The 80s is often referred to as the greatest decade of all time. Well, rightly so, just look at the fashion that ruled that era. From padded blazers to neon leg warmers to chunky jewelry, the 80s was iconic.
But if I dress to these trends and attend a party in the current day, aka 2023, I’d look like a struggling backstage dancer in a Whitney Houston music video. In other words, I’d look like a misfit.
It’s important to stay up to date with current trends, or else you’re at risk of missing out. This is the case with email marketing as well.
If you follow the trends and best practices of the early 2000s, you can bid farewell to high conversions and revenue. Luckily for you, we’ve mentioned the latest email marketing trends that you must follow in 2023 for successful campaigns.
9 Email Marketing Trends to Follow in 2023
If you ask us, there’s a lot of marketing flim-flam dominating the search engines. For you, we’ve separated the hits from the misses and came up with a comprehensive list of the 9 email marketing trends you shouldn’t ignore.
1. Creating hyper-personalized emails
Personalized emails are a part of the past. In 2023, only hyper-personalized emails will bring in conversions.
71% of subscribers will decide whether to engage with an email depending upon the level of personalization offered. Hence, you must move way ahead from including your prospect’s first name in subject lines.
Hyper-personalized emails take data from multiple customer touchpoints and use them to offer highly personalized experiences. Examples include sending emails with product recommendations based on past purchases, monthly/yearly usage reports, and tailored offers based on behavior.
The best example we can give you is of Spotify Wrapped. Each year the audio streaming company highlights each user’s listening patterns and shares them across multiple channels. The following email includes figures unique to the subscriber receiving it.
2. Focusing on email automation
If you’re still not on the email automation bandwagon, then you’re greatly missing out on high audience engagement.
The thing is that your prospects are spread out across the globe, and no matter how hard you try, you can’t manually reach them at the time when they’re ready to convert. This is why you should rely on email automation tool to do the job for you. It will help you facilitate marketers by creating if and when scenarios to send behavior and action-triggered messages.
Popularly known as triggered or drip emails, a sequence is developed on the basis of which the right messages are sent to the right people at the right time. We suggest integrating micro-segmentation when creating these workflows to provide extremely personalized experiences.
3. Making email designs engaging
The design of your email determines the overall fate of your campaign. Let us make this super clear; poor email design = poor conversions.
It’s 2023, your emails must look like mini-websites, or else your email will get lost in your subscribers’ massive inbox clutter. While there are many email design trends of this year, the most important one is what works for your customers. Our tip? Test a bunch of designs, see what works, and then stick with it.
Email design doesn’t have to be complicated. Just make sure the overall color palette marries well, the copy is concise yet effective, the email graphics are interactive, and the final email isn’t heavy in size.
According to Litmus, 76% of brands use email templates to design their emails. That’s because they’re easy to modify and can be designed quickly. At Unlayer, we have a library of 1,000+ email templates that are grouped for different usages, industries, and holidays. No lack of inspiration here!
4. Leveraging AI in your strategy
We’re living in a time where Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) are all the rage. AI in email marketing is one of the hottest trends in 2023. Why so? Because it can lead to successful email campaigns without committing lots of time and resources.
AI in email marketing can be used to:
Write subject lines and email copy
Predict the best time to send emails
Offer personalized experiences
Clean email lists
5. Including user-generated content
Customers of 2023 are smart people. They can easily tell when brands are making too big of a claim. The best way to market your message and convince your readers to take action is by including user-generated content in emails.
As the name suggests, it is any content type created by users and shared by brands. User-generated content can take multiple forms, including social media posts, reviews, case studies, surveys, blog posts, and webinars.
You better jump on this bandwagon in 2023 since 83% of people trust reviews more than advertising.
6. Using responsive email templates
When was the last time you opened your laptop just to read one specific email? You could simply view it on your mobile phone instead.
Consumers are busy people and hence, look for solutions that make their lives easier. Mobile phones are convenient and portable, which is why 81% of people choose to read emails on their smartphones.
However, making responsive emails is no easy task. You need to design for rendering across multiple email clients, limit vertical scroll, and make call to action buttons large enough to be clicked on.
One resolution we’re making in 2023 is to work smarter, not harder. If you’re in the same boat, then you should design emails with the help of responsive email templates like we have at Unlayer.
Responsive email templates can boost your click-through rate by up to 15%. How about trying our collection of 1,000+ responsive email templates?
7. Making your strategy agile
If you’ve watched the season Friends, you must remember the iconic pivot episode. Like Ross and co., we suggest you pivot your email marketing strategy in 2023. In other words, create an agile strategy.
In such a strategy, you adopt a trial and error method. If something works, you continue with it. If it doesn’t, you pivot. You might think an agile strategy is unnecessary, but honestly, it makes all the difference when you’re evaluating your performance at the end of the year and wished you made timely changes.
Our top tip is to never lose sight of your outcomes while making adjustments in outputs when needed. The outcome is what you hope to achieve, while outputs are the actions/items needed to realize them. Let’s explain this through an example.
Your outcome is to achieve a 5% higher click-through rate in 2023. For that, you’ve adopted the output of gamifying your emails. Once you’ve made a series of campaigns live, you can test their results by leveraging different email marketing metrics. If the results are positive, you’re good to go. If not, you need to tweak this output or try a new one altogether.
8. Saying goodbye to open rates
Open rates aren’t as important as they used to be. Actually, you shouldn’t care about them at all. After Apple’s new privacy settings, companies are unable to track the information that they were previously able to do.
In the past, whenever a subscriber opened an email, tracking pixels would also load. The latter contributed to the high or low open rate we’re all used to measuring. With this new update, Apple preloads all emails, and naturally, the tracking pixels preload as well. This means an email will appear opened even if the recipient didn’t open the same email.
Apart from not knowing when people open emails, Apple limits brands from getting to know where their audience opens emails and what device they use to open them on.
You should care for this privacy update since the iPhone is the most popular device for reading emails. Companies like you should now focus on other metrics, like conversion rates and revenue per email, to track the performance of email campaigns.
9. Maximizing accessibility in emails
Around 15% of the world population experiences some degree of disability. If your emails are not optimized for them, you’re greatly missing out on solid customer relationships and high conversions. In 2023, your top priority should be to make emails accessible for all.
Accessibility in emails can be increased by:
Adding alternative text for graphics in emails so that screen readers can read them
Keeping the flashing rate of animations between 2 Hz and 55 Hz to avoid seizures
Ensuring the font size is not less than 14px, and the font style is legible
Featuring a color contrast ratio of at least 4.5:1 for people with visual impairments
Avoiding center-aligned text as it is difficult to read for people with dyslexia
Wrapping Up
Successful email campaigns are now a reality in 2023 by following these email marketing trends. Just remember that the most important trend for you is the one that is loved by your audience.
