Email Debrief: Marketing and Design Trends

Welcome to our new monthly blog series where I, your humble Senior Community Evangelist, recap our latest Litmus Talks and note key takeaways (and offer a few thoughts of my own) to occupy your precious brain space.

This month, I’m sharing my thoughts on email marketing and design trends submitted by email geeks for “Email Marketing Trends in Focus for 2023.” Hosted by Litmus’ Director of Email Marketing Jaina Mistry and our own email designer Hannah Tiner, this virtual event featured conversations with Anne Tomlin of Emails, Y’all from the email developer end, and Aaron Beatty of Engage Evolution to offer an email marketer point of view.

Read on (or jump ahead!):

BIMI is the newest way to visually build trust in the inbox

It could be said that email marketing is a functional exercise in building relational trust. Brand Indicators for Message Identification (BIMI), where you see a verified brand’s logo next to their email in your inbox, is about building and reinforcing trust with our subscribers. BIMI is currently supported by Apple Mail, Gmail, and Yahoo, which accounts for almost 92% of email client market share as of December 2022.

Our experts say:

• Make sure you’re using a clear and simple version of your logo. Text is unlikely to be very legible at that size, so stick with the icon portion of your logo and work with your designers to develop a version that works in that square, if you don’t have one already. 
• There is a cost to getting BIMI set up. But considering how much of deliverability these days is based on sender authentication, it seems eminently worthwhile to invest in getting it set up for your brand.

More email marketing role specialization means more value

Fighting to convey the complexity and labor of email marketing work is such a common experience across our community. Seeing the shift from email being one of many responsibilities for a marketer to the development of specialist roles feels like email finally being given its due. 

Here’s what our experts think is particularly noteworthy:

• Email developer roles are being posted every day, with remote work being the standard, all of which are positive signs.
• There’s still a supply and demand issue. Trying to find people with in-depth knowledge can be a challenge. We’ll also see email marketers asked to flex outside of email into social, SMS, and other forms of engagement.
• Being able to specialize in email as a designer allows focus on email as a discrete design medium, which makes for a higher quality of work.
• There’s a clear line from the pandemic and recession to email becoming the primary marketing channel for many companies because of its high return on investment (ROI), to those companies investing more into their email programs, to driving more innovation as a result, to the creation of more niche roles. 

Hyper-personalization is the latest iteration of an evergreen trend

We have a long-held association of personalization being the very basic use of first names—which is due for an update.

Hyper-personalization as a term is merely the way we try to describe the need for deeper connection with subscribers, beyond the first name.

Here are recommendations from our experts on how to approach hyper-personalization:

• Reframe personalization. What are the things I can talk about with our subscribers that are specific to their experience of my company?
• Collaborate between customer relationship management data teams and email teams needs to be happening much earlier in the process, because the medium affects what’s possible with personalization as much as what data we have available.
• Dynamic content has surpassed first name personalization for many companies.
• Keep the big picture in mind when organizing your data. Understand that consolidating sources of data will speed and ease the development process.

Will AI start to influence email marketing content?

In 2021, we reported that 70% of brands were increasing email marketing work, but budgets have largely stayed the same. Is that where AI comes in as a tool? 

Our experts weigh in with a range of perspectives:

• These services potentially raise everyone’s game. You can give an AI service a prompt and receive content that you can then tweak to be good enough to use.
• There’s a quality gap. AI-produced images are pixel-based, not vector, which limits their utility. 
• There are ethical concerns. Many conversations in design spaces right now focus on how AI services are trained and the replication of biases, as well as how they themselves rely on real designers’ work, raising concerns about plagiarism. 

More interactivity in emails

Interactivity generates twice as many conversions as static content, according to Demand Metric, and Dyspatch says that 50% of email recipients said they want to interact more with content inside their email. 

Here’s what our experts say about interactivity:

• Email marketers want to create a memorable experience. Interactivity—hover effects, image carousels, polls, AMP—can be seen as a key method for doing just that.
• No one has to start from scratch. There are so many examples and tutorials online, and as Alice Li has mentioned in the past, hover states are a great interactive refinement to an email that take very little time to implement.
• “Is the juice worth the squeeze?” It’s worth putting in the due diligence to figure out your subscribers’ email clients and what sorts of interactive elements are supported, and then to figure out if the addition of those elements is generating what you need from an email. 

Sentiment polls measure engagement and emotional response

It’s less tangible in some ways than clicks and opens, but a sentiment poll is a great way to know if a subscriber is enjoying the content they’re seeing. 

Our experts advise us on what to keep in mind with sentiment polls:

• Helpful for long-form newsletters where there are no click-away calls to action.
• Make it very clear what the user is expected to do. Avoid ambiguous rating scales. 
• Pick a style that fits with your visual brand, and consider where you want to place it in your content hierarchy.

Two approaches, one goal: accessibility and usability

Honestly, accessibility is less of a trend at this point and more of an expectation. At its core, it’s simply acknowledging that people experience the world in a much broader range of ways than we’ve traditionally credited. From that perspective, usability connects seamlessly with accessibility when we ask, “Usable for whom?”

Here’s what our experts say to keep in mind when it comes to accessibility and usability:

• Consider accessibility at the beginning of your content strategy rather than assessing it at the end. 
• It should be easy for subscribers to find the relevant information in even the most content-packed emails, know where to click and what that click means. 
• There are many ways to craft a cohesive experience for the reader, from breaking up content into distinct sections to creating clear calls to action, using bullet points, and writing descriptive sub-headers. 
• The more you follow accessibility best practices when coding, the more usable your email is going to be. Developing emails that work with different assistive technologies and devices people with visual, cognitive, or motor disabilities utilize is about making them usable.
• ALT text is intended for describing the look and feel of images, and is not a replacement for live text content.

Minimalism is the great connector

This style of design enables and complements several of the trends mentioned previously. 

Our experts offer these thoughts on minimalism: 

• Minimalism complements usability and accessibility practices. 
• This design approach allows content to take center stage, and can also help encourage concise copywriting and increase legibility across multiple devices by stripping away stylistic elements that may distract. 
• Depending on your brand’s visual style it may not be appropriate, as visual consistency and cohesion across your branding is quite important.

Will you embrace (or ignore) these trends?

Leaning into trends is a great way to help you stay relevant with your subscribers. Will you be embracing—or ignoring—the email design and marketing trends?

Download our latest ebook for eight email marketing and design trends you should know.