15th Dec, 2023

5 Email Marketing Strategies to Boost Engagement in 2024

By:

Effective email marketing strategies can drive engagement.

Marketers who rely on email campaigns to capture customer attention face a complicated, ever-changing environment. An estimated 347.3 billion emails were sent and received daily in 2023. The average office worker receives 120 emails per day. This over-abundance can create email fatigue that lessens the impact of email marketing strategies.

When subscribers feel overwhelmed by too many emails, they stop engaging with a brand. In fact, Hubspot reports that the most common reason consumers give for unsubscribing from emails is that they come too often.

Given these challenges, marketers need their email marketing to engage customers with timely content that provides value. Deliver it using the following five email marketing strategies—including some that rely on motivation-aware Generative AI.

#1: Send messages at high-engagement times

Many factors can influence whether a customer opens an email—including timing. Hubspot saw the highest email engagement from 9 am and 3 pm on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday.

Data from Sender, based on a different sample, shows a different result:

As these different results show, the best time to send an email may depend on your audience. Marketers must experiment with distributing emails at different times to determine that sweet spot for your audience. Many ESPs offer staggered or batch email sending in order to improve deliverability, increase open rates, and optimize resources/traffic.  

Since consumer behavior is always changing, you should conduct a dynamic send time experiment at least once a year to inform your email marketing strategies. The purpose is to reassess when your audience will be most receptive to your message. This effort takes some extra time, but it will be worth it when more readers open campaigns.

#2: Send emails from someone your audience wants to hear from

The sender matters. According to Constant Contact, 68% of consumers decide to open an email primarily based on who sent it. Think carefully about what you put in the sender line, or customers may not recognize your email. Look at the distribution set up to make sure the sender name and email address reflect your brand. Often emails coming from a person’s email address rather than a generic business email address receive more attention. 

Also consider your business reputation and how that affects email delivery. In other words, just because your business sends emails and they are marked as “delivered” doesn’t mean everyone on your list receives them. A company’s email performance can be influenced by the email service provider (ESP), which gives senders a reputation score. A higher reputation score means the  ESP  has more trust in your organization, resulting in more emails making it to customer inboxes. More on how to troubleshoot emails that end up outside of the inbox.  

#3: Focus on quality when building your email marketing lists

The philosophy of more is better does not apply when it comes to email marketing strategy. After all, having recipients on your email distribution list who aren’t in your target market and aren’t connected to your brand will only harm email performance. These people are never going to open your messages or click on them. Keeping them on your distribution list just hurts your metrics.

Developing a quality email list requires a focus on the following questions: 

  • What value does a customer receive from signing up for your emails?
  • What information does your company provide? 
  • How often will they hear from you?

Expect a better response rate when people opt in to join your email list. Asking for permission to add someone to a list is a legal necessity in some places and a best practice in most. Think quality over quantity. Take time every quarter to review the regulations outlined by the Federal Trade Commission on email marketing, the CAM-SPAM Act. The agency publishes new information regularly.

Consider as well whether you should have just one email distribution list or several, all receiving different information. The one-size-fits-all approach rarely drives results in email marketing. Marketing segmentation is key. Make sure you are properly segmenting your email list and sending content that is relevant to the recipients based on specific demographics or behavior. You may discover marketing segments you’ve never even thought of in these 50 email segmentation strategies.

#4: Optimize results with AI-generated language trained to improve marketing performance

Marketers rely on high open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates as metrics of email marketing campaign success. Open rates reflect the share of successfully delivered emails that were opened. The click rate reflects the share of opened emails that registered at least one click. Best of all is when a customer takes the final step to make a purchase, enroll in a service, apply for a program, or otherwise convert on the call-to-action that the campaign was designed to promote.

The subject line has a huge impact on open rates. Getting it right means the core content, at least at first glance, resonates with your audience. Click rates, in turn, suggest that the body content of the email message is relevant, interesting, or answers a question subscribers have. High levels of both go to the organizations that best understand the interests and issues of their customers and deliver on-point, on-brand content.

Generative AI is giving marketers a new set of tools to improve the result from their campaigns and programs. About 20% of marketers are piloting Generative AI solutions in their enterprise, according to recent Gartner survey data.

The Persado Motivation AI enterprise Generative AI solution helps email marketers produce that optimized language. Trained on more than 10 years of marketing language from Fortune 500 brands, our platform knows what language works to drive higher engagement. It leverages that knowledge to generate the language with the highest predicted performance for each individual marketing campaign.

Brands can access the Persado Motivation AI in multiple ways. Our self-service Essential Motivation leverages machine learning to enable brands to produce the best predicted language for their campaign. Alternatively, brands can take advantage of Persado’s managed service offering, which includes the ability to run experiments to learn which message will guarantee the highest performance. Experimental results include insights into the emotional contexts and narratives that best engage your audience.

Brands can leverage Persado Essential Motivation to optimize engagement with AI-generated campaigns.

Unlike other Generative AI options, which are simply trained to produce meaningful language at scale, Persado’s solutions include performance prediction scores rooted in years of experimental design. For more on Generative AI and email marketing check out our guides Generative AI for email marketing and Generative AI for email marketing subject lines

Examples of impact using Persado Motivation AI

Consider this example of an email subject line that Persado worked on with a retail apparel brand. The brand’s control message for a sweater campaign read, “For Fall: Select Sweaters 40% Off.” The Persado Motivation AI analyzed the message, generated alternatives predicted to deliver higher performance, and then tested the variants with the audience. The AI-generated message, “From Us To You—30% Off” produced the highest engagement in spite of the lower discount rate. 

This campaign is just one example of how finding the right language can motivate customer action. Another comes from retailer Marks & Spencer, which saw a 20% increase in orders from using Persado’s Generative AI to optimize email marketing subject lines.

European grocer, Carrefour, used the Persado Motivation AI Platform to create AI-generated email subject lines. As they broadened the scope to include the full email and other channels, Carrefour was able to see how much impact the subject line or CTA had on the overall message lift.

Average email marketing impact trends

Constant Contact’s latest research (as of January 2023) has captured average trends for the following industries:

Open RateClick Rate
All Industries – Overall Average34.39%1.43%
Financial Services28.30%1.26%
Healthcare35.11%0.92%
Hospitality41.59%1.07%
Retail32.86%0.96%

Some marketers will find that their engagement rates are lower than these averages. But, you can improve them using the Persado enterprise Generative AI to optimize marketing language.

Many GenAI applications based on large language models like GPT-3 or 4 have the ability to generate email copy quickly. Those messages won’t necessarily capture attention and motivate customers to action. Not unless they reflect insights about the kinds of language that will engage customers in that moment.

In contrast, the Persado Motivation AI Platform can predict which message elements will drive opens, clicks, and conversions. With Motivation AI, brands can identify the best narrative and emotional context for your emails.

Here’s what that looks like in practice.

A luxury retailer found AI-generated language drove better email engagement.

A luxury retailer worked with Persado on an email marketing campaign to increase engagement with its loyalty program. Persado generated email subject lines and body copy for three separate loyalty-focused messages.

In each case, the retailer’s creative team crafted their copy for the campaign and shared it with Persado. The Motivation AI analyzed the retailer’s message and generated a series of variants. Message testing found that Persado AI-generated language significantly outperformed the retailer’s control message in terms of email opens, click throughs, and conversions. Discover more on luxury brand marketing strategies

A luxury retailer increased email engagement by as much as 60% by optimizing subjects lines using Persado enterprise Generative AI.

Remember that many customers read emails from their phones, so it’s important to optimize subject lines for the mobile experience.

#5: Personalize your email marketing campaigns

Today, customers expect personalization. Brands can deliver it using a number of personalization tools across the customer journey. For both email and websites, Persado offers multiple ways to personalize using the right language for the right customer.

For example, a bank customer of Persado leveraged the Motivation AI platform to generate a message targeted to loyalty reward cardholders who preferred the cash back option. The personalized AI-generated language resulted in 44% higher engagement than a generic message. 

A Fortune 50 bank increased email engagement by 44% using motivation-aware Generative AI in its marketing strategy.

Persado also offers Dynamic Motivation, a Generative AI solution that personalizes messages based on customer behaviors and preferences. Available for web and email, Dynamic Motivation drives conversions by leveraging session data and Generative AI.

Boost your email engagement in 2024

Generative AI is transformational—even more so when it is built for the enterprise and motivation-aware. As a key input, it can drive engagement and conversion rates to help businesses more effectively drive revenue growth with email marketing. 

It’s important to remember that many popular Generative AI applications can quickly produce conversational copy, but limitations exist. These tools cannot influence email performance because they aren’t trained to do that. They produce more messages, not better messages.Want to learn more about the Persado impact on Generative AI for email marketing? Contact Persado today for a risk-free trial.

Share

Subscribe to our newsletter for the latest news & information.