Keeping up with the latest digital marketing trends is more important than ever in a rapidly evolving technology and continuously changing customer behavior.
However, regarding AI, which dominated the scene in 2023, it is here to stay in 2024.
According to Statista, around 80% of marketers are automating at least some aspects of the customer’s experience.
52% of effective marketing organizations have increased their usage of AI, leading to a 41% boost in sales and conversions from email marketing.
Based on our extensive research and experience in AI and marketing automation, these were the emerging trends in 2023 and will continue to grow in 2024:
- AI email content generation
- SMS
- Image generation
- Predictive email sending,
- Sentiment analysis,
- Short-form videos on Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, and TikTok
- Live commerce
- Marketing in the Metaverse
- Zero-party data
However, AI has expanded to other initiatives and trends that will be critical in the next year and will be covered later in this article.
In parallel, there is an emergence of new trends in email design, a revival of no-audio content, multilingual marketing, updates in privacy to reflect the increased use of AI tools, and other trends that will be discussed.
Top 7 Digital Marketing Trends for 2024
- Email Design
- AI-Powered Functionalities
- TikTok Shoppable Ads
- Interactive and Dynamic Ads
- Revival of No-Visual Audio Content
- Multilingual Marketing
- Privacy and Ethical Marketing
1. Email Design
- Minimalism
- Overlapping elements
- Dark mode
Each year, you may expect new trends in branding and design that you need to be aware of to identify which of these emerging trends your business must tap into. Let’s look at a few of these for 2024.
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Minimalism
Less is more; this concept consists of using simple text, emphasizing white spacing, and using colors that are comfortable to the eye.
Simplicity helps viewers focus on what you want them to focus on and easily understand the content.
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Overlapping elements
According to 99designs, it’s not only about making letters' font size bigger or bold but also about creating an artfully contrasting effect with the design of the email template.
This type of design uses dynamic headlines overlapping with other elements like images, colors, and texts.
The email template below illustrates this well:
Colorful and patterned drop shadows are also other design trends that are applied to headlines and CTA buttons to make them look more physical versus using flat design.
Such a design aims to make critical elements inside the email stand out.
Here’s another example from Really Good Emails, too, revealing how the word “refill” and the CTA buttons underneath are drop-shadowed:
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Dark mode
According to EarthWeb, around 82% of smartphone users prefer dark mode.
Dark mode is highly desirable as it is more comfortable on the eyes and ensures a minimum brightness that saves the battery’s life.
Furthermore, emails that render well in dark mode can improve a sender's reputation and reduce the likelihood of their emails ending up in recipients' spam folders.
It's critical to note that several email marketing tools have started adding dark mode testing for their customers within their inbox preview sections.
The two images below illustrate this example:
This valuable feature allows email marketers to see how their emails will look on different mobile devices before sending them officially to their clients.
2. AI-Powered Functionalities
- AI-powered chat support and marketing assistant
- AI-generated visuals for website/app design
- AI video generation
- AI-powered design solutions
- AI automation and plugins
AI dominated the scene in 2023, and it’s not going anywhere in 2024.
By 2025, it’s expected that 97 million people will work in the AI space.
As mentioned, AI content generation for email marketing and social media was trending in 2023.
Still, we’ve seen a remarkable expansion of AI to other initiatives and functionalities.
Some examples include AI-powered chat support and marketing assistant, AI-generated visuals for website/app design, AI video generation, AI-powered design studios, AI automation, and plugins.
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AI-powered chat support and marketing assistant
Customer support is an essential component of any successful marketing campaign.
AI-powered chat support provides personalized answers to customer questions all the time, which leads to improved customer experience and saves time for your team to focus on other productive tasks.
By offering prompt and accurate support, AI chatbots can help you build trust with your audience and drive customer loyalty.
Here’s an example of how VBOUT, an AI-powered platform, provided AI-driven chat support to answer customer questions in seconds.
Moreover, the integration of ChatGPT with marketing automation platforms allows businesses to streamline their processes and deliver more personalized experiences.
To create a more efficient interaction and faster implementation of online marketing tasks, AI-powered marketing tools enable their customers to take advantage of natural language commands and perform a variety of functions such as:
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- Manage contacts effectively: Users can manage their contacts in a simpler way by asking the bot to add a specific contact to a particular list, retrieve a subscriber from a list, assign a contact a tag, remove a tag, create, edit, delete lists, and much more.
- Create personalized email campaigns: With the ability to create campaigns in seconds using natural language commands, marketers can create and launch campaigns easily. This level of personalization and automation helps optimize marketing strategies, ensuring that the right message reaches the right audience.
- Craft social media posts: Social media marketers can leverage AI marketing assistants to create, schedule, edit, or delete a social media post that’s supposed to go out on a selected channel.
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AI-generated visuals for website/app design
AI image generator tools help UX designers produce visuals seamlessly, speeding up the design process.
Platforms like OpenAI’s DALL-E 3 and Midjourney generate images from textual descriptions, allowing designers to directly transform sketched or wireframed designs into functional code and obtain instant prototype visuals.
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AI video generation
Video marketers are switching to AI video generation to save time and reduce the cost needed for expensive materials.
AI-powered video tools allow users to create text, audio, and visuals, reducing the necessity for human intervention.
For example, platforms like Synthesia provide over 140 AI avatars, voices in more than 120 languages and accents, and a selection of 60+ ready-made video template designs for demos, tutorials, and personalized pitches.
Furthermore, video generation via AI is not limited to texts.
Still, it extends to further options such as obtaining a video from images or clips, erasing elements, adding slow-motion effects, animation, and background removal features.
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AI-powered design studios
Like videos, blog posts and social media posts, you can now generate logos, banners, mockups, and marketing collaterals.
It saves graphic designers and digital marketers time while allowing them to generate the required visuals based on their requirements and specifications.
For instance, Adobe Firefly is a powerful generative AI tool that enables you to generate images, add or remove objects, transform text, and much more, with simple text prompts in more than 100 languages.
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AI automation and plugins
AI plugins in Chrome are going to surge in 2024. HARPA.ai enables browser-based command execution.
It provides search results, summaries of content and videos, PDFs, blog post generation, social media posts, languages translation, and more.
As for native plugins in ChatGPT, they provide marketing automation professionals with integrated tools to enhance their marketing strategies through conversational AI interfaces.
It is what many marketing automation platforms make available.
AI orchestration tools are another trend in 2024, which allows you to build workflow automation in minutes by specifying all required details and conditions for setting up all needed triggers and actions.
For instance, ask the model to create an automation for cart abandoners who might leave without completing their purchase order.
Send them an email after 10 minutes from abandonment to incentivize them to go back and complete their transaction.
3. TikTok Shoppable Ads
After Facebook and Instagram introduced the shoppable ads option in the last two years, TikTok has also made this feature available on their channel.
TikTok shop is expected to be trending in 2024, allowing e-commerce brands to engage with their customers and enhance their shopping experience by allowing them to make purchases right from the app without abandoning it.
According to eMarketer, the number of US users who make purchases on TikTok is expected to increase from 27.3% in 2022 to 38.6% in 2024.
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Three types of TikTok shoppable ads
1. Video shopping ads: Customers see shoppable in-feed videos on their For You pages.
Customers can search for products on the TikTok shop by clicking the product’s anchor link or card and then purchase them in your shop.
2. Catalog listing ads: To launch catalog listing ads, you must integrate your product catalog with your TikTok account.
Such ads dependTok’s algorithm to show your product photos to customers from your brand’s catalog based on the kind of content they use.
Customers explore your items inside the videos on their ForYou page and can click them to reach your landing page, which shows your product catalogs.
Then, when selecting a specific product within the products catalog section, they are redirected to the product’s detail page for a simple checkout.
3. LIVE shopping ads: LIVE shopping ads help customers find and watch your live videos, browse your products, and purchase them. This ad allows you to boost your TikTok and drive prospective buyers to buy from your site.
4. Interactive and Dynamic Ads
We’ve noticed, in recent years, the rise of interactive elements to elevate your email campaign engagement.
Besides email marketing, this trend will be emerging in the advertising space for 2024.
Interactive elements focus on user engagement and establish better connections through polls, quizzes, games, and animations.
Here’s an example of how Dunkin’ Donuts revealed its interactive ads using the polling sticker feature on Instagram.
Interactive ads not only help story ads stand out, but they can create more influence over campaigns by enticing people to watch longer.
In 9 out of 10 beta campaigns, the polling sticker increased 3-second video views.
Back to Dunkin’s, which was part of the beta launch, the brand has noticed significant results by reporting a 20% lower Cost Per Video view (CPV).
Another trend in advertising is dynamic creative, which use customer data to tailor design elements, such as colors and fonts, to capture the target audience’s interest and elevate marketing conversion rates.
Here’s an example showing how Guitar Center designed an appealing ad to grab their customers' attention:
5. Revival of No-Visual Audio Content
After the dominance of visual content in recent years, 2024 marks a revival in audio-only formats.
Sound-only content such as podcasts or audiobooks provide immersive storytelling with realistic soundscapes and expressive voice work.
Podcasts can engage your audience by building a rich and imaginative world through audio.
The advantage of the audio compared to other content formats like blog posts, videos, or infographics, is its capability to engage listeners while performing other activities such as working or exercising.
Producing engaging and informative podcasts enables businesses to position themselves as thought leaders, create trust with their audience, and boost their customers’ loyalty and revenue.
For instance, let’s take Audible, an audiobook and podcast platform owned by Amazon.
This tool provides an extensive library of audiobooks, original podcasts, and other audio content.
Their marketing strategy involves promoting their content via targeted advertising, cooperation with celebrities, and exclusive releases.
Audible has made itself a leading tool for audio entertainment and education by emphasizing audio.
Besides podcasts and audiobooks, other forms of audio content, like audio ads and branded audio experiences are earning traction in the marketing era.
As voice assistants like Siri, Amazon Alexa, and Google Assistant rise, brands have discovered advanced methods to create audio content that engages customers more interactively.
6. Multilingual Marketing as a digital marketing trend for 2024
In a global marketplace, marketing content in multiple languages is essential to connect with diverse audiences.
The marketing content and materials that can be translated into different languages are websites, blog pages, social media posts, advertisements, and apps.
Multilingual marketing gives businesses a competitive advantage, expands their reach, increases brand recognition, drives customer growth, and boosts sales.
In addition, multilingual marketing leads to improved SEO and enhanced online visibility internationally.
They can help improve your website ranking in search results across different languages and regions. It leads to boosting your site’s organic traffic.
AI translation tools now make it easier and faster for marketers to convert their content into several languages.
However, this minimizes the reliance on a professional translator to a certain extent, there might be limitations in handling specific languages, dialects, and context-specific nuances.
Therefore, translators are better able to provide more accurate translations, particularly for creative content, legal documents, and technical materials.
7. Privacy and Ethical Marketing
Privacy and ethical marketing are not going anywhere in 2024.
After the death of third-party cookies in 2021, brands providing forms, landing pages, popups, email communication preference centers, and interactive surveys are prioritizing transparency in data practices, particularly with the growth of AI.
Google’s postponement of Bard illustrates this trend, following the Ireland Data Protection Commission’s insistence on clarity about the protection of EU citizens’ privacy rights.
Such regulatory interventions emphasize the importance of ensuring privacy in implementing new technologies.
Furthermore, President Biden takes formal action toward AI leadership in U.S., emphasizing the importance of safety, equity, consumer protection, workforce support, innovation, and international collaboration.
This executive order includes measures such as incorporating AI safety standards, preserving privacy, eliminating discrimination, encouraging innovation, and improving the government’s use of AI.
Read more about digital marketing for startups.
Wrapping Up
Digital marketers should be aware of the advancements in AI across various initiatives.
Whether it is for conversational bots, or content generation for different materials like content, images, and videos, and find out how to incorporate this dominant technology into their businesses for growth.
The new trends of design in email marketing are essential to take into consideration to keep engaging your audience with new and exciting stuff and keep them from getting bored with the same design concept.
Advertisers must always stay updated with the new trends and use attention-grabbing ads that drive engagement and conversions.
Interactive elements in ads like polling stickers feature on Instagram is one of the techniques to encourage your audience to interact with your ads.
Multilingual marketing, where your content and materials are translated into different international languages to suit your diverse target audience, improves your SEO, increases your brand’s exposure, and drives more traffic to your site.
Last but not least, be constantly aware of privacy and seek to protect your customers’ information, giving them the right to access their data anytime they ask for it.
If you’re using AI, make sure that the tool respects privacy rights and doesn’t break any rules, as this would make you vulnerable to penalties and lawsuits.
We hope these trends are helpful for your business. Consider implementing the strategies you find suitable for your marketing strategy today to gain a competitive edge.
About the author
Georges Fallah is the marketing manager of VBOUT, an AI-powered marketing platform. He has 10+ years of experience in marketing automation, social media management, content marketing, SEO, and analytics.
