10 Email Marketing Design Trends You Need to Know

Email is the heart of the digital ecosystem and an essential element of successful marketing campaigns. Both cost-effective and quick to produce and deploy, email marketing helps brands build relationships as well as acquire new customers. Email provides timely results and detailed metrics. And best of all for those marketers interested in implementing multi-channel campaigns, email plays well with other channels for integrating strategies.

Here are 10 email marketing design trends you can implement this year to get more results:

  1. List Segmentation and Dynamic Content – Brands should use transactional and demographic data to their advantage in order to send the most relevant email content. Examples include suggested accessories to match recent purchases or information about earned reward points.
  2. Mailable Microsites – Linking to your website can be problematic in emails, but many brands are now creating mailable microsites complete with a menu bar that can link to other relevant content such as store locations, rewards, additional products or reservations.
  3. Contextual Emails that Show Progress – Tracking advancement towards achieving a goal is an important communication with your customers. Fitness apps are great at measuring your goal progress toward achieving those New Year’s resolutions and reap high open rates for email communication.
  4. Text Only Emails – As inboxes become fuller and email communications vie for attention, a text-only email is now a way for brands to stand out. These emails are likely to be read and can be highly personalized for effectiveness.
  5. Use of Popular Phrases in Subject Lines and Hero Images – Brands are getting creative in order to garner attention and ultimately get emails opened! Clever subject lines complete with hashtags and slang words compete for a reader’s attention. We’ll be seeing more of phrases like “Sorry Not Sorry”, #Bae, and #FOMO.
  6. Integrating Social Media – Email integrates well with other digital channels like social media. Emails can link to special offers, images or personalized content on integrated social channels like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram to engage email recipients and motivate additional interactions.
  7. Unique Typographies/Highlighting Key Phrases – Capturing attention is key to the success of your email marketing. The use of distinctive typefaces that highlight key phrases will become the norm for creative email design.
  8. Interactive Elements – Adding interactive elements to your email design can be as simple as inserting a one question quiz into your email. As more and more email clients support interactive design elements in the Inbox, brands will see that interactivity boosts click-through rates drastically. New ways to breathe life into your emails include rotational banners and counters.
  9. Mobile Menu Optimization – A whopping 55% of emails are opened on mobile devices, so brands will want to ensure that their email menus are mobile optimized. Emails with menu functionality at the top that leads to a mobile-friendly website with plenty of navigation options are resulting in increased spend.
  10. Mobile-Friendly Subscription Forms – It makes sense if the purpose of your email is to garner subscriptions, you’ll want to make sure you have a mobile-friendly subscription form built into the email itself.

If you need help implementing any of these email marketing design trends, turn to the experts at AccuData Integrated Marketing. Visit our Email Design Checklist for more email marketing resources!

Written by AccuData Integrated Marketing