Digital Marketing

6 New Year’s Resolutions from Email Marketers

Dana Chan

January 4, 2024

Marketing Resolutions for 2024

The new year is here, and people everywhere are making resolutions to start 2024 off on the right foot—marketers included. Whether it’s upping data-driven tactics or streamlining workflows, setting key professional goals is critical to tracking progress and smashing last year’s benchmarks.

Movable Ink’s strategists are here to share 6 marketing resolutions to hit the ground running this year. Whether you’re looking for some inspiration when crafting your own resolutions or want to adopt these for your own marketing plans, this blog will offer you strategic ideas to optimize your marketing programs.

Resolution #1: Prioritize Proactive List Hygiene

Inactive email users have been a perennial issue for marketers, but with tightening policies and new industry standards, such as the Great Gmail Purge, embracing list hygiene is more critical than ever.

To preserve your validity as a sender, marketers must diligently adapt to evolving policies and be proactive with their email list hygiene strategy:

Provide high quality content and ensure that it delivers value for customers. As a best practice, content should be personalized to drive relevance and steer clear of any spam words. Once lists reach a certain size, however, you’ll need to seek an automated solution that sends the right customers the relevant content they need.
List purges should be a routine task in your data hygiene practices alongside segmentation. It’s crucial not to inundate inactive customers with too many messages, otherwise you risk disengaging them from your brand forever.
Winback campaigns are marketers’ best bet for reigniting excitement in their inactive email users. Rather than continually sending them the same emails as everyone else, create strategic content that entices them to return.

Resolution #2: Prioritize Zero-Party Data

Data is the heartbeat of engaging, personalized marketing, making zero-party data activation a linchpin tactic for 2024. Customers consciously exchange zero-party data for an optimized marketing experience, making it a gold standard to strengthen marketing communications. As a result, leveraging this data builds trust and powers personalized marketing experiences simultaneously. To deliver a data-driven experience that deeply resonates with customers, marketers need to keep two things in mind: their tech stack and their data-collection strategies.

In terms of tech stacks, marketers need to opt for tools that can efficiently generate content from all data scattered across their entire marketing ecosystem. That means a marketing solution that’s automated, fits seamlessly into existing workflows, and offers streamlined integrations.

Data-collection strategies is where marketers get to put their creative brainstorming to work. The options are endless: marketers can implement quizzes, polls, or incentivization, just to name a few. Take Ulta’s recent year-in-review campaign:

Ulta Beauty first- and zero-party data powered campaigns

At the bottom of their year-in-review email, customers are offered 30 points in exchange for answering a question about their favorite beauty trend. Once customers fill it in, Ulta Beauty’s automated trigger delivers a message that notifies them that their bonus points are being processed along with product recommendations that match their response.

Resolution #3: Challenge the Status Quo

As a marketer, it’s easy to stick with the tools and methods that are already working. Let 2024 be the year you challenge the status quo by creating an ongoing Test & Learn plan. With this approach, you can develop a step-by-step plan that methodically iterates your content after the launch of each campaign. Instead of focusing on marketing messaging that just “works,” it’s time to develop content that drives the strongest results possible.

What would this involve? Here are some key factors to keep in mind when building your own Test & Learn plan:

Customer preferences are evolving. To keep up with them, start the year off by retesting learnings from the past. Customers may respond differently, even if the original test wasn’t that long ago. Make sure your baseline is accurate and double-check those recent results.
No idea is too unique. While it may seem risky to deploy your most creative ideas, it doesn’t have to be. Carve out a small portion of your mailable population to test your most out-of-the box ideas and analyze those results before sending them to your wider audience.
Review test performance. At a regularly scheduled cadence, review campaign performance to get the full picture of its impact. While initial readouts are important, some campaigns need a longer timespan to show their true impact on KPIs.

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Resolution #4: Spill the Loyal-Tea

Loyalty customers generate over 300% higher lifetime value than other shoppers, meaning they need to be treated like royalty by marketers. Make it a priority in 2024 to build into that loyalty and strengthen these valuable customer-brand relationships.

One of the best strategies to accomplish that is data visualization, especially as loyal customers are quicker to share data. Use it early and often, whether that be in personalized status updates, animated progress bars, dynamic points balances, or month- and year-in-reviews.

Keeping customers up-to-date on how close they are to their next reward or milestone will motivate continued conversion, as well as highlight the value they gain from your brand—that’s how the NBA really scores points with their audience.

Here, the NBA uses automated personalized banners at the top of their newsletter to celebrate fans as they acquire different badges: becoming an NBA ID member or season ticket holder, choosing a favorite team, and subscribing to their streaming service, League Pass.

Loyalty tactics like these are a double win because not only do they keep faithful customers engaged, they also serve an opportunity to win back lapsed customers through enticing rewards or benefits.

Resolution #5: Stay Mobile With Strategies

Mobile is customers’ current go-to device, and now is the time for forward-thinking marketers to make the most of the channel. The first step to success is creating a mobile-first email design. Building emails with mobile in mind has been a best practice for years. Typically, when emails are built for mobile, they render well on all devices, ensuring that every touchpoint is a perfectly crafted user experience.

From there, marketers can continue to reach their 2024 mobile goals by creating a robust app and SMS strategy that compliments their existing channels. Whether that’s ensuring a seamless journey between channels with deep-linking or generating personalized experiences using mobile app data, prioritizing customers’ convenience and ease is key.

Resolution #6: Unify CRM Strategies

Often, an effective CRM strategy is built on a foundation of trigger programs: welcome campaigns, renewal and replenishment reminders, and reactivation notifications. These programs are dependable for marketers because they are based on consumer actions, making them highly relevant and personalized.

While marketers should continue these efforts and optimize them for this year, a much-needed resolution is taking those learnings and applying them to batched email programs.In other words— remove silos from your CRM strategy and make personalization your business-as-usual. With the right AI solution, marketers can get the best of both worlds with personalized batched emails, where each traditional trigger is layered with data-driven recommendations.

Hit the Ground Running in 2024

With these marketing strategists, you’ll be ready to ace the new year. Get more inspiration from the related resources below, and prepare to drive greater results than ever in the year ahead!