Email Marketing in 2024: Best Practices You Need to Know

Open up your email. Go ahead; I’ll wait…

How many new messages do you have?

If your inbox is anything like mine, it’s likely swimming with various newsletters you forgot you subscribed to, and maybe one or two personal emails that your eyes are drawn to first. And, if you're anything like me, you probably press delete, delete, delete...until you arrive at those two messages of value.

In 2024, email is the easiest and most direct way to communicate with clients. In a landscape where marketers are now sending 27% more emails than before the pandemic, the challenge remains: how can you ensure yours stands out in an overflowing inbox?

The answer lies in creating an effective email marketing strategy and refocusing on email’s fundamental goal: sending the right message to the right person at the right time.

Here are five email marketing best practices to help you send better messages that won't land directly in the dreaded trash folder.

1. Use Personalization

We all know how important personalization is in marketing. Email is no different.

Hyper-personalized emails generate six times higher transaction rates than non-personalized emails. And emails that use a personalized subject line are 26% more likely to be opened.

In 2024, when the competition to stand out in email inboxes is higher than ever, personalization is key to success. But to truly look different than your competitors, it’s going to take a bit more creativity than just dropping a name into a subject line. Here are a few ideas for elevating email personalization.

Segmentation

Organizing your contact list and sending out segmented email campaigns is a must in 2024. You’ll want to group your customers by:

Customer Demographics: Age, gender, income, location, and occupation can all be useful in segmenting your email lists.
Behavioral Data: This includes past purchases, click-through rates, and website browsing behavior.
Engagement Level: Segment your list based on how often customers interact with your emails.
Purchase Cycle: Consider where the customer is in their buying journey.
Customer Interests: Use survey data or website analytics to understand what topics or products each customer is interested in.
Email Activity: Open rates, click-through rates, and unsubscribe rates can all be used to further segment your list.
Customer Lifetime Value (CLV): Segmenting customers by CLV can help you focus on retaining your most valuable customers.
New Subscribers: Consider having a separate strategy for people who have recently joined your mailing list.
Inactive Subscribers: Identifying and re-engaging inactive subscribers can be a good way to clean up your list and improve deliverability.
Device Usage: Knowing whether subscribers primarily use mobile devices or desktop computers can help tailor your approach.

When done correctly, email list segmentation has several benefits, including:

Increased Open Rates: Segmented emails are more relevant to the recipient, which can lead to higher open rates.
Improved Click-Through Rates: When the content is relevant and personalized, recipients are more likely to click on links within the email.
Lower Unsubscribe Rates: If recipients find your emails valuable and relevant, they're less likely to unsubscribe.
Enhanced Relevance: Segmentation allows you to tailor your messages to meet the specific needs and interests of different audience segments.
Efficient Use of Resources: By focusing on targeted segments, you can allocate resources more efficiently and get a better return on investment.
Opportunity for Testing: With segmentation, you can A/B test different strategies and optimize based on the results for each segment.

We recommend using HubSpot for easy list segmentation. The platform offers a simple way to organize your contacts based on user data, build and send hyper-personalized emails to these contacts, and track results after each campaign. Here’s a great resource from HubSpot on email list segmentation.

Automation

By setting up automated triggers in your CRM, you can send highly targeted emails based on your clients’ behaviors. This type of personalization builds trust with your customers, as it creates a responsive dialogue with your brand. When a user takes action, you respond. Even if it’s an automated response, the consumer still feels valued, appreciated, and noticed.

Automated emails are simply more effective – generating 320% more revenue than non-automated emails. They also provide the advantage of precise customer interaction timing. For example, individuals who receive automated abandoned cart emails are 2.4x more likely to complete their purchase.

Here are a few examples of automated trigger emails:

Onboarding
Cart abandonment
Weekly or annual reports
Birthdays and anniversaries
Reactivation or re-engagement
Discount codes and special offers
Transactional (missed payments, order confirmation, etc.)

2. Get the Timing Right

So you’ve got the right content lined up for the right audience, but are you sending it at the right time? If your customers actively check their email at a specific time each day, your message is more likely to get noticed if it’s at the top of their inbox versus buried under all the other marketing messages.

There are a couple of different ways to accomplish this. A/B testing can be incredibly valuable in determining the best time to send emails. By splitting your email list into two groups and sending the same email at different times, you can track which group had a higher open rate or engagement.

But the simplest way to ensure you’re sending emails at the optimal time is to research your industry and when your buyer persona is most active online. Every industry is different, but there’s a lot of general data out there on some of the best days and times during the week to send out an email newsletter.

Here are some insights from HubSpot’s 2023 Email Marketing Survey:

Best Time for Engagement: 9 a.m. to 12 p.m. and 12 p.m. to 3 p.m.
Best Day for Engagement: Tuesday and Monday

(Image: HubSpot)

However, it’s important to remember that every audience is unique. The best time to reach a marketing manager is likely much different than the best time to reach a business owner. That’s where AI email automation tools can come in handy.

There are several different tools out there that can help personalize email delivery times based on each individual in your contact list. These tools analyze when a recipient is most likely to open an email, and then sends the email based on this data. Send time optimization is a crucial step if you want to increase your open rates and better engage with your email subscribers.

If you're a HubSpot user, Seventh Sense is a great tool that automatically integrates with the HubSpot platform. Other email delivery tools that will optimize send times include:

3. Evoke Emotion

Yes, the audience and timing is a crucial part of email marketing. But if your content lacks emotional resonance, your efforts will be in vain. Social issues have become a top priority for consumers. More than ever, consumers are looking for companies that align with their values and support the causes they care about.

Email is an excellent way to communicate what your company stands for. By injecting authentic emotion into your email marketing strategies, you'll establish an essential connection with your customers that will reciprocate trust.

If you want your emails to evoke emotion, here are some important considerations:

Understand Your Audience: You need to understand your audience's values, pain points, and motivations to evoke the right emotions. This can be achieved through market research, surveys, and customer feedback.
Choose the Right Emotion: Different emotions will trigger different responses. For instance, happiness or excitement might inspire sharing and engagement, while fear or urgency could prompt immediate action.
Use Powerful Imagery: Images can often convey emotion more powerfully than words. Use high-quality visuals that align with the emotion you're trying to evoke to make your email more impactful.
Craft Compelling Copy: The language you use in your email can also evoke emotion. Use storytelling, vivid descriptions, and emotive words to connect with your readers on an emotional level.
Respect Boundaries: It's important not to manipulate or exploit your audience's emotions. Be authentic, respectful, and empathetic in your approach.
Balance Emotion and Information: While evoking emotion is important, your email should still provide valuable information or offers to your audience. Striking a balance between emotion and reason can lead to effective email marketing.

4. Keep it Simple

Standing out in email inboxes doesn’t necessarily mean having this crazy, over-designed, graphically pleasing newsletter. In fact, simple, straightforward, and plain text emails are actually performing better. HubSpot tested the open rates of HTML-templated emails with photos versus plain text emails and found the former to have a 21% lower clickthrough rate and 51% fewer clicks.

It all comes back to consumer demand for authenticity. Flashy, image-heavy newsletters often look like spam. Focusing on helpful content and letting your words, not your graphics, carry the weight of your email marketing will be crucial to standing out in 2024.

(Image: HubSpot)

5. Be Mindful of Recipients' Inboxes

Email will continue to be one of the best ways to communicate with customers and prospects. Because of this, email inboxes aren’t going to get any emptier. Being mindful that companies just like you are communicating the same way will help you to differentiate your marketing messages.

This means taking a look at how often you're sending out marketing emails. And maybe it means scaling back. Instead of focusing on the frequency of emails, focus on quality content. To stand out in an inbox full of emails, it’s more crucial than ever that the communication you send offers some type of value to your subscribers.

Elevate Your Email Marketing Strategy in 2024

It’s no secret that consumers are bombarded with countless marketing emails every day, making it difficult for businesses to cut through the noise and grab their attention. But with these email marketing tips, you can create effective campaigns that not only catch your subscribers’ eye, but also provide them with valuable content they will want to open and engage with.

Get in touch if you need assistance with email marketing. We’ll work with you to redevelop your strategy to ensure all messages are reaching the right people at the right time with the right content.

Editor's Note: This post was originally published on February 17, 2021, and has been updated for accuracy and current best practices.