9 email marketing trends for 2023

Email marketing is an important tool to inform your customers of offers, new products, or special promotions. Technical developments and changed user behavior mean that you have to regularly adapt your strategy to stay up to date. You might already be familiar with some of these trends — a sign that they are becoming more and more important. Other methods, such as A/B testing or smartphone optimization, have become so commonplace when it comes to newsletters that they don’t need to be explained in this article.

Generally, this year’s email marketing trends are also aimed at inspiring readers and challenging them with new ideas. The biggest challenge with newsletters is providing users with useful content and original advertising messages. Data protection is a growing challenge here. That's why you need to find ways to measure success in a way that does not disrupt user privacy.

1. Accessibility
2. Omnichannel marketing
3. Automation
4. User-generated content
5. Interactive content (gamification)
6. Plain text emails
7. Artificial intelligence (AI)
8. Data protection and privacy
9. New KPIs

Your clientele is diverse, and your newsletter should reflect that. So, make sure to design emails in a way that all recipients feel addressed and can access the content. This includes people with visual impairments. Therefore, don’t get too creative with the color selection, and ensure strong contrasts. This helps both people with visual impairments and those who are color blind. Enough white space, i.e., blank spaces, visually structures the text and makes it even easier to read.

Also, assume that people with no eyesight at all are among the recipients of your newsletters. Blind people often use a screen reader. This software captures the content on the screen and then reads it aloud. So, for your newsletter content to be expressed, it must also be perceived as text. That’s why you shouldn’t exclusively place content in graphics. For HTML newsletters, use additional alt texts that put the image content into words.

For newsletters, you can follow the same tips that apply to accessible websites:

• Clear text design with plenty of whitespace
• High contrast and restrained color design
• Correct HTML formatting
• Meaningful alternative texts for images
• Clearly recognizable buttons and links

However, accessibility can also refer to the language used. Not every mail recipient can decode nested sentences and understand foreign words. If you offer a version in simple language in addition to the detailed text, you will actively be promoting inclusion.

Thanks to automation, you can get two things done at once: on the one hand, you can react much faster and more individually to each user. Depending on how your customers act online, you can prepare the right email for them and can send it in real-time. On the other hand, you save resources because automation processes mean you need less time and fewer staff members to run effective email marketing.

You can also incorporate user-generated content into your email marketing campaign by engaging your readers through a survey and collecting informative data on their shopping preferences etc. Add a call to vote into the first email and follow it up with the survey in your subsequent newsletter. You can personalize it even more by organizing challenges, for example, on social networks and then present the winners in your newsletter.

Although interactive and elaborative content is part of our list of successful email marketing trends in 2023, you might notice that a countermovement is happening at the same time: some marketers are going back to plain text emails. This is because they want to ensure that all users see the email as it’s intended to be seen. The benefits are that users don’t need to download any graphics, for example.

However, the option deprives you of plenty of design options to attract attention which means you’ll need to convince readers through the content of your texts. Write texts that intrigue readers and win them over; texts that ideally, are followed with a call-to-action. Keep it short for newsletters: large blocks of text tend to discourage readers. You can include lists to break up the typeface a bit.

The advantages of a plain text email include correct presentation. These types of newsletters are usually inexpensive and quick to produce. While graphically complex emails may require the assistance of designers and photographers, plain text emails are easy to produce. Plain text emails may stand out from the crowd and attract more attention from readers, because they look very different from more graphic ones.

Artificial intelligence is starting to spill out into areas outside of computer science. Smaller companies also now rely on artificial intelligence and machine learning. Therefore, another current email marketing trend is to integrate artificial intelligence into the creation and distribution of newsletters. This development is still in its infancy but it’s advisable to get in there and keep your eye on the ball. The focus is on optimization and making predictions.

For example, artificial intelligence can determine the best dispatch time. It is not only possible to determine the optimal time for large groups, but you can also do this for individual recipients as well. The same applies to the very important subject line: if it isn’t appealing enough, the email won’t be opened. AI can also help here, although it goes one step further. Thanks to the enormous amount of data that artificial intelligence can process, it also makes it possible to make predictions. This way the computer can determine beforehand how well a certain image in a newsletter will be received, for example.

Another email trend is competing with the possibilities of artificial intelligence and shouldn’t be ignored: data protection. This, of course, isn’t a new topic. Data protection is, was, and will continue to be an important task for marketing specialists. The large amount of personal information makes it easier to advertise on the internet (especially in combination with AI). You need to comply with the laws, however. If you fail to do this, your (future) customers will lose faith in you.

While there is no federal data protection law in the US, there are some state laws that you can consult, such as the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA). If you’re sending newsletters to customers within the UK or the European Union (EU), you’ll have to comply with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The GDPR has outlined strict rules for how companies handle personal data. Although the UK is no longer part of the EU, it’s “UK GRPR” is quite similar to the EU GDPR.

Customers must agree to their data being collected and it may only be used for purposes to which they’ve given their consent. In other words, data provided by a customer so they can buy something cannot be then used for advertising purposes. This requires additional approval. You must also ensure that this data does not fall into the hands of unauthorized people.

Furthermore, there are extensive documentation and information obligations relating to which data you store for which purposes. You must also provide the user with information about how data will be stored as well as delete all or any data at the user’s request. Another important point for many companies is the one best known as “privacy by default”: the technical setting for the collection of personal data must always be as restrictive as possible. Personal data may only be transmitted after users have given their explicit consent. For email marketing, this means that in the future you will have to handle user data even more transparently and responsibly than was required in the past.

Therefore, you should focus on the click-through rate. Although you want your newsletter to inform readers and clients (which is where open rates come in), you also want to redirect readers to your website. If users click through to your website, your newsletter has been a success. The conversion rate is another strong indicator of successful email marketing — the more newsletter recipients make a purchase, the more successful the email has been.

Throughout the year, you’ll have plenty of opportunities to make your email marketing seasonal to increase customer engagement. So that you don’t break a sweat and can plan your successful campaigns in advance, we have put together a list of a few important dates for you to consider: