Marketing Strategies Must Evolve With the Times in 2024

Marketing strategies face some headwinds in 2024. They must adapt to leverage emerging technologies while operating under tighter budgets and an increased focus on accessibility and data privacy.

Let’s take a closer look at how companies can navigate these very real—but not insurmountable—challenges this year.

Marketing budgets

In January 2023, many experts shared dire warnings about the economy. It was clearly headed for a recession. One year later, despite multiple interest rate hikes, the U.S. remains recession-free. A report from the National Association for Business Economics found that 76% of those surveyed believe the risks of a recession this year have fallen to 50% or less, and some businesses, like Bank of America, are predicting a soft landing.

However, when they planned their 2024 budgets, most marketing teams expected to do more with less this year. Those tight budgets will push companies to streamline fragmented collections of niche marketing technologies. Companies opting to implement all-in-one platforms that simplify workflows—and consolidate capabilities—will gain an edge. Integrated tech stacks built around centralized workflows will become the gold standard for businesses seeking efficiency and cost savings.

Data privacy

Despite the rise of social media and other digital platforms, email marketing remains one of the most popular and effective marketing channels, and no wonder—over 4 billion people use email every day. According to a recent Hubspot report:

• 77% of marketers have seen email engagement increase over the past year.
• Email ROI generates $36 for every $1 spent.
• The average email open rate is 46% to 50%.
• Click-through rates average 2.6% to 3%.
• The 2023 average email deliverability rate was over 85%, with Google (95%), Microsoft (91%), and Yahoo (81%) topping the list.

To protect recipients, these three email providers are implementing stricter anti-spam policies. Marketers failing to comply risk their emails getting rerouted to spam folders—or being blocked entirely. To avoid penalties and performance issues, marketers should prioritize sending relevant, personalized messages to engaged subscribers and using innovative tactics like live polling to gather subscriber preferences at scale.

Expect marketers to use robust re-engagement campaigns in 2024 to invite and encourage dormant subscribers to interact with messages. This approach will help marketing teams identify and cull inactive subscribers from their lists. The focus will (and should) shift from email volume to list quality and audience engagement. Building a high-quality subscriber list is key for deliverability.

Generational email preferences and personalization

While email has been a tried-and-true marketing channel to reach many target audiences, if marketers want to meet subscribers’ changing expectations across generations, it’s time to evolve the approach. Older generations may appreciate email’s familiarity and universality; younger generations (think Millennials and Gen Z) see its utility for business purposes and expect a more personalized, conversational tone similar to what social media channels feature. In fact, 80% of customers are more likely to purchase from a brand that provides personalized experiences. But your personalization has to be effective.

This significant—but not insurmountable—challenge requires marketers to craft an omnichannel experience, retaining email’s reach and adapting its use to make content more relatable and engaging. Marketers transitioning from solely promotional emails to messages with a more one-to-one, human tone offering a personalized experience tailored to emerging preferences will find more success and connection with recipients.

Accessibility

The customer experience will reign supreme in 2024, but equally important to prioritizing CX is prioritizing accessibility. It can’t be an afterthought. Delivering an exceptional customer experience requires incorporating accessibility into the marketing strategy from the outset. Brands embracing accessibility as a core value—not just a compliance issue—position themselves to connect with a broader audience and earn its trust and business.

Brands building accessibility into their CX strategy will enjoy greater customer satisfaction, expanded reach, and increased loyalty. Brands should:

• Conduct accessibility audits across your email marketing programs. Are you following email accessibility best practices, and do you have a plan for how to update areas that still need improvement, such as Dark Mode compatibility, copy size, format and justification, and code that complies with assistive technologies. Identify any barriers in the customer journey and define steps to remedy them..
• Adopt universal design principles benefitting all audiences, including alt text for images, captioning for audio/video, plain language and good color contrast.
• Provide a range of options for customers to interact, like chat, phone, email, and in-person, to accommodate different needs and preferences.
• Promote accessibility in marketing materials and communications to highlight your company’s commitment.
• Solicit feedback from disability advocates and groups to guide improvements.

AI for email marketers

AI played a much more significant role in 2023, with 90% of marketers saying it helped free up time spent on manual tasks and increased their available time to spend on creative aspects of their role (79%) and on the elements of their job they enjoy the best (80%). Was last year all sunshine and roses? Not quite.

What resonated most? The time savings on repetitive tasks. While marketers remained excited about AI’s potential, they also expressed:

• Worry about its ability to generate high-quality, strategic marketing content versus “passable” content.
• Concern that AI would replace human jobs rather than assist and enhance the work humans did.
• Anxiety caused by the initial challenges of implementing and integrating the technology into workflows.
• Frustration about choosing the right AI vendor and getting proper training and support.
• Hesitation about committing a large portion of their budget to AI startup costs.

As we enter 2024, marketers remain cautiously optimistic about AI’s promise to transform workflows and project management this year. Leveraging AI for tedious tasks frees marketing teams to focus their energy on strategic, creative thinking.

But when AI is embedded into your email marketing platform, you can also use it speed up and improve the quality of your personalization. AI will help marketers curating smarter, more personalized and relevant emails through AI-powered product recommendations.

The value of AI, however, lies humans’ ability to use these tools effectively. The Email Marketing Show Podcast said, “AI tools can only write about features and benefits. You’re feeding information into these platforms, and the outcome is linear. The problem is that people don’t buy just on features and benefits—they also buy on emotion.”

You’ll never remove the human element from AI marketing because humans are the storytellers who provide empathy and emotion that AI-powered tools lack. But AI and email marketers working together to offer subscribers a better experience? That’s a winning combination.

Final takeaways

The 2024 email marketing landscape demands adaptive, analytics-based, and customer-focused strategies. The future performance of email campaigns will depend on how fully marketers embrace an agile and personalized approach rooted in data insights. Companies resisting static, blanket messaging in favor of targeted content precision-tailored to customers’ needs and preferences—and providing data privacy—will dominate inboxes. Marketers that thrive in tomorrow’s email will be those making dynamic, customized, and context-aware email a core part of their strategy today.