9 email marketing trends to guide your campaigns in 2023
Miglė, product manager and Dalia, web project manager
Keeping up with trends can be a risky business. Get it right, and you stay on the cutting edge, always ready for what’s next. But take a wrong turn and you get the email marketing equivalent of a closet full of neon jeans and a hole where your lip ring used to be.
In this article, we focus strictly on email marketing trends that fall into that first category. 😤 We cover everything from AI to the uncertainty around major tech platforms and new ways to grow your list and boost conversions.
We’ve also included plenty of tips from our in-house experts about how to use these trends in email marketing to improve your campaigns in the coming year.
Let's dive in! 👇
1. Email marketers are turning to AI
You can’t write an article on 2023 marketing trends without mentioning artificial intelligence. Content and image-generation tools are everywhere on social media and in the news as people continue to be amazed by what they can do.
But while AI promises to impact the content generation process, it’s not completely clear how that's going to happen. The current generation of tools is some ways away from being able to create perfect content on demand, meaning they are better used as assistants to help you with the content process.
With this in mind, we asked our content team for ideas about using AI to help with content creation. Here are the pick of the ideas, as well as a useful ChatGPT command for each one.
| Use case | Chat GPT command |
|---|---|
| Discover ideas or new angles for content | "Generate ideas for an email about [your topic]" |
| Simplify long paragraphs | "Simplify the following text" |
| Generate subject lines based on email content | "Generate 6 subject lines for an email on [your topic]" |
| Ask it to rewrite content with a different tone | "Rewrite this content in a more conversational tone" |
| Find synonyms and alternative phrases | "What are synonyms for [target word]" |
| Check your work for spelling or grammar errors | "Correct spelling and grammar errors in this text" |
2. Targeting is becoming even more important
If AI makes content easier to write, it’s reasonable to assume people will create more content and send more emails than ever before. Brands must learn to stand out by creating messaging that speaks to their customers.
Hyper-personalization, when you target messaging at specific customer groups, is one way to do this. You don’t have to create individual emails for each subscriber; rather, you send personalized emails with messaging based on customer data.
Get this right and every email the customer receives is relevant to their needs. You’ll increase open and click-through rates while improving the customer experience.
As a MailerLite product manager, Miglė Navickaitė knows all about the latest tools available for creating highly personalized content.
Here are her top tips:
Automate segmentation using opt-in fields on your subscribe form, your preference center, or surveys
Add dynamic content blocks to your emails to target content and offers to each group
Use content fields to personalize email copy based on customer data such as names or location
Let your brand identity shine through in your messages! This is one thing that AI content will never be able to copy
Check out our guide for more on how to do email segmentation right.
3. Partnerships are an essential source of subscriber growth
Email marketers are always looking for ways to grow their list: especially strategies that don’t involve spending big on ads.
Partnerships are an increasingly popular growth strategy that fits this description perfectly. Just find other email newsletters or influencers with a similar audience to yours and then promote each other’s businesses. It’s low-cost yet can result in a ton of email growth.
We asked our partnerships manager, Rachel Guidery, what to look for in a partnership to ensure it benefits your brand.
She suggests:
Products that complement your own: For example, an eco-friendly phone case business could partner with a creator who makes compostable iPad and MacBook cases
Industries that complement your own: For example, a newsletter about pottery trends and ceramics could collaborate with their favorite artisanal tea maker. They could offer a giveaway or discount in return for the feature
Influencers: A fitness supplements business could contact influencers to try out their product for a newsletter segment or social media series
4. People are focusing on email to avoid big tech uncertainty
We’re email evangelists at MailerLite, and we’ve long thought that having an owned channel is the best way to connect with your audience.
We’re predicting that in 2023, this will be more important than ever due to the continued uncertainty around the tech platforms people use to grow audiences.
Issues we’ve seen over the last few months include:
Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter leaving people uncertain about how the tech tycoon’s changes will impact organic reach
AI search like ChatGPT could result in websites seeing less traffic from search engines
Regulatory investigations around TikTok could change how people can access the platform in the U.S.
Meta’s attempts to TikTokify Instagram changed the way posts appeared in the app before the changes were rolled back
While social media will still be an effective way to grow an audience, savvy businesses will convert as many followers into subscribers as possible.
Check out our guides to turning your social followers into email subscribers:
5. Email is becoming the glue of omnichannel strategies
The point above is all about email’s benefit as an owned marketing channel. But it isn’t the only owned channel marketers can use. Growing your SMS, app, and web notification channels gives you other options to contact customers.
The more of these owned channels you can set up, the more protected you’ll be from changes to external platforms and the more control you’ll have over your digital marketing.
What's more, you can use your existing email list to grow your presence on these other channels.
Using transactional email and SMS to deliver order updates
Notifying subscribers of new content via web notifications
Highlighting product or inventory updates via in-app notifications
6. Marketers are measuring engagement over opens
Apple Privacy changes mean open rate metrics aren’t as accurate as they once were. This leaves metrics like clicks as the best way to gauge email list engagement.
By focusing on how many people click on or reply to your campaigns, you get a true measure of how people interact with your content marketing.
Some of the best newsletters aren’t built to generate clicks: subscribers get all the value they need from within the newsletter itself. This can make measuring engagement difficult.
One way to get around this is to make interactive emails. You could:
Include a box asking readers to click a link if they received the email
Add sections that point to external resources such as blog posts or interesting articles
Include questions and ask readers to reply to the email (this won’t generate clicks, but you’ll still see engagement)
7. The creator economy will flourish using email
Google Trends data shows that searches for the keyword “side hustle” grew in 2022 and peaked in early January 2023. This is reflective of more people looking to start side gigs than ever before.
How is this relevant for email? Well, almost all side businesses can benefit from email marketing because it’s an affordable and effective form of promotion. Small businesses can use email marketing to connect with customers, promote their products, nurture leads, and more.
The tools are also typically easy-to-use, and it’s possible to automate much of the strategy. This leaves business owners free to spend their time on other parts of their business.
With MailerLite, you can create a website and set up email marketing within the same tool. Our drag-and-drop email and website builder mean you could go live in an afternoon. Click here to try it out for free.
8. Businesses will test and automate more to optimize conversions
Economic uncertainty and rising prices mean stores are selling less, as seen by the decline in consumer spending in the U.S. in December and November. Making sales will become more difficult, so businesses must ensure their funnels are optimized to convert.
Email marketers can use A/B testing to check each part of the funnel performs at its maximum level.
You can test all parts of the email marketing processes, including:
Forms: See which offers generate the most signups
Landing pages: See which pages convert
Subject lines: Create messaging that resonates with your audience
Email content: Discover the content that leads to more clicks
Workflows: MailerLite customers will soon be able to run tests in workflows to find the optimal step to take
Automated workflows are another good way to maximize the impact of your marketing. Set them up to send automated messages when subscribers need them based on how they interact with your business.
Here are some effective ways businesses can use automated emails.
Cart abandonment emails remind e-commerce customers about purchases they never got around to completing and boost conversion rates
Onboarding or welcome emails provide new signups with information about your brand so they end up making a purchase
Personalized promotion workflows use subscriber behavior to target people with relevant offers they’re more likely to buy
Demo confirmation emails to automatically confirm and provide further information about product demos
Membership renewal emails to remind people to keep subscribing to your service
Easily set up any of these workflows with our new email automation template library. Just choose the email workflow template you want to use and customize it to your needs.
9. Email deliverability matters more than ever
Our final 2023 email marketing trend is that email marketers will focus more on email deliverability.
Why? Because if you’re spending a ton of time creating campaigns, it makes sense to ensure that as many people see these messages as possible. Improving deliverability means more of your messages will land in the inbox and fewer end up in the spam folders.
MailerLite is consistently rated as one of the best platforms for email deliverability. But there are still things that individual accounts can do to improve.
Amy Elliott from the email deliverability tool MailerCheck shared the 3 most impactful steps you can take to improve deliverability.
Keep a clean list: As your email list grows, it’s only natural that you’ll attract some low-quality addresses. Removing these contacts ensures your messages only go to people who want to hear from you. The best way to do this is to implement regular list cleaning and a real-time email verification API
Analyze your email content: Checking your campaigns before you send them will highlight phrases likely to be flagged by spam filters so you can optimize your content for deliverability
Test deliverability before your send: MailerCheck allows you to test your campaigns to see where they end up in the inbox. This can be the difference between your message landing in the user's main folder, promotions folder, or even spam inbox
Find out more about optimizing your email marketing campaigns for deliverability with MailerCheck here.
Use these email trends to inspire your strategy 🚀
These are the latest trends we expect to see in the email marketing industry over the next year or so.
Many of the trends, especially AI, are super early. If your email marketing strategy is already paying off, these are things to keep an eye on rather than bring into your workflow immediately.
Other trends, like working to bring subscribers from social media or using workflows to improve ROI are things that can have an instant impact on your email marketing efforts. You could start today and it won’t be long before you see the benefits.
Grow your business with email in 2023
Our cutting-edge email marketing toolkit is here to help you have your best year ever. Grow your list and generate conversions with forms, campaigns, user segmentation, and intuitive marketing automation. Hit the button below to start your free trial.
