5 Email Marketing Trends for 2023: What's New?

The world is changing fast. Every year, we notice new emerging trends in email marketing.

In brief, let's recap what has happened in the past few years; interactive elements, which allow people to fill out a survey or choose from poll questions within an email, have been a major trend in 2022. AI and predictive modeling are other trends that have risen in recent years and will still be dominant in 2023. Other new trends will even be evident this year. To help you carefully adapt to the changes and create a successful email marketing strategy, we’ve put together the 5 top email marketing trends in 2023.

1. More Emphasis on Actionable Metrics

Although this trend has been present since 2021, after Apple's Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) was introduced, it is becoming more applicable to companies, especially with the rise of privacy rules.

Open rate has long been considered a vanity metric that does not determine the success of your email campaigns. Email marketers need to focus on more realistic metrics, such as click-through rates, conversions, unsubscribes, spam reports, revenue, and list growth.

In 2023, companies will become even more specific in measuring their email marketing performance by using attribution models and UTM parameters. They will analyze attribution patterns to determine which factors led to conversions, such as the initial source that caused the conversion, and the series of actions taken before purchasing a product.?

For example, it could be the following analysis:

• What pushed them to subscribe to your email newsletter list in the first place? Is it a paid ad on social media, an organic social media post, Google search for a specific keyword that led them to find your website or a blog page?
• Was a specific email campaign that drove them to sign up or purchase your product/ service? Was that email the initial source that caused this conversion or was it mainly preceded by previous attribution patterns (i.e: finding a blog post from Google Search).
• Did they convert right after they read your email, or did they take a series of other actions before purchasing your product? (e.g., browsing certain pages on your website, clicking through a request-a-demo link inside your email, and speaking with your sales team).
• How long did it take to convert them after they interacted with your emails?

By examining these patterns along with actionable KPIs, companies can draw conclusions about the effectiveness of their email campaigns. UTM parameters can help break down email campaigns and identify how each one drives traffic and conversions.

2. Zero-Party Data Opening Up the Way for More Personalization

With the privacy rules that have been imposed in recent years such as GDPR, CCPA, Virginia laws, Colorado and others, as well as the death of Third-Party data where customers' information were being retrieved without their consent, companies need to be careful about the way they collect data from their customers.

Instead of acquiring customers' data in an indirect way from third-party sources such as Facebook, Google or specific data-retrieval tools, email marketers should make all their lead generation materials visible to their leads and ask if they wish to subscribe. Examples of these materials are landing pages and subscription forms or popups.?

That way, you protect yourself against potential lawsuits while you open up the way for more effective personalization. As your customers' information is being obtained based on their permission, it would become easier for you to segment them using the fresh data you have, thus, communicating with them in a more relevant way.

These practices would in turn boost your email engagement rate, minimize spam and reduce the bounce and unsubscribe rates.

In 2023, more companies are expected to go beyond using First-Party data, allowing more space for their customers to act in a proactive manner such as updating their preference centers on their own and sharing their purchase intentions, known as Zero-Party data.

The table below reveals the difference between First-Party data and Zero-Party data:

3. AI Content Generation and More Mature Machine Learning

Artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming more and more important as businesses take their marketing to a new level. In 2022, we’ve seen AI evident in several marketing channels such as content marketing, SEO, video marketing and landing page building… In addition, AI has become available in email marketing where email marketers can now save time generating email content in seconds while enhancing their personalization strategies and driving more conversions.

Several email marketing tools have started adopting AI in their technology; users only need to specify the email type they want to send their customers (welcome email, confirmation email, cancellation email, follow-up email, product-update, up-sell/cross-sell…), fill in few additional details and the email content will be automatically generated.

Machine learning has made it possible for marketing channels to process data in a more advanced way. One example of this is predictive emailing, which helps marketers determine when recipients are most likely to engage with emails based on previous patterns.?

This also applies to subject lines, which tells marketers how well their subject lines are likely to perform before sending the email and what needs to be improved to increase the score for higher open rates.

Machine learning has also taken lead scoring to a new level, transforming traditional lead scoring into predictive lead scoring. This option minimizes potential errors that can result from traditional scoring practices. It creates persona profiles based on past and current behavior and helps marketers and sales teams focus on leads that are likely to convert. Same like Zero-Party data in terms of efficiency, this advancement allows email marketers to create more effective segmentation and personalization strategies.

4. Emergence of New Design Trends

Each year, you may expect new trends in branding and design that you need to be aware of in order to identify which of these emerging trends your business must tap into.

One of the major design trends for 2023 is focusing on minimalism in design. Less is more; this concept consists of using simple text, emphasizing on white spacing, and using colors that are comfortable to the eye. Simplicity helps viewers pay attention to what you essentially want them to focus on and easily understand the content.

Another trend is overlapping elements. According to 99designs, it’s not about making letters font size bigger or bold, but also creating an artfully contrasting effect with the design of the email template.

This type of design consists of using dynamic headlines that overlap 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 as well as CTA buttons to make them look more physical VS using flat design. The purpose of using such a design is to make critical elements inside the email stand out from the rest.

Here’s another example from Really Good Emails too, revealing how the word “refill” and the CTA buttons underneath are drop shadowed:

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 battery 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. This valuable feature allows email marketers to see how their emails will look on different mobile devices before sending them officially to their clients.

The two images below illustrate this example:

5. The Increased Use of Omni-Channel Approach

As customers use several channels, why should you keep relying on one type of communication?

Reaching your audience on different channels is not a new strategy but this practice is likely to be more trending as more companies have started communicating with their customers using different types of automated messages such as emails, SMS, web push notifications and chat.

The real purpose of combining these multi-channels into an omni-channel approach is to build a solid marketing funnel that targets your leads at once and creates a successful customer experience.

For instance, if someone abandons your shopping cart page, he can be added to your audience list on Facebook to be retargeted with an ad that redirects him to your page and pushes him to complete his purchase order. If that visitor has already been a contact in one of your lists, provided his phone number or opted in to receive web push notifications from your company, you would have the ability to reach out to him with either of the automated messages or all of them. If he completes his purchase order, he will be removed from the audience list in order not to see the same ad in the future.

Aligning the messaging across multiple channels boost your sales, enhances the relationship with your customers and increases their loyalty and trust toward your brand.

Wrapping up

Email marketers should stay aware of the new trends and how to make the most out of them. It’s not about not missing any of the aforementioned trends, but making sure the basics are there. The emails you send need to be personalized and relevant to your customers. Data privacy is another concern to take into consideration so you make sure to avoid sending out any content to your customers without their permission.

It’s also critical to leverage AI and machine learning to generate content in seconds, optimize your email marketing results and devote your time on other email activities and tasks.

In addition, finding out what’s trending in design and applying what most would reflect your branding boost your customers' engagement. Make sure you keep it simple and easily readable.

Last but not least, consider communicating with customers across different channels to increase the potential of reaching them anywhere.

By applying these practices, you help boost your email engagement and maximize your ROI.

We hope these trends are useful! If you have any other trends you would think are going to be used this year, feel free to share them.