2020 Email Design Trends that you can incorporate in your own mails

Everyone strives to stay ahead of the curve and keep up to date with the latest trends in the industry. That’s why we’ve decided to round up the 2020 email design trends for you, so you can save time and incorporate some of these trends in your own campaigns. In 2020 a lot of focus has been placed on creating email campaigns that not only look beautiful but that also account for growing changes in technology across email clients and devices.

Even though there are many people who believe that email marketing is dead, we think that this couldn’t be further from the truth when you look at how the email marketing environment continues to change, grow and advance.

Dark Mode for Email

You’ve most likely seen or been asked whether you’d like to set your devices to Dark Mode or dark them. Depending on the browser you use, it would be a setting you can change or even an extension (or a combination of both).

Practically, when this setting is enabled it changes your interface background from light to dark. What most people don’t realize however is that it doesn’t actually invert the colours, fonts or other content pieces but just shifts them to create better contrast.

There are many reasons why dark mode has become popular:

• It helps reduce eye strain (there are no tested results to back this up so far)
• Blue light from your devices can make it hard to read and scan content, dark mode minimizes the impact of blue light
• Dark mode makes content more legible when you are in low-light conditions
• It’s different and fun - so more people are interested to try it out
• Dark mode helps to increase your mobile charge by up to 50% according to Google.

How does Dark mode affect email creation?

Your emails may look different if your subscribers have dark mode enabled. You can keep these things in mind when you want to optimise for dark mode:

• Your logo: When you use a black logo, you may want to keep the black logo on a white background to make sure it is visible.
• Product images: When you include product images you may be tempted to keep them on a transparent background. To ensure they are clearly visible you can keep them on a white background to make sure they appear clearly.
• Background colours: If you want to make sure your emails look similar to how you intend them to look, you can change your backgrounds to a different colour. Any colour that isn’t white will remain the same.

Minimized Email

There is a massive trend towards minimalistic design. The saying “less is more” truly applies when it comes to this trend. A lot of email marketers are opting to apply minimalistic design principles when designing their campaigns. Some clear positives of using this design principle are that it keeps your emails focussed and clear. This helps your subscribers complete the action you wish them to complete.

Harry’s Minimalistic email design

3D Images

A big trend we’ve seen is the rise of the use of 3D images in email campaigns as shown in the below examples. Adding 3D images provide “texture” and realism.

Use of 3D images in Magic Spoon campaign

Rise of interactivity

There is a definite rise in interactive elements across marketing channels with more and more companies opting to use interactivity in their marketing efforts. Email campaigns are no different. 2020 has seen a rise in interactive email campaigns with some businesses even including elements of gamification for their audience to enjoy.

The below example shows how the brand Bose incorporated interactive elements to their Black Friday emails. The subscriber is able to “scratch-off” the circle to reveal the discount available.

Bose Interactive campaign

Creative use of Typography

Good copy can change everything when it comes to marketing messages but so can typography. Choosing which fonts to use and how to balance them is really important when setting up your email campaigns. Font choice can affect how people read and feel about the content in an email. There has been a lot of speculation about whether email marketers should use web fonts in their campaigns or not.

A lot of marketers are opting to use bold text without any imagery in their mails to capture their audience’s attention and keep them focussed on one theme.

Other trending font applications that have surfaced in 2020 are:

• A variety of Serif fonts
• Retro fonts
• Bold and big fonts
• Animated fonts
• Neon fonts

How about we campaign

Have you tried to incorporate any of these design trends into your campaigns lately? Tell us which one’s are your favourite in the comments below.