Email is essential in business – especially if you want to sell something. But, like all technology, email is constantly evolving. Stay on top of your email marketing game with these latest email trends for 2020.
Content Trends
An article on Email Monday has listed several notable email content trends for the new year. Our favourites include:
User-Generated Content
Engagement goes both ways – especially on channels like social media. And a lot of companies are using the brand-supporting image, video, text, or audio content their users generate in email. Content like this is especially effective in marketing, as it demonstrates how others love and enjoy your brand – boosting your social proof.
Accessible Content
More and more smart devices, speakers, and assistants are making their way into people’s hands and homes. Not to mention those of a whole audience of people who are visually impaired. And email marketing is catching up.
To make emails more accessible for these people and on these devices, companies are creating emails that are easier to read with the eye and by text-to-speech speakers. Ways in which you can make your emails more accessible include:
- Shorten the email content
- Use real text HTML instead of text in images
- Be aware of text alignment
- Avoid long sections of justified text
- Use bigger font sizes and line spacing
- Use alt text for images, were appropriate
- Make sure HTML tables are accessible to screen readers
- Use semantic HTML
Email Automation
We’ve said it before. Enterprise email automation is a game-changer. By including things like email list segmentation and smart database management in your email strategy, you can ramp up, amplify, and simplify the creation of sophisticated email automation workflows; tools that take readers on personalised and relevant email journeys.
This doesn’t just amplify your messaging, but it gets the most out of every email you send, squeezing more and more ROI out of your email budget.
Keep Thinking Mobile
This isn’t new, but for some reason people are still creating emails that need to be pinch-zoomed and scrolled from side to side to read. This is way behind and ineffective – especially considering that about a quarter of all emails are read on mobile phones and that screen-responsive email tools (like Everlytic) are available to businesses of all sizes.
But even if your emails are mobile-responsive, there are still more email composition tips that can help you simplify the experience even more, so emails are easier to consume on mobile. This includes:
- Keeping the content concise
- Using CTAs and buttons early on
- Watching your image sizes
- Testing your email view in all email clients
Data-Driven Marketing
A/B testing is a highly effective way to gather data on what works and what doesn’t for your audience. It allows you to send two versions of an email to two randomised samples of your mailing list to see which one gets more clicks or opens. This kind of information can help you create emails that are proven to work best for your audience.
Design Trends
Email design has a major impact on email engagement. This can have a ripple effect on things like email delivery, click-through rate, and, ultimately, your ROI. According to Litmus, these are some of the top email design trends for 2020:
- More image depth with 3D imagery
- Isometric illustrations
- Futuristic design and imagery
- Retro styles
- Organic shapes
- Abstract imagery, typography, and layouts
- Bringing animation to the next level
- Textured illustration
- Negative space
- Dark designs
