30+ Email Marketing Trends Reveals by Email Experts

Indeed, there are things in email marketing that are not going to change, but there is a lot you need to update yourself as a marketer.

Whether you run a small business or yourself a marketer for a brand, you need to look forward to what email marketing trends will take off this year.

Leveraging email marketing trends and strategizing accordingly gives you a competitive edge against other brands in the market.

The best you can do to win this leverage game before you get into email marketing strategy and planning for 2022 is to ride on the trends.

And who can be better than getting these predictions and trends right from the horse’s mouth, i.e., experts in the industries?

These experts come from an authority position in the market and have seen all that there is to, hence capable of understanding the market, not now but also in the future.

So, without getting further ado, here are the leading marketing trends coming right from email marketing experts.

Contents

Redek Kaczynski (CEO, Bouncer)

According to the CEO of the company Bouncer Redek Kaczynski, 2022 will continue adapting to the changes that started in this decade.

The world will witness a more holistic approach when it comes to email marketing. He further breaks down :

The functionalities of the marketing will be consolidated with the martech solutions.
It will be only to create a seamless user experience saving people’s time and energy and also improving their focus.
A solid example of this could be the marketing automation solution which will integrate with email verification API making verification functionalities more intact.
The technology will continue providing the business with a better image of their customer and how to build relationships with them.
This means there will be better technological methods and techniques to capture customers’ data, their inputs, needs, preferences, and interests.
The means for retrieving data from customers will improve but without compromising their privacy, so there will be better options for people to manage & control their information which companies get to know about them.
There also will be more options in terms of censoring or managing information like ‘hide my email, location or other aspects’ by people.
Read also shares that there will be better availability of the tools that help build more real human-to-human relationships.

Kaleigh Moore (Freelance Writer For SaaS Products & Ecommerce Websites)

Kaleigh Moore, an eCommerce writer, suggests that personalization, storytelling, personality, and plain-text emails are going to be the trends of 2022 and beyond.

As per her, long gone were those days when promotional emails were a thing. You always have new product launches and sales emails to send, but it is not going to work.

The consumer today wants to know more about the behind-the-scenes of your product. They want to know the face of the brand, the personality, and the story.

As per her, a personal brand is going to be a big thing for brands to grow.

When she was asked what email marketing trend will take off in 2022, she added that plain text is going to be important in the upcoming year.

Jenna Tiffany ( Founder & Strategy Director, Let’s Talk Strategy)

Privacy, as always, has been a CenterPoint consideration for all kinds of marketing, a concern, and even a challenge from both ends.

The founder & strategy director of Let’s Talk Strategy, Jenna Tiffany, highlights how 2022 is going to be an important year for the role of privacy in email marketing.

Starting from the last few years, consumers have been getting more and more aware of their rights to privacy.

Since people become more conscious about the data and information they share with a company or involving in brands’ marketing practices, they expect brands to take a clear position on this.

So, for brands, the significance of communicating the importance and value of new subscribers and demonstrating that to them will be of utmost priority.

The second thing is how the positioning of the brands to show the benefits of subscribing will be as critical as ever, if not more already.

So, it will be challenging for brands to come up with a value proposition for visitors to turn into subscribers.

Brands need to clear their positioning and define exactly the value they offer people to subscribe to them.

So businesses need to strongly ask questions to them like :

What will subscribers receive if they subscribe to your email list?
How will it add value to them?
What value are you providing to them right now for sharing their email address with you?

Brands will have to put customers or subscribers into the center of their email marketing strategy, and then only they are going to stand the test of time in marketing.

Chad S. White (Head of Research, Oracle Marketing)

When the head of the research from Oracle Marketing, Chad, was asked about what email marketing trend will be taking off in 2022, here’s how he responded.

He shares that omnichannel visibility and attribution will be the prime focus, especially for larger brands.

This is also due to how Mail Privacy Protection from Apple impairs the ability of the email marketers to find out their active subscribers and thus safer to their mail.

He also brought attention to all the early sign-ups happening during the holiday season, which further indicated how this problem would only scale and get worse in 2022.

This will be especially true in the case when MPP adoption exceeds 95%.

Chad further states that when the visibility of marketers in the real opens decreases, they will have to boost their visibility by compensating with other mediums.

Then, they will be more focused on driving traffic or boosting brand awareness through web visits, purchases, app sessions, and cross-channel activities, all accounting for increasing their email audience.

Dave Gerhardt (Chief Brand Officer – Drift & Founder, DCMG)

Another email marketing trend that is going to rule in 2022, and then perhaps till the kingdom comes, is the incorporation of social proof in marketing emails.

Dave Gerhardt, the founder of DCMG, is convinced that social proof in emails that brands or businesses send to their subscribers or prospects changes everything.

Social proof is how a prospective customer believes in the credibility and authority of the product. Not just that, it clarifies all the potential doubts hindering the purchase.

A lot of times, actually, most of the time, if a brand reaches the potential target customers, they really want to buy the product but only need a little push and confidence to do so.

Dave goes on to say how despite writing a three-paragraph email with a whole lot of text about features, benefits, and all of that, you could just add a social proof to get it converted.

He added how numerous convincing pitches of your product will still fail in front of one simple quote from a customer saying, “ this product boosted my revenue by 76%. I can’t recommend it enough.”

Eddie Shleyner (Founder, VeryGoodCopy.com)

When asked by the founder of VeryGoodCopy.com, Eddie Shleyner, about what email marketing trend will help marketers succeed in 2022, he said “creating Growth loops”.

He further explained what growth loops are. It is about using emails to compel your existing audience, whether it is big or small, to take action on other platforms to get more engagement.

For example, you can create a growth loop from your email list to your social media profiles such as on Twitter, Instagram, or Linkedin to increase engagement, thereby leveraging an email audience.

This certainly can be done the other way around or from any platform to any other platform but with email; it is a great opportunity and most effective.

Email lists are more defined, convertible, and, let’s say, ‘serious’ contacts, which you can take to any other social media, and it will be more engaging.

Shmuel Hershberg (CMO, Shyn Media)

Shyn Media CMO, Shmuel Hershberg is optimistic for 2022 for the email marketing ecosystem.

Per him, he predicts that there are different trends in email marketing that is going to make an impact this year :

AMP for email
BIMI widespread adoption
Text messages integration

He is also looking forward to the Apple changes and how it is going to pan out in 2022 and beyond.

Shmuel urges content marketers and email marketers to reconsider their marketing practices or overall strategy in relation to these leading email trends and predictions.

Komal Helyer (CMO, Pure360)

According to Komal Heyler, CMO at the Pure360 company, personalization will become a C-suit demand.

She stated that 80% of frequent online buyers would be going to buy from the brands that are personalizing their experience using the data and insights.

Consumers, in 2022 and beyond, will be more inclined to buy from a brand that they relate to and have better interpersonal relationships through relevancy and communication.

They are, in fact, going to turn away from all those brands, even if they are competitive or good, who are not delivering them on a personalized level.

Most email marketing platforms or software allow brands to create built-in personalization for their email campaigns, but now personalization is going to take up bigger budgets.

She also explains how the democratization of martech translates to openness towards all sizes of marketing teams in terms of accessibility to powerful technologies.

In other words, the accessibility to technology for email marketing will be increased, even for the smaller marketing teams, so there will be better capabilities for delivering personalized journeys to customers at every level.

According to her, the brands who want to succeed in 2022, especially focusing on their email marketing practices, must execute their personalization game at the forefront.

Personalization will be used to enhance the journeys of the customer and resolve their challenges with the help of brands with faces.

Komal also stated how personalization would also help in reducing the friction in the purchasing process for the customer as it will articulate the brand values to customers that they can relate to.

Jeanne Jennings (Founder, Email Optimization Shop & GM, Only Influencers)

Jeanne Jennings, the founder of Email Optimization Shop, dug deep and suggested a few email marketing predictions for 2022.

Open rates

Jennings states how marketers will be using the open rates for leveraging marketing strategy as they have done in the past.

More importantly, even though the Apple Mail Privacy Protection initiative gives a ‘false boost’ to image caching, it will happen.

Industry Cooperation

Another notable prediction from Jeanne is the cooperation, education, and collaboration that is going to be there in the email industry profession.

This will direct the response to the Mail Privacy Protection from Apple and other similar initiatives that will seek to protect customer privacy and not antagonize marketers.

So this means marketers will be coming together to protect their industry and the reputation of marketing professionals.

High Return On Investment

She further predicted that email would continue to drive the highest ROI among any other marketing channel. Also, it will still be the most profitable marketing channel to invest in.

Brian Minick (COO, ZeroBounce)

The COO of ZeroBounce, Brian Minick, talks about the one email marketing trend that, in recent years, has become more prominent and will continue to be in 2022.

And that is plain-text emails. He shared how the competition of standing out in people’s inboxes is becoming harder day by day.

So for marketers, the importance of doing the right thing to stand out in people’s inboxes is crucial.

The goal of email marketing is always to create engagement with the audience and get more and more click-throughs and replies.

It is certainly not enough to rely on the statistics of opening the email. That won’t do really well when it comes to engagement or sales.

He talks about how essential it is to play smart, and take essential steps like segmenting your audience, creating personalized emails, and giving the content what people expect or what you promised when they signed up.

Scott Hardigree (Founder & CEO, Email Industries)

Scott Hardigree goes on to say that hitting inboxes for email marketers will be even harder in 2022 as spam filters are going to be more sensitive.

He states that email deliverability experts in their company suspect that spam filters will be much more sophisticated in the coming years, starting from 2022.

The higher level of sophistication with the machine learning algorithms is already adapted by these spam filters that are excellent at interpreting signals.

These signals basically indicate whether people are interested or want to read your email or not.

Machine learning capabilities in these filters are hard to get by as, even if it gets the slightest hint of irrelevance or lack of interest from readers for the particular email.

Their spam filtration algorithms will be better at measuring whether people open and click on your emails but also how they read them, how they move or scroll through, and how long they stay at it.

These spam filters will incorporate more and more negative signals to catch on. Also, they will be more determined to detect them.

Moreover, it will go beyond the usual metrics of the email like engagement or open rates but rather customer behavior and much more.

So, the onus is on email marketers to become smarter and more nuanced in their marketing practices. After all, not getting an email delivered to the customer’s inbox is the worst-case scenario for businesses or marketers.

Matthew Smith (Founder, Really Good Emails)

One of the marketing trends that is going to lead the way in 2022, as per Matthew Smith from Really Good Emails, is knowing the customer in and out.

He reinforces the fact that understanding the audience emotionally and empathetically is essential for the business.

According to him, the self-obsession of any brand, which is often reflected in their email or branding efforts, is a huge disadvantage, especially in 2022 and beyond.

People are inclined to brands that are empathetic listeners and provide value on the basis of what they have learned about a particular customer.

On being asked again what more could be seen going through the roof in 2022 in terms of marketing trends, he stated – Bold fonts.

Bold fonts as per this design expert, are visually appealing and highly engaging. It has the capability to bring people in and give meaning to the words if done well.

Rui Nunes (Founder, SendXmail)

Rui Nunes, the founder of SendXmail gave three vital predictions for 2022 :

Artificial Intelligence

He pronounced how AI (Artificial Intelligence) is going to be the main competitive advantage for all those medium-level brands that have subscribers in thousands.

So what determines the success at that level is how well they are able to use machine learning and AI to personalize their customer expereince.

The smart data and insights from the customer, along with their behavior, patterns, and inclination, will be the key to success in conversion.

So basically, it will all be about how these medium-level brands are reaching out to each of their prospects or customers with much more tailed messages and customized offerings.

BIMI Authentication

The next prediction, coming from Rui Nunes, is the BIMI authentication which will have a huge impact on how brands differentiate themselves from their competitors.

Gmail is already embracing this with its full capacity, and then, and there are other primary players in the market like AOL and Yahoo! Mail that support this as well.

According to Nunes, the full compliance and its legacy authentication are what truly excites him, which is more of a consequence rather than an impact.

Permission-based Email List

The value of the permission-based email list is going to elevate. This will happen due to the end of the cookies along with the reign of the third-party providers.

Email, in this case, will be that first-party data source for brands and marketers, more authentic and perhaps the only real data point for them.

Andrew Kordek (VP, Customer Engagement – iPost)

Andrew Kordek, who is the Vice President of Customer Engagement at iPost list three trends in 2022 to look out for :

Optimizing the First Impression

Andrew states how brands will be focussing more on the first impression that they are going to make on the prospects, visitors, and new subscribers.

What this means is there will be a sign-up process where the first email they will send, whether it is COI, welcome, or confirmation, will customize, scrutinized, and crafted for a better first-time experience.

They focus on the first impression a prospect gets about a particular brand through the first email.

Andrew believes this will be the only way to assure that prospects or new subscribers have a great first and last impression of the brand.

This will help brands to establish their brand right away in a good and positive light.

Data Alignment For Optimizing User Experiences

Another trend Andrew mentioned about data alignment and not exactly personalization.

In fact, he shared how marketers will stop talking exactly about personalization and rather focus on using the data and insights to personalize the expereince s and customize it for a better impression.

The idea is to use the data first in a small way to cater to customers but gradually upscale it to make it a predictable AI.

Customers basically want that brands listen to them, acknowledge their requests and suggestions, and that’s what they will expect in 2022 as well.

So, the best way to address that for brands will be to utilize data to find different ways to offer more personalized experiences.

No Workaround For MPP

The Mail Priavy Protection (MPP) in 2022 will be something where there will be no shortcuts to a workaround for brands.

Privacy will be an important concern for customers, so it will be non-negotiable in marketing.

Marketers in the sense of email marketing will also have to find different ways to learn another campaign instead of using open rates.

Ryan Robinson (Blogger, Podcaster)

Ryan Robinson, who is a well-known blogger and podcaster, says that 2022 will belong to the brands or creators who become human to their audience.

The more connected and personalized your relationship with the audience will be, the better chances of their loyalty will be there on your side.

Getting to what exactly Ryan explained, he announces how there is no replacement for simply having a humane connection with the audience over email, regardless of what kind of business you are in.

A much more holistic and universal marketing trend that is going to sustain till thy kingdom comes, as it goes back to the basics of human psychology and relationship.

He suggests building a process by staying a little bit far from all the sales messaging and creating email campaigns focusing on exactly who your recipients are.

Focusing more on what they really want and what you can provide them.

Andy Crestodina (Co-founder, Orbit Media)

Andy, the co-founder of Orbit Media, was about the top email marketing trend that marketers should look for in 2022.

And he responded to it with – Linkedin Newsletters.

He started by explaining how marketers or creators were warned against “building on rented land,” meaning creating marketing avenues on third-party platforms.

They were rather advised to create an email list on their own website for their subscribers.

But Andy gives a contrary idea to this popular belief, saying what if this rented land is cheap, better, and way to the future?

Going further, he suggested that marketers create LinkedIn newsletters along with their own website newsletters.

He shared how leveraging the engaged audience on LinkedIn to start a newsletter can aid in the marketing efforts of your brand.

As per him, the growth of these LinkedIn newsletters is immense and staggering, to say the least, and can do wonders for a growing brand in 2022.

He suggested the creators and marketers write Linked in articles, create helpful content and add this newsletter to the articles.

Andrew and Pete (Founder, ATOMIC)

Andrew and Pete from ATOMIC state that business emails are still dominated by newsletters that seek attention in inboxes.

So per it takes time and effort to be seen, especially if you’re sending business emails through newsletters.

They suggested not to discount the less-is-more approach for your message being received and seen.

He also advised marketers to focus more on plain-text, to-the-point, and shorter emails.

As per them, business emails also need to be in the way you are chatting with your friend via email.

Such personalized plain-text emails are going to be the trend in 2022 and beyond, if they aren’t already.

This is primarily because consumers are smart. They look through marketing and sales emails very clearly.

Email users are also not afraid to use the ‘Spam’ button in the email.

Plain-text emails are supposed to be creating personal connections with target recipients with a much more conversational tone.

Tiffani Davidson (Senior Manager, Lifecycle Marketing, Thimble)

The senior manager of Lifecycle Marketing at Thimble suggests three primary email marketing trends that she sees to hit in 2022.

She enlisted :

Empathy marketing won’t be a tactic
Data is dead
There’s won’t be just but also SMS

Let’s see what she has to say about each of these.

She suggested that Empathy Marketing isn’t just a tactic but a continuing trend in email marketing or any marketing for that matter.

Tiffani states how changed political climate and pandemics in the world and then all those different sorts of news across the world.

She talks about no matter how obviously all this points out the conclusive fact- empathy marketing is done, it is yet to continue as a trend in 2022.

As for her, those days are gone when users aren’t able to read through the marketing strategies of companies.

So all that matters is the emotions a brand touches upon. So brands who are unable to read emotion in their audience fail to engage with them.

Anne Tomlin (Founder, Emails Y’all and Email Loot)

The Email marketing trend that will help marketers and businesses to grow in 2022, as per Anne Tomlin from Email Y’all, is modular design systems.

She shared that making plenty of modular systems in 2021 makes her aware of the fact of how mainstream it has become over the years.

Whether one is looking to make one in ESP or using a third-party tool or storing their modules in git, this modular code repository comes with many benefits.

Anne explains that it speeds up the process of email creation. There are a few errors that you can get, but when you use a trustworthy and efficient third-party tool, it becomes minimal or even none.

On top of that, non-coders on your team can also use custom codes with their visual editor.

Anne Tomlin, who also founded Email Loot, was asked what email marketing trend she will take off in 2022.

She shared that higher chances are the wider adoption of full-body background images.

She continues to add how it has become more prominent and really getting cooler. It can also be used in the dark mode.

It is true that a few email clients, such as Windows 10 Mail, cannot display the image on top of the background images.

But in order to solve this, designers can also use a separate VML image with MSO 2016 condition in addition to any use of the regular image.

Have a look at Hottest Email Marketing Trends You Need To Test

Mrugesh Dabhi (Associate Director, Email and Automation, Email Uplers)

There are three top-of-the-head email marketing trends that come to Mrugesh Dabhi, the Associate Director of Email & Automation at Email Uplers :

Focus & Prioritization of Data Privacy
Interactivity
More accessibility In Emails

Now, let’s see what exactly Mrugesh talked about these email marketing trends that are going to rule in 2022 and beyond.

Focus & Prioritization of Data Privacy

Mrugesh explained that there are plenty of factors that are affecting companies changing their ways of collecting and leveraging data for their marketing programs.

This might be because of the new rules, regulations, and legislations or just the specific technological evolutions and developments specifying email marketing practices, such as Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection.

All of this, in one way or another, is posing challenges to email marketers in 2022 when they are expected to adopt these requirements or changes.

So, smart marketers will adapt and find their way around without getting hiccups in their email marketing strategies or results.

Interactivity

Email campaigns happening in 2022 are going to leverage all kinds of engaging interactivity with their content to their users.

This will be the email marketing trend as per the copy of the content goes.

As per Mrugesh, one can already see the number of polls, surveys, questionnaires, forms, and other kinds of content that interact with recipients out there.

It is a powerful method to interact with your audience and boost engagement. And that’s only one part; then there are other benefits, like collecting required data from your audience.

Rather than recipients clicking through to a website, they interact within the email, giving a variety to the email content type.

He suggests that adding the elements of interactivity makes email user-friendly and highly engaging as it also reduces the number of steps for recipients to engage.