Jordie van Rijn: What advanced email marketers need to know in 2024

Email marketers are constantly looking for ways to improve email marketing results — through strategy, new tools, tips, and new approaches. In addition, they follow the trends that change the industry every year, and 2024 will be no exception.

We invited one of the leading voices in email and eCRM marketing for an interview. Jordie van Rijn has over 13 years of practical experience as an independent email marketing consultant and founder of Email Vendor Selection, helping companies improve their email marketing results and providing email marketing training and speaking engagements in online marketing.

Interview Expert

Jordie van Rijn

The independent email marketing consultant

The most common mistakes in email marketing strategies

Stripo: As a consultant, you do email marketing strategy audits for your clients. What are the most common mistakes you've seen companies make?

Jordie: You don't choose email marketing. It chooses you. This means a lot of people wind up in an email marketing job without a real education for it. So solid feedback, talking with an expert, and just going through their program will unlock a LOT of unused opportunities and tweaks. I also give training, and most often, it will be, “Ahhhh, I never really thought of that.”

Companies tend to leave a lot of email marketing opportunities unused. I have seen these often apply:

1. Make your email channel a business model

This may sound a bit strange, but every email marketing program should have a “business model.” Even if it is there only to inform current clients or promote content, there should be a reason for being. Thinking of your goals as a business model makes it easier to spot where the opportunities are.

Getting very, extremely, amazingly, brilliantly, and microscopically specific on what you want out of it makes it much easier to define the steps to take. And without fail, once that first moment of truth (FMOT) comes around, more shoppers will buy. It leads to a higher degree of success. Making stretch goals out of your goals also encourages people to think bigger and not stop once they have hit a goal.

2. List health and growth is too easily ignored

Remember, +10% new subscribers will lead to more than +10% extra results, as new subscribers are always more engaged.

So focus on list growth and use email validation tools to check your list subscribers are verified and emails deliverable. A subscriber with a complete profile, and all preferences set, is even more valuable. Because there are more specifics to target and segment, so gathering additional data points will turn into valuable profiles. They call it enrichment for a reason. There are always things that make a huge difference, but you haven't thought about. Like adding a step in your purchase or sign-up flow where normally your thank you for signing up page is.

3. Double down on triggered triumphs

Instead of covering all the bases, even when starting out, it is often a better idea to double, or even triple, down on the emails with the most potential. Even if they are already performing well. The same goes for audience segments. It is a form of prioritization and knowing that there is way more to be gained.

So, for instance, you'll see an OK welcome email that could have been great — and there are a lot of improvements in just that one email and welcome process to skyrocket it and gain +300% or even more.

Three aspects of teamwork that affect the productivity of teams

S: In your consulting activities, which aim to improve clients' email marketing, do you sometimes need help to improve teamwork and flow? What three aspects of teamwork are most often weak and affect the productivity of teams as a whole?

J: Oh yes, teamwork makes the dream work. So important, your TEAM has a major effect on job satisfaction and culture. Employee engagement statistics say that 50% of employees consider meetings mostly wasted time — so start reducing meetings wherever you can!

There are a couple of things to think of that can easily improve your flow and fun on the job.

1. Keep the team tight and limit the feedback both in rounds and with people who can check and give feedback. There is a lot of time wasted on small updates and changes that are just more about personal preferences.
2. Properly working with project management tools will already help A LOT. We have one separate channel that is for quick chats (like Slack, Skype, and MS Teams chat).
3. Learn how to explain, give, and receive feedback clearly.
4. Craft standard operating procedures that will make all the difference. And it lays the groundwork for further process improvement and automation later on.
5. As much as possible, let the marketers have all the access to the tools to do what they need to do. For instance, to make their own audience selections, import their HTML into tools, etc.

How to choose email marketing software

S: As the founder of Email Vendor Selection, you help with software selections and review tools for email marketers. What difficulties do you think email marketers face when choosing or using tools, and what advice would you give them?

J: Nobody wakes up in the morning, jumps out of bed, and starts singing the “I'm so happy, gonna do an RFP!”-song. It is more like this below.

(Source: Emailvendorselection)

Just kidding, of course.

I think I may be the only one that does get enthusiastic about guiding software selections. You do need a proven process to make it all run smoothly.

There are 1000 ways to screw up a selection. Most marketers don't have a lot of experience in software selection processes, so these brands don't really know what they don't know.

On the surface, it may seem easy until you are in the thick of it. If you have the budget and email is a sizable part of your business, get some help from someone who has run selections before.

Here are some rules of thumb:

1. Spend time looking at your AS-IS (now) and TO-BE (in 18–24 months) operations. Having a strategy first makes it easier to zero in on the functionality you need. A great selection leads to a better implementation because you are preparing all these things you will need later on.
2. Make a list of detailed requirements. The devil is in the details. Score those into must have, should have, would like to, not needed. If a requirement is something that nobody has ever heard of, it isn't a requirement. Not everybody who gives input for requirements knows if it makes sense.
3. Narrow down the contestants. From a long list, pick 3 to max 6 solutions to look at more closely. More is just a waste of time, your selection shortlist should already be good picks. Obviously, it helps that you have someone in the selection team that knows the market.

   

   (Source: Emailvendorselection)

4. Use real campaigns, triggers, and data to test drive solutions. It will reveal a lot more of the practical stumbling blocks than a “pre-prepared demo.”
5. No software will be perfect. All software has some things that won't be ideal. Manage expectations and manage time.

Email marketing trends in 2024

S: What email marketing trends do you think will rule in 2024?

J: Zooming out a bit, it seems like there is some stormy weather ahead in Marketing Land. And a lot tougher to reach your audience in the coming years. I put together a blog with all email marketing trends each year. It feels like 2024 is a pivotal year for marketing.

Smart marketers will think of what to do in bad weather scenarios, and I think email marketing is a key part of that. Some trends to keep an eye on:

1. Social platforms will become less and less effective as they get more crowded. Or just overflowing with AI-generated nonsense. So if you want or need to shift focus, get ready to use email and re-build your audience on other social platforms.
2. E-commerce purchase habits of customers and B2B are bound to change — something to keep a close eye on in your market. How will they find you, and how can you keep that relationship going? Double the impact if you sell digital products and downloads.
3. Generative AI will bring amazing things and efficiency. Side effects are still up for debate. But what we know for sure is that SEO and SEO-centric content marketing will become harder. A different way to promote your content is needed.

Even one of these changes can be a big shift in your marketing. Things are changing. There are a few books for starting businesses you should read this year. “Atomic Habits” is a good book, but it is more like the book “Who Moved My Cheese?”

(Source: Emailmonday)

Luckily email, and this is where you’ll see it shine in 2024 and beyond… email can be the glue between channels:

• (re-)build audiences in multiple channels;
• nurture relationships with your current customers;
• promote products/services directly and activate audiences.

S: In which direction will email marketing personalization move? How do you see it soon? Tell us about your concept of Generative Personalization.

J: This is very interesting. I bet that email platforms will have Generative AI embedded to help you write and create your emails. To suggest subject lines, write a text blurb based on your blog article URL, and give text improvement suggestions.

Tools like ChatGPT and other LLMs can do this already, but they will live inside your trusty email marketing tools. The other part of your personalization is that the emails feel personal and authentic (and you don't really need data to do that, per se).

I see it more as a marketing personalization umbrella that has different tactics you can use, personalization isn't one thing. It is a combination of tactics that leads to tailored content.

(Source: Emailmonday)

A new concept I coined is Generative Personalization with AI. The dream of a unique email for each and every recipient may just come true. This means that we can move the data and preferences one step earlier, using them BEFORE we create the emails and offers instead of applying them AFTER.

You can see it happening now. Think about the advances in machine translation. International campaigns are now much easier to create and more cost-effective. We made an overview of AI writing tools, but expect many of these functionalities to become embedded into email and other SaaS tools — they will end up where they make the most sense workflow-wise. We saw the start of custom GPTs, so where exactly the tools will end up in the data ecosystem is still to be decided.

But we can expect to have a few more bumps in the road and different AI tools replacing each other. So it may be time to see our organization in flux.

(Source: Emailmonday)

S: What do you think email design will look like in 2024? Which trends will gain popularity, and which, on the contrary, will lose? Why so?

J: In design, I have been seeing a lot of big hero images in B2C emails lately. They are becoming spectacular, aided by the ease of new features in image editing tools and Generative AI. You can place them at the top of your emails to grab attention. There is no real excuse not to have fitting contextual images now.

In content, and especially thought leadership/consultancy or expert content. We could see a sea of more personality, person-driven, value-giving, minimalist emails in B2B. It is one of the ways to make it unique in a world of bore-speak, copy-and-paste, where your basic content can be replaced in an AI second.

Wrapping up

Here are some insights and best practices we will definitely apply after this interview:

• every email marketing program must have a “business model”;
• to improve teamwork, reduce the number of meetings, and pay attention to communication tools, project management, automation, and specialized software for email marketing;
• when choosing tools for work, take into account your email marketing strategy, limit the number of tools, and choose the optimal ones for your tasks — ideal ones most likely do not exist;
• in 2024, pay attention to updating your subscriber lists, selling through email campaigns, using Generative AI, and promoting content.

We are grateful to Jordie van Rijn for the interview, where we discussed important topics for the email marketing industry.

Trends and insights 

Email marketing trends for 2024