Drive your email marketing performance with these current trends and strategies.
Email has been a mainstay of marketers’ toolkits for nearly a quarter of a century now. But that doesn’t mean it’s stopped evolving.
Gartner research indicates that email marketing platforms have the highest adoption rate of any direct marketing technology. And 41% of CMOs — especially within larger companies — plan to increase their spend in this area.[1]
Indeed, the global market for email marketing is projected to expand from $11.5 billion in 2023 to over $46 billion by 2033,[2] suggesting that there is plenty of scope for expansion, but also room for brands to differentiate themselves in a colossal playing field.
As consumer preferences change, so must email marketing, and brands that fail to stay agile will find the performance of their campaigns dropping. Marketers in small to midsize businesses (SMBs) should consider how segmentation, strategy, personalisation, and content can all contribute to more successful campaigns. The results will be more engaged customers, higher revenue, and greater long-term customer loyalty.
With that in mind, we have identified the top three email marketing trends and translated these into actionable tips for SMBs. Read on to discover how the ever-changing email marketing landscape will affect your campaigns and how to build strategies that boost performance.
Trend #1: Consumers are quick to unsubscribe from digital marketing communications that don’t serve them
One of the most difficult things about email marketing is getting people onto your database. The only thing harder is keeping them on it.
Capterra’s 2024 Advertising Preferences Survey* found that one-quarter (25%) of respondents globally unsubscribe from digital marketing communications at least once a week. This may be because they don’t see value in the content, they receive too many communications, or just because they’re trying to keep their inbox tidy.
Potentially losing one in four subscribers every week is a sobering thought for any business, but especially SMBs. Hopefully no business has anything close to this level of attrition, but the implications of the trend are clear: customers can stop receiving emails just as easily as they can start, and they don’t need much of an incentive to do so.
Keeping readers on board requires a top-to-bottom approach. Email frequency, subject lines, content variety, and personalization all play a role. Getting this right will make the difference between a barrage of unwanted information and an engaging and welcome presence in customers’ inboxes.
Email campaigns should deliver content that meets people’s needs when they sign up — but that’s a bare minimum. To stand out in a crowded marketing channel, email campaigns should go beyond what customers expect by predicting their individual preferences and delivering regular surprises into their inbox.
Fail to do this, and you’re already on the road to losing that subscriber. And there are plenty of hurdles to fall at. All of these common mistakes can make a reader unsubscribe:
- • Cluttering up their inbox with too many emails
- • Boring or irrelevant subject lines like “October 2024 customer newsletter”
- • Promises in the subject line that aren’t delivered in the email
- • Offers that don’t match the reader’s interests
- • Product promotions that aren’t exclusive to email subscribers
- • Broken content or links
How SMBs can reduce email unsubscribe rates
1. Personalize campaigns to keep them relevant: Gartner research shows that top brands “[sustain] email engagement by tailoring the ongoing value to customers through data collection and segmentation.”[1] As your business and customer base grow, the need to tailor content for smaller subsets becomes all the more important. This means robustly (and ethically) collecting customer data to support customization.
2. Focus on what’s valuable to the customer, not you: Some brands overestimate how invested their customers are in their company and see their email comms as an opportunity to talk about themselves. But good marketing means focusing on customer pain paints, building a story around those pain points that ends in a customer outcome, and clearly signposting the customer through that journey.
3. Track your success metrics: You can’t manage what you can’t measure. Ensure campaigns are performing by defining key metrics and tracking them. Open rates, click-throughs, and purchases that derive from email are all important statistics to keep an eye on.
4. Keep your list fresh: Brands can waste time and money sending emails to dormant accounts or disengaged customers. Regularly audit your email databases to ensure that you’re communicating to customers that are buying — or are likely to buy.
Trend #2: Brands aren’t providing clear enough reasons to sign up for emails
Because email is such a valuable marketing channel, it’s ubiquitous among online SMBs. Simply sending regular emails is not a unique proposition. Customers know this, and they expect real value from the email content they receive.
The problem is, many brands fail to communicate this value properly. According to a Gartner analysis of brand mobile sites and mobile applications, only 58% of brands explicitly describe the benefits of subscribing to their emails at sign-up, and fewer still (24%) provide promotional incentives for signing up.[1]
There is a clear opportunity for forward-thinking marketing professionals at SMBs to differentiate their business through small improvements to the sign-up process. Many of these require simple changes to website interfaces, or just the content that customers see when they are browsing and buying.
When it comes to email content, think back to the customer’s pain points and the journey you want to take them on. Ask how signing up to your email database would help them solve these pain points. Taking this approach should focus your email strategy on a customer outcome rather than viewing it as an endless license to send unsolicited marketing material.
Four ways to boost sign-ups to your email database
1. Provide discounts to customers that sign up: A common tactic, this involves providing customers with a discount code if they sign up to your email list. It’s especially effective with new customers, and can be embedded into your website. Many website tools include the feature as standard, and you can customize the offer according to your needs.
2. Make it too good to miss: If your email marketing really is as good as you think it is, prove it. Show them how they could benefit from the offers or teachings in your emails. And consider testimonials from other customers who can attest to the value of your emails.
3. Require sign-up to access exclusive content: This tactic is standard in business-to-business (B2B) marketing, and provides a meaningful value exchange for both parties. Brands create content such as how-to guides, simple downloadable tools, or useful files that customers can access for free. All they need to do is provide their email address.
4. Use referrals: Even in a digital world, word-of-mouth is still a powerful force. You can ask your existing customers to sign up a friend, and provide gifts or discounts to both when the new customer signs up. Referral tools exist to automate this.
Trend #3: Ethical email marketing practices are increasingly important for gaining consumer trust
Businesses can only achieve long-term gains in email marketing performance if their customers trust the brand.
Consumers don’t like clickbait, but some marketers claim that sensationalist headlines and thumbnails are the only way to get their content seen. This may be true on social media platforms — a topic for another article — but email is still a channel that’s wholly owned by the sender and recipient. Only brands can control what they send, and consumers control whether they delete, open, read, and click through.
Brands must therefore take this ownership responsibly. Capterra’s 2024 Advertising Preferences Survey* shows that 34% of consumers would report a company that used a misleading subject line in a marketing email.
By promising something in a subject line, then not delivering it in the email itself, trust in that brand quickly drops in the eyes of the consumer. They are less likely to take any action in the email, may delete it or unsubscribe, and their negative experience may well lead to losing them as a customer in the future.
Two common email mistakes that cause customers to lose trust in your brand
1. Promising things that never materialize
Making sensationalist or misleading claims in subject lines just to increase open rates might work for one campaign, but rarely pays off in the long run. It damages consumer trust in the brand and will cause readers to unsubscribe or ignore future comms. Ensure that you set customer expectations early on in a journey and consistently meet them as they move along it.
2. Not respecting people’s privacy choices
Some of your existing customers may choose to unsubscribe from your email communications — or never explicitly subscribe in the first place. By ignoring this and sending unwanted marketing emails, SMBs are showing that they either can’t handle data properly, or that they don’t respect customers’ choices. At the point where customers hand over their contact details, always be clear about when, why, and how you will communicate with them.
Keep on top of trends to improve your email marketing performance
The trends highlighted in this article show that email marketing is constantly changing, and that online consumers are more demanding than ever.
Understanding these developments and taking the steps we have suggested will help email marketers exceed customer expectations and set themselves apart from their SMB competitors.
Email marketing needn’t be complex. But consumers deserve a fair value exchange. If they are trusting you with their personal details and letting your brand into their inbox, they expect something in return — whether that’s discounts, offers, or insight that non-subscribers don’t get. Failing to communicate that value will prevent your list from growing, and failure to deliver it to subscribers will cause them to drop away. And of course, like in any area of marketing, good ethical practices are a minimum requirement.
