication and secure data storage protocols. Data privacy has been in the limelight in the past couple of years with the tech giants clamping and restricting the amount of data sent to businesses.

2024 sees Yahoo and Google implementing new measures for bulk senders, requiring authentication, easy subscription, and adherence to a reported spam threshold. The steps aim to enhance email security and reduce unwanted messages coming into inboxes. Find more about the new measure via Google’s post.

Track the Right Metric

Many privacy tools being used by email providers can make measuring the success of an email campaign difficult. There are some key metrics to pay attention to:

Zero-Party Data – Questions You Directly Ask Subscribers

Specific Preferences – Asking customers what products/service information they like to receive such as events, offers or news. Assuming customers have registered their interest in a company or service doesn’t mean they want to receive everything on it. They might be looking for specific information that would be useful to them; would be better to send the information that the customer is looking for.

Preference Updates Over Time

Over time customer’s interests and preferences change. It's best to re-ask subscribers about themselves every so often to keep data fresh and to track your customer interests.  

First Party Data – Data You Observe/Track

Email Content Clicks

Tracking what subscribers are clicking in the emails such as CTAs and links. For more complex emails you may want to filter the data further by persona, average time, and other attributes to get a more detailed report on success.

Website Content

Tracking the customer journey from email campaign until they exit can give you more information on your customer. If the email sends customers to a particular product page but they spend more time on a different product page, it can show your customers buying intentions.

With Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection, marketers are unable to see when and where users open their email, the device the email is opened on, and the activity used to open it.

Open rate is no longer a reliable metric therefore marketers must shift their focus to other metrics to determine the success of marketing emails. Here are some other metrics you should consider to determine the success of your email campaign.

• Click Rate – Percentage of recipients who take action

• Conversion Rate – Percentage of recipients who take action such as making a purchase

• List growth – How fast you are gaining or losing subscribers

• ROI – Revenue generated for every dollar invested in email marketing

Artificial Intelligence (AI) 

2023 saw an explosion of AI tools being released for consumers to use. 2024 will see these technologies mature and will allow marketers to use these tools to refine subject lines, copy, CTA text, and determine email layouts based on content. The possibilities are endless and a long journey of experimentation to understand what these tools are capable of. With many businesses looking to work within a restricted budget, AI tools could help reduce costs where possible with agencies.

Email Automation

Email marketing automation can help ensure consistent and cohesive communication between the brand and customer. An action taken by the customer can activate the launch of a sequence of emails which are drip-fed to the customer. A drip campaign is more responsive and creates friendlier communication between both sides. Email automation can reduce the cost and time for the need to create emails enabling your team on focus on bigger email campaigns. Some helpful tips when considering email automation:

• Make use of email templates

• Automate mailing list scrubbing

• Send automated transactional emails to your customers

• Automate the onboarding process with a series of email drips

• Automate email lead nurturing

Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) for Email

Accelerated Mobile Pages were created to speed up the loading time of a web page on a smartphone. AMP can enable emails to be interactive with both Gmail and Yahoo supporting AMP. AMP can simplify registrations by allowing customers to share information with the email in a couple of seconds therefore reducing drop-off rates. AMP can allow for carousels, forms, and dynamic content although this requires coding. Take a look at AMP email examples here.