Trends in using AI for marketing: 2023-2024

 

What AI-based tools and digital marketing techniques should businesses from small to large be considering?

I’ve been fortunate to be involved in digital marketing for over 25 years now. The opportunities presented by AI recently are the most exciting developments that I have seen in this time, since the early days, where everything from organic search, a website and email marketing seemed a similarly huge opportunity.

This range of projections of advancement in AI presented at Technology for Marketing by Implement AI highlights that we are at a relatively early stage of adoption of AI, with the biggest advancements yet to come recently hinted by the rapid adoption of ChatGPT.

In this post, I’ll summarize trends in real-world applications of AI and tools to consider in each of these categories of AI that are open to any business from small to large. Some of the hottest marketing applications and trends in AI we’ll cover are in these five categories

1. Generative AI
2. Autonomous AI
3. Causal AI
4. Conversational
5. Predictive Analytics

For each technology, we’ll look at how they can be used in marketing and recommend some of the best free and paid tools to consider. Apart from the techniques and tools, in the last section, I’ll also review the issues of governance and management - What actions should businesses be taking to improve to their use of AI.

Generative AI is currently at the peak of interest according to the latest Gartner Hype Cycle on emerging AI technology. This means that in theory, it will soon enter the ‘trough of disillusionment’ and evidence of this is the comments in subreddits such as r/ChatGPT where power users complain of new limitations caused by legal and ethical concerns. There are also recommendations for other ‘Personalized AI’ competitors which I’ll cover below which given the growing popularity of these and specific paid marketing solutions such as Jasper and Writesonic suggest to me that this category is still ‘on the up’.

Of course, the applications of AI in marketing aren’t new. In 2017 we shared these use-cases for Artificial Intelligence (AI) in marketing

Our visual shows the wide array of applications for Machine Learning and AI for marketing across the RACE customer lifecycle, all of which can be put in place today.

None of the technology is speculative or on the horizon, these are current marketing techniques already being utilized by many successful companies) across our customer lifecycle. You can read more about how to integrate new or existing MarTech into your digital marketing strategy in our 2024 edition of The Future of Digital Marketing Trends guide, which is a free download produced in partnership with Technology for Marketing.

A good place to start to review the latest trends in AI is the latest Gartner Hype Cycles which chart which new technologies are ‘on the rise’ and forecast when they may reach their respective plateaus.

1. Generative AI

Developments in Generative AI or Gen AI which produces text, visual and video content from prompts has seen many new features introduced into ChatGPT this year, with ChatGPT now being able to listen and respond to audio prompts, read visuals and with DALL-E integrated, create visuals.

AI image and video generators

This move from text to richer content is one of the trends in this category, with AI now even producing video based on audio or transcripts delivered by human-like avatars through tools like Synthesia  and HeyGen, in which you can overlay pictures of your team to implement avatars based on real people (think ABBA Voyager)!

This year there has been a huge investment in Generative AI, with Microsoft’s investment and collaboration with OpenAI, the obvious example. With Amazon recently betting $4 billion in Anthropic, the developer of Claude we can expect the Amazon re-branded version of Claude to do well in the years ahead.

Fine-tuned Gen AI

You'll know that prompting in ChatGPT works best when Prompts are more specific to what you're looking to achieve, so, in marketing, this means the context for the copy or imagery you're looking to create. In our Quick Win on Using AI for Copywriting I explain a Templating approach which is the most efficient way to define your communications goals, target audience, brand, creative and channels. I also explain how to use ChatGPT's relatively new Custom Instructions feature to re-use supplying the context of your brand, products, customers and brand tone of voice.

While Custom Instructions are a huge improvement to tailor ChatGPT copy to a specific business and audience, they are still limited, so there is a trend to other specific tools for marketers building in fine-tuning. One such is Jasper Brand Voice feature which enables you to upload brand style guidelines or other company information such as campaign briefs to tailor the AI's responses.

Topical Gen AI

Another trend within Gen AI, is that we can expect more regular updates to Large Language models which enable us to work with more topical information than the 2021 currently offered by OpenAI GPT-3 and GPT-4. Although OpenAI doesn’t seem to have cracked this problem yet, Google seems to. You can ask Bard for a summary of the main developments in digital marketing in 2023 and it does a decent job - great for seeing what you may have missed. You can even ask it about trends in AI within marketing for 2024, but the results there are generic compared to this article since it can’t extrapolate as well as a human!

We can also expect that the release of Google’s new Search Generated Experience (SGE) will dramatically increase use of Generative AI when it goes live, which is expected to happen in 2024. This will give Google users an AI conversational response like Bing AI. It’s currently being tested in the US, India and Japan and although Google is testing many changes to balance usability and monetization through Ads, it seems likely it will launch in 2024. Some SEOs such as Eli Schwartz are forecasting an SEO apocalypse as clickthroughs to sites decline as the AI in the SERP answers the user's query.

Personal Gen AI

Finally, another trend within Generative AI is illustrated by Pi from Inflection (founded by ex-Google Deepmind developer Mustafa Suleyman (CEO)). In 2023 Inflection AI announced $1.3 billion of funding led by current investors, Microsoft, and NVIDIA.

Billed as a Personal AI, this currently has a more user-friendly conversational style than ChatGPT which can be voice-enabled and some have compared to the AI in the movie: ‘She’. For me, it’s impressive since it provides a genuine conversation where the AI leads to step you through an issue towards solutions. Compare this to ChatGPT where you have to lead with intelligent prompts to get the most from it…

2. Autonomous AI agents

The future of Autonomous AI agents was highlighted in 2023 when AutoGPT was released. Note that this isn’t an official OpenAI release, although much of the superficial commentary on it suggested it was. Rather it involves clever innovation from one developer to add a coding ‘wrapper’ around ChatGPT via the API. So, it's only available to developers who manually install it from the GitHub code repository. However, it has engaged many developers with its potential, becoming the top trending download on Github.

Microsoft Jarvis is another example showcasing the potential of autonomous agents. Like AutoGPT it can only be setup by developers downloading code - it’s not a service yet. This article on How to Set Up and Try Microsoft Jarvis / HuggingGPT shows the approach through this visual.

So, AutoGPT and Jarvis can connect to and control other web services using APIs and perform actions such as web searching, web forms, and API interactions. AutoGPT works by self-generating the necessary prompts to reach a desired goal. It does this by breaking down the goal into sub-tasks to generate prompts for each sub-task. It then executes the prompts and gathers data to refine or validate its prompts and their outputs. The application then iterates until it completes the tasks and the top-level goal.

For marketers, the impact of AutoGPT is more in showing what AI the future will offer in the future, such as autonomous bots that can be set a task to research a topic and select and buy products, such as the cheapest flight from X toY. In fact, Paul Smith and I wrote about this in our first 2001 edition of Digital Marketing Excellence as a future option, to me it’s still years into the future for widespread adoption.

AutoGPT and Microsoft Jarvis highlights these features of autonomous AI agents. It can :

• Work through a series of steps to achieve a goal
• Chain a series of actions based on prompts
• Take decisions based on the results of previous prompts

More general applications of autonomous AI are self-driving cars and robotic automation.

3. Causal AI

Causal AI is the other category of AI identified by Gartner – see What’s New in Artificial Intelligence from the 2023 Gartner Hype Cycle.

Causal AI will possess more human-like intelligence and will be able to assist in analysis and decision-making. Its aim is to uncover the cause-and-effect relationships between marketing efforts and outcomes. The article above gives these examples of the type of question that can be answered: what if we had only targeted Group A instead of all of Group B? What if we spent an extra $20,000 on TikTok instead of Instagram? How many additional conversions would that deliver? In other words, It lets us go beyond predictive accuracy and get insights into the incrementality of our marketing dollars.

As an innovative technology, there are few competitors in this space. One is Causal Lens which offers to support decision-making by understanding the drivers of behaviour as this case study of retention drivers for an insurance company shows.

4. Conversational AI

For the last two key categories of AI, we return to more established AI marketing capabilities which don’t feature as an emerging AI according to Gartner, but with innovation happening apace in this sector.

Conversational AI is where AI supports direct customer interactions of which there are two types:

• Customer-driven inbound customer enquiries which are sent via web contact forms
• Company-driven outbound communications such as email welcome and nurture sequences which are for promotion and engagement

The main development amongst vendors in this sector relates back to Generative AI where solutions are now less based on rigid templates, but more relevant responses based on prompting with the customer query and tuned to the relevant business question. Autonomous agents will increasingly replace simple questions, but human oversight is mostly still required.

Vendors in this sector include services like Intercom which we use and Drift which offer inbound and outbound capabilities with AI-based engines such as Fin in Intercom and others such as Genesys and Zendesk which focus more on inbound communications.

Another approach relating to the Fine-tuning I mentioned earlier is exemplified by MyAsk AI is to use a standalone AI knowledgebase to which you can upload company documents to answer customer queries using a GPT engine. HubSpot is using this on there site.

5. Predictive Analytics

I’m covering predictive analytics last since in large businesses with business intelligence teams this is one of the longest-established technologies with numerous applications across marketing including

1. Customer Segmentation: Predictive analytics is used to segment customers based on various attributes, such as demographics, behavior, lifetime value and purchase history.
2. Lead Scoring: By analyzing historical data and identifying patterns, predictive analytics can assign scores to leads, indicating their likelihood to convert into customers. This helps marketing and sales teams prioritize their efforts on high-potential leads, leading to more efficient lead management.
3. Churn Prediction: Predictive models forecast which customers are at risk of churning (leaving) based on their behavior and interactions. Marketers can implement retention strategies to reduce customer churn.
4. Personalization and Recommendation Engines: E-commerce and content platforms use predictive algorithms to suggest products, services, or content to users based on their past behaviors and preferences. This enhances the user experience and drives sales or engagement.
5. Marketing Campaign Optimization: Predictive analytics can help optimize marketing campaigns by predicting which channels, messages, and timing are most likely to yield the highest conversion rates. This maximizes the return on investment (ROI) of marketing efforts.

All these types of machine learning applications based on analysis of historical customer interaction data will continue, but supported by the other types of AI innovations we have reviewed such as Causal and Generative AI. The opportunity here is the fast rate of development of these tools, and the practical application of data to improve marketing performance. Of course, with so many different possible areas, it's important to prioritize optimizations that will make the biggest difference to your current marketing objectives. Our guide gives recommendations for planning and reporting too.

Trends in managing AI and governance

Businesses are reviewing the opportunities of AI, but they also need to manage the downside. Implement AI identifies these negative factors of AI that need to be managed in their article on The AI-Assisted Organisation - a blueprint for Small and Medium Businesses.

• Job Displacement. Workers performing repetitive analytical and mechanical tasks face displacement through automation.
• Data Privacy. Concerns collecting, processing and securing ever-growing datasets raises concerns around consent, transparency and misuse that can erode customer trust if not intelligently managed.
• Digital Ethics. As automated systems impact people’s lives, proactively developing ethical frameworks needs to be guided by principles of transparency and accountability.
• Security Risks. Increasing reliance on AI and interconnected systems means system
  security must be considered.

AI policy for marketing communications

We believe that more organisations developing is a major trend given the impact that Generative AI in particular, has had, so we have a separate section on this.

In this podcast, Implement AI reviews further recommendations to AI policy summarized how to manage these challenges for these types of business:

For Large, Enterprise Businesses:

• Create an AI policy framework to provide guidelines on ethics, data privacy, security, and explainability of AI systems across the organisation
• Form an AI committee with cross-functional leaders to govern and continuously review the AI policy and strategy
• Provide comprehensive AI training to employees on using new tools responsibly and optimizing workflows
• Appoint a Chief AI Officer to own and drive the AI strategy and roadmap forward
• Engage stakeholders like customers and employees on AI plans to retain trust and talent

For SMEs:

• Draft an AI policy even if basic to start aligning business goals with AI adoption
• Assign AI responsibility to a senior leader even if part-time to drive strategy
• Evaluate customer data handling and security practices required for AI systems
• Explore AI opportunities to gain competitive advantage through faster task completion
• Be transparent about AI plans with staff to ease uncertainty and align on the vision

By Dave Chaffey

8 email marketing experience trends for 2024

 

By Kath Pay 

Try these 8 new and trending customer-centric approaches to help you keep proving your value to leads and customers over email

Marketing trends forecasts should be resources marketers can consult to help them set strategic priorities for the coming year. But all too often they recycle the same old ideas or serve as thinly disguised showcases for vendor specialties.

So let’s make this email marketing forecast more useful by focusing on one overarching development we see happening in the world of email marketing and the supporting events that make it a significant development.

For my part, I expect that email experience will be the defining trend for 2024 – the increasing focus on improving our customers’ experiences with our brands, products, services, representatives, and messages.

Many of the more specific trends included in forecasts that are beginning to trickle in revolve around improving our customers' experiences of our emails. That includes everything from building up trust in the inbox to investigating Dark Mode email designs.

This rise in the customer experience as a major focus of marketing efforts goes hand in hand with greater attention being paid to customer loyalty. A study by SimplicityDX found the cost of acquiring new customers skyrocketed 222% since 2013, from $9 per customer to $29 in 2022. “Customer acquisition costs and higher rates of product returns account for virtually all of the difference,” the study claimed.

Two supporting trends contribute to this greater focus on customer experience: tools that help marketers work smarter, and practices that help companies become more customer-centric by putting customer and their needs, wants, and preferences first in all decision-making.

The eight trends listed below fall into one of these two categories, but they all contribute to a better CX and help the company continue to prove its value to its current customers.

This more focused attention on the customer experience can lead marketers to seek out and use tools and data that allow them to work smarter at the intersection of loyalty and business growth: helping customers achieve their goals makes the company more valuable to them and more worthy of loyalty.

1. The trend toward working smarter

When they work smarter, companies can serve customers better – everything from better products to more efficient browsing and buying in-store or online, customer support and services, more relevant and effective messaging, and even better deliverability to inboxes.

A. More brands aim for inbox visibility through trust and authentication

We have always advised our clients to create an informative inbox presence with both a quickly identifiable sender name (never a “no-reply” email address) and a strong subject line.

But now marketers must do even more to prove to mailbox providers and subscribers alike that their emails are inbox-worthy. Fortunately for email marketers, they have more tools today to get their emails into more inboxes and to help subscribers trust the messages enough to open and act on them.

These include BIMI {Brand Indicators for Message Identification) and DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance), an email authentication, policy, and reporting protocol. 

Using BIMI to build trust: Email fraud is on the rise worldwide, as is the financial damage it can inflict on people and companies who fall prey to attack. More than 3.4 billion phishing emails are sent daily. The financial cost is severe, with an estimated cost of £150 ($181) for each piece of personal information stolen in a phishing attack.

Wary subscribers are more cautious about falling victim to email fraud, but they can also go to the opposite extreme and discard or report genuine emails as spam or fraud. BIMI is gaining more traction as a trust signal, thus creating a better customer experience.

BIMI is an email specification that standardizes logo display across mailbox providers. Because it requires the sender to verify that it is authorized to send email with that logo. It can also assure subscribers that a message is from an authentic sender and not someone spoofing the brand. 

Brands that have passed the necessary requirements for verification can display their logo next to their email message in the inbox. Brands that haven’t gone through the process will continue to display no logo, as in Gmail, or a default image as in Yahoo! and Outlook among others. 

The image below shows a mobile Yahoo! Mail inbox displaying messages both from brands that have gone through BIMI verification and those that have been assigned a default image, usually featuring letters pulled from the brand name.

A brand must follow an authentication path specified by the AuthIndicators Working Group, an industry coalition of mailbox providers and email security firms. They must pass DMARC validation checks, among other requirements.

As of publication, Google/Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, Apple Mail, La Poste, Fastmail and Cloudmark support BIMI. Microsoft (Hotmail, Outlook) does not. Mailbox providers considering support include Yahoo! Japan, Comcast and BT.

DMARC validation becomes a must-do: While the customer experience impact isn’t as obvious here as it is with inbox trust signals, it does ensure that the emails people look forward to seeing in their inboxes will actually show up there.

In autumn 2023, both Google/Gmail and Yahoo! Mail announced plans to tighten sender requirements to place messages in their users’ inboxes. It’s no longer enough to show a subscriber gave active permission to send email. 

Now senders must also authenticate their sender IP addresses and domains using SPF (Sender Policy Framework) and DKIM (Domain Keys Identified Mail) as well as DMARC with at least a p=none policy, which tells inbox providers to deliver email even if they fail SPF and DKIM checks.

However, many email security experts recommend senders set their DMARC policy to p=reject, which tells inbox providers to block any mail that fails SPF and DKIM checks. 

Gmail and Yahoo! Mail also want email recipients to be able to unsubscribe from a brand’s emails with a single click, so they’re requiring brands to use list-unsubscribe headers. This code, which an ESP will add to the email header code, places a native unsubscribe link in the inbox’s message. 

Placement varies between email clients. In Gmail, the unsubscribe is a text link next to the sender's name (top image). In Yahoo! Mail’s mobile app, it appears as a CTA button marked “Unsubscribe” at the bottom of the message (bottom image).

B. Marketers will expand their use of Generative AI

Generative AI, or “GenAI,” has evolved from the latest shiny toy to a genuine business asset in the space of just a couple of years. This adoption should increase in the next year and beyond as more marketers become familiar with AI-driven tools and learn how to use them successfully.

For marketers, much of the attention has swirled around OpenAI’s ChatGPT for copywriting and idea creation and optimization, and DALL-E for creating and optimizing images from text prompts and descriptions.

ChatGPT, which is built on OpenAI’s GPT large language model, is one of the fastest growing AI-driven language bots, with more than 100 million registered users since it launched in November 2022. A number of proprietary tools such as Jasper and WriteSonic have emerged, as well as free or low-cost tools like Bing from Microsoft and Google’s Bard.

As reported in Smart Insights’ The Future of Digital Marketing, about one-sixth of businesses have used AI for content creation and optimization for more than a year, with around one third recently starting using AI for generating content for SEO, social media, and email marketing.

The top three uses for AI in email marketing are content personalization, email retargeting, and subject line optimization, according to 2023 Email Marketing & Research Report: A Look at the Market for the Future of the Channel, a research report by RPE Origin and Ascend 2. Other uses include dynamic content creation, send-time optimization, predictive analytics for customer behaviour, automated segmentation and targeting, and A/B testing and optimization.

Use GenAI to write a campaign brief: The simplest ones are for generating short bursts of highly focused copy, such as headlines, subject lines, calls to action, taglines, email body copy, and the like. Some marketers have experimented with using ChatGPT and other copy-focused bots for producing long-form copy, but results have been mixed so far.

My agency has discovered that ChatGPT can shave a great deal of time off the process of creating a detailed brief for a complex email campaign.
Here’s a recent prompt I write for an email campaign brief in which we called on several persuasion principles developed by Robert Cialdini in his book, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. Note the precise instructions! I used ChatGPT to produce this brief, but the principle is the same no matter which GenAI tool you use: The copy is only as good as your prompt, or instructions.

“You’re an email marketer for an ecommerce clothing retailer tasked with writing compelling copy to increase conversions for an email campaign. You’re selling a new range of summer dresses that are affordable, pretty, comfortable and stylish.
Deliver one subject line, opening paragraph, and call to action, using each of the persuasion principles and cognitive biases listed below, without actually mentioning the cognitive bias within the copy, but label each example with the principle or bias:
Reciprocity, scarcity, social proof, authority, anchoring, loss aversions, curiosity gap, endowment effect, confirmation bias, emotional appeal.”

If you're looking to get started with ChatGPT, don't miss our new Free Members' ChatGPT prompt cheatsheet, which contains a fully integrated A-Z glossary of ChatGPT features and techniques, with tips and examples, plus our recommended free and paid tools including ChatGPT alternatives.

C. More use of complex email automations

One example is switching from a single system-generated email to a multi-email series of branded, optimised messages aimed to engage new subscribers and move them to act, such as creating an account or making a first purchase.

Although we have no recent data on the percentage of email marketers who have, for example, added a cart-abandonment series to their email programmes or expanded their welcome email into an onboarding series, I have seen wider acceptance of these automations among my clients and in the wider email marketing world.

Driving this trend are four recent developments:

• Cloud-based software-as-a-service platforms, including ESPs and start-up AI tech firms, with near-instantaneous integrations and dashboards that take much of the work out of building complex automations and email templates
• Development of tools that can automate the creation of different customer segments and optimize the timing and content of highly personalized emails based on data held about individual recipients
• Greater access to data, especially in real-time, without having to wait for database managers to answer requests
• Cutbacks in marketing team size, especially during and after the COVID-19 pandemic, which forced remaining marketers to look for efficiencies wherever they could find them.

The resulting do-it-yourself approach, which no longer needs the same degree of IT involvement, has made automation more accessible. On average, 81% of marketing organisations use some form of automation, according to Salesforce.  

This means email marketers are getting more sophisticated about automation and their results, and companies are recognising that money spent on these more complex automations gets returned in the form of higher revenue and customer retention.  

With automation, brands can collect and manage individual preferences automatically and call on those details to create more relevant and personalized communications. This helps brands meet customers’ expectations for receiving messages that they are interested in, thus improving the customer experience through email.

As more ESPs add automation features to remain competitive I expect to see more marketers begin to explore them and use them to save time and increase conversions and retention.

D. Better organising and access to data

A key part of the trend toward working smarter is improving marketers’ access to data and using the data we have more efficiently and effectively to inform decision-making – everything from campaign development and audience choice to content selection and message optimisation and analysis.

The CDP, or Customer Data Platform, is on the cusp of becoming a mainstream data entity. The CDP Institute estimated CDP industry revenue would reach $2.3 billion in 2023 – a modest growth over $2 billion forecast in 2022 and says there are 171 defined vendors in the CDP space.

A CDP has some overlap with a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform in that both are intended to manage and integrate data, but CDPs pull in and unify data from a larger range of sources to provide a complete view of the customer beyond the sales cycle.

A CDP promises both a better customer experience through more timely, personalised and relevant messages, and a “work smarter” advantage because it can reduce the labour that marketers put into creating, selecting or requesting audiences or segments, building multiple versions of email campaigns to match those audiences and sending all of those campaigns out at once.

I expect more brands will explore CDPs, but while they will appreciate the unified customer views that are a hallmark of the CDP, they will also discover that CDPs need to be able to access that data from siloed sources, such as customer support contacts. CDPs also require a lot of data to be most effective. Other tools, such as CRM platforms, might be able to meet a company’s needs if it doesn’t generate the kind of data, or enough data, to make a CDP worth the cost.

E. Using AI to support A/B split testing

A/B split testing will become more commonplace thanks to two developments:

• More testing tools provided as features on email sending platforms
• Using generative AI to create test controls and variations faster and more accurately

As the RPE Origin/Ascend2 study cited in a previous indicated, many enterprise-level email marketers use ChatGPT and other large-language model bots to take some of the drudge work out of doing A/B split testing.

The simplest ways are to use these language bots to suggest alternatives for subject lines, calls to action, or copy blocks that that range from the prosaic (word or character count, word choice, sentence structure) based on a hypothesis, to more sophisticated variations based on emotional approach, or persuasion elements or selecting testing audiences.

Start improving your use of of ChatGPT today when you join us as a Free Member to access our ChatGPT prompt cheatsheet, which contains a fully integrated A-Z glossary of ChatGPT features and techniques, with tips and examples, plus our recommended free and paid tools including ChatGPT alternatives.

2. The trend to focus on customer-centricity

We are still feeling the reverberations of the shifts in email messaging driven by the COVID-19 pandemic, primarily in retooling email programmes to meet customer needs and wants first over driving company objectives.

Although this customer-first trend has receded somewhat as society moves into post-pandemic mode, I still see brand email teams retaining or even expanding on efforts to make email as customer-centric as possible through these three trends:

A. Dark mode email design

Dark mode aims to give electronics users a bit of a break from the brilliantly lighted screens that render graphics so well and is often part of the movement to building greater accessibility into email viewing to overcome challenges for readers with vision or cognitive issues.

Although no recent reliable statistics point to the percentage of users who choose view email and other interfaces in dark mode, an investigation by Litmus found 40% of iPhones have the feature enabled.

A study by the Nielsen/Norman Group also found no single preference for one polarity over another. About one-third of respondents chose dark mode, another third used light mode exclusively, and the remaining third used both.

Dark mode can pose a problem for marketers because designs that are optimized for light mode don’t always render correctly in dark mode. Rendering can vary across different email clients as well. As one example, colours can render differently against a darker background, often becoming nearly invisible.

Designing one template for a dark mode version of an email template can be virtually impossible given how it can render across so many email clients. Rather, determine which email clients most subscribers use and create a template design that renders well across it.

B. AMP for Email – not dead yet!

Originally promising to increase interactivity in email and allow conversions to happen in the message instead of on a landing page, AMP for Email is still waiting for its close-up in email design circles.

However, some brands haven’t given up on this technology, which promised to eliminate one step in the path to conversion – the need to leave the inbox and complete the action on the website. This leads me to believe that AMP for Email could trend again, especially if marketers and email developers discover it can fill a need despite its drawbacks.

AMP has fallen short of the mark for a number of reasons:

• Microsoft cancelled its AMP for Email pilot for Outlook, and Google has de-emphasised it.
• Only a few ESPs and mailbox providers support the technology. 
• Brands pulled back from adding experimental technology during the pandemic and subsequent global recession.

However, AMP for Email could be poised for a breakthrough because it has support from two major mailbox providers (Gmail and Yahoo! Mail) and two ESPs (MessageBird and Netcore Cloud).

Netcore has developed several case studies supporting AMP for Email, including one for YourStory, the content and communications platform dedicated to India's start-up economy.

Your Story had three goals: to increase participation in its events, to grow the number of leads from those events, and to streamline its event registration process. 

Working with Netcore's Customer Success Team, YourStory transformed its traditional email marketing programme by using AMP for Email and introducing AMP-based responses and registrations in its email messages.

The process had two advantages over sending traditional emails that required users to click to a landing page to register for an event: 

1. Simplified registration: Users could share their information within the email in a matter of seconds and on the fly.
2. Fewer lost registrants: Because registrants could complete registrations in the email message, this reduced drop-offs. 

According to YourStory’s Aaron Karthik, head of digital marketing, the AMP for Email test generated a 5.5X increase in conversions for event registrations.

C. AI in personalization for higher sales and customer engagement

Along with my general prediction that companies will find more uses for AI in email marketing, I also believe they will find uses that align more closely with strategic objectives instead of limiting themselves to subject-line or call-to-action drafts.

As an example, AI can help personalize the email newsletter – the workhorse of an email content strategy. All too often they are static affairs driven more by what a brand wants to tell its customers than by customers’ highly individual interests. AI can help transform them into more relevant messages, as the report below from Volvo indicates.

Creating a personalized newsletter at scale is an ongoing challenge for many brands. But Volvo used its vast quantities of customer data to build profiles and elevate its CRM function. Tony Allen, Global CRM Lead for Volvo cars, explained to me that Volvo needed to design customer communications that kept them interested in Volvo during the typically extended automobile purchase cycle.

Volvo wanted to communicate more often with engaged segments, send hyper-targeted, relevant campaigns and personalize campaigns that had a single focus. The process included these steps:

1. Machine learning platform iota-ML, AI-copywriting tool Jasper.ai, and video-in-email system Playable were chosen to deliver this upgraded customer experience. 
2. The team tested a weekly version of its bi-monthly newsletter on 10% of its audience for 12 weeks. 
3. After learning that the test audience responded well to the new format, the company rolled it out to the rest of its audience.
4. The revamped newsletter featured content in two categories: “help and inform” or “inspire and entertain.” Volvo’s CRM team used cross-functional planning to pull timely content.
5. The email clickstream was classified into 28 customer content preference categories The Iota-ML platform used these 28 categories to build predictive audiences to personalise and engage small segments. 
6. Volvo sent 75 predictive campaigns in the first year, positioned as “We thought you’d like this.” This campaign format was effective among groups with lower general engagement.

Results: Using machine learning via Iota-ML streamlined data usage for content choices and reduced the campaign process to two hours from idea to campaign deployment. It also resulted in the following:

• 3X increase in year-over-year engagement
• 47% of new product sales came from ML audiences
• The “most engaged subscribers” segment grew 4.5X
• The highly engaged segment interested in electric-car content grew 6X
• Volvo used a universal control group, which meant the company could tie the impact of the change directly to higher revenue

The trend of embracing MarTech developments amongst email marketeers

I‘ll be the first to admit that my trends list for 2024 involves some wishful thinking. But I’ve also seen a greater openness to the advantages of using data, technology, and good old-fashioned strategic thinking to keep email going as a way to give customers a better experience with a brand, one that helps them achieve their own goals – which, in turn, help companies achieve theirs. I’m excited to see how this next year plays out!

For more help identifying and prioritizing digital marketing trends to inform your strategy, don't miss the 2024 edition of The Future of Digital Marketing, exclusively for Smart Insights Free Members only.

https://www.smartinsights.com/

Web design trends 2024

 

By Robert Allen 

our website reflects your organization

No one wants their website to look tired and out of date. Being aware of the latest website design trends means you can ensure your website keeps impressing visitors. It’s not about chasing the latest fads, which you should be careful to avoid, but rather understanding the current state of best practice and applying these to your site where relevant to you. 

Website design agency Numiko builds stunning and complex websites for some of the most prestigious organizations in the world. So we asked their team of web designers to uncover the latest web design trends for this year and share what their predictions are for 2024. Here’s what they identified as the current top web design trends:

Bento grid layouts

These types of layouts aren’t new. In fact, they’ve been around for decades. However, they have exploded in popularity recently, in part due to their adoption by Apple both in their online presence and iOS.

The bento grid layout feels modern and playful. It’s also very simple, as it’s a form of grid, making it easy to use. You can see more examples of Bento Grids here.

Apple’s decision to use the Bento grid layout for their pages showing the iPhone 14 Pro and Apple Card have propelled its popularity. Apple is probably the world-leading brand in design, so their use of it will prompt many other designs to consider it for their websites. 

Website technologies have developed to support the Bento grid designs, making them easier for developers to deliver. This combined with its integration into iOS means we predict this hot web design trend is just getting started and will continue to grow in popularity in 2024. 

Fluid layouts

Fluid layouts are fully scalable and ‘fluid’ design systems that mean a website no longer snaps to predefined breakpoints and instead proportionally scales to a users’ viewport, ensuring a more consistent experience for users across devices. In design terms, this means no-longer using pixel based measurements, but instead using percentages.

Elements within the grid adjust proportionally, so the layout smoothly adapts to different sizes. This is the most effective way to ensure your website looks great on all devices. With the rise of new device types such as smartphones with folding screens, like the Galaxy Z fold, it’s more important than ever to ensure your website is perfectly flexible to whatever device your visitor is using.

AI-generated imagery

The proliferation of AI-generated imagery will explode in the next few years. This will affect website design and imagery heavily. This trend started recently with the launch of MidJourney v5 in March 2023, and is set to gain further momentum as AI image-generation tools continue to improve. Dalle-3 is now out in alpha and is due to be released to all Open-AI subscribers in October 2023. 

Below is an example of AI-generated imagery. It’s already on the cusp of realism, it could soon be indistinguishable. 

This raises ethical questions, particularly for charities - does using AI-generated imagery of non-existent people diminish the legitimacy of your message? 

Despite this, we have no doubt that we’ll see AI imagery as a major trend in 2024, potentially with some pushback. Its ease of use means websites that may have lacked great photography in the past and therefore rely on flatter designs, will now be more likely to use images. 

AI-generated video may also start to improve in the same way as AI imagery has over the past year, increasing the use of video and animated content.

Renewed focus on accessibility

Website accessibility is nothing new, but new developments over the course of this year mean it’s receiving more attention than ever. The WCAG standards which set out the official requirements for websites to reach different levels of accessibility and has recently updated its guidance to WCAG 2.2.

In the UK, all public sector websites have been required to meet WCAG AA accessibility standards since 2018. The updates to the WCAG guidelines mean that web design teams will be looking to accessibility afresh in 2024 and building more accessible websites than ever before.

Retro / nostalgia 

It’s 2023, and the 90s are cool again. 

Fashion moves in cycles, and strange as it may seem, there’s now enough time between us and the early 90s that a current pop star’s music videos are deliberately cultivating a 90s look.

Web designs are not immune to this. Certain websites are embarrassing 90s or 2000s fashion trends and applying it to their design. Nottingham Contemporary Art Gallery for example opted for a nostalgic, 90s-inspired design for its new website.  

It’s fun, quirky, and stands out from the crowd. It’s a great example of how trends can be unpredictable, they don’t always go one way. Sometimes you have to leap back into the past in order to be cutting edge. 

Large typographic hero images

The ‘hero image’ is a classic of web design. A way to showcase your product or evoke a feeling with a single powerful image. The typographic hero image takes this style of design but updates it by switching to using oversized typography to create a memorable impression.

Artist Martine Syms’ website uses extra-large typography in the place of a hero image to make a bold impression on the visitor.

Numiko applied this trend to their own website, which uses extra-large typography in place of a hero image, with the addition of masked video, using the typography as the mask.

Microinteractions

Microinteractions in web design are subtle interactive elements that enhance user engagement and experience. They provide feedback, guide user behavior, and serve various functions such as loading indicators, form validation, and gamification.

These small design elements play a significant role in brand identity and contribute to user satisfaction and usability on websites and digital applications. The interaction itself may be just a simple animation on a button to indicate a change of status, but these little elements of movement help bring a website to life. 

By giving the user subtle clues about changes in status or interactive elements, they can help improve the UX whilst adding to the aesthetic feel of the website, such as in the example below. 

A simple but effective micro interaction website is rotating the hamburger menu to indicate when it is opened. Or you can animate it to become a cross, indicating that you tap there to close it once opened.

Bold and custom typography

Bold typography is a trend characterized by the use of large, impactful fonts. It serves to immediately capture attention, establish a visual hierarchy, and convey brand personality. This trend enhances readability, adapts well to mobile responsiveness, and complements minimalist design principles. 

Designers often use custom fonts for creative expression, and when combined with animations and interactions, it can create engaging web experiences. However, it's essential to consider accessibility to ensure an inclusive user experience. 

For a long time, typography trends emphasized simplicity, serifs were out and Helvetica was king. But now things are going in the opposite direction. Serifs are back. Designers are using typography more creatively, using uncommon fonts to stand out from the crowd. 

E-commerce store aiaiai employs a typographically driven design to great effect, creating a captivating website that stands out from the crowd.

Predictions for 2024

The design trends outlined here are likely to continue to grow in popularity over the course of 2024. The Bento Box layout is currently being propelled by Apple, and so has further to run, but we may see it peak after another year or so. 

AI imagery will evolve rapidly so this will keep getting more and more use in web design over the course of next year. However, because AI will make great imagery ubiquitous, it will mean that great imagery will no longer provide a way to stand out from the crowd. 

That’s where you’ll see trends like creative, bold typography come into their own, as a way to stand and position your brand as different from the rest.

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