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Email Design Trends to Look For in 2021

Beefree team
Beefree team
Dec 9, 2020
Email Design Trends to Look For in 2021
Email Design Trends to Look For in 2021

New year, new email design tactics? That’s a yes from us! Many businesses leaned heavily on email marketing throughout 2020. And email design will only continue to be essential into 2021. With the COVID-19 pandemic, more and more brands are relying on digital channels such as email to communicate with their customers.But the face of email marketing has changed. Email design trends are constantly evolving, and the pandemic has altered customer communications forever. By getting ahead of the biggest email design trends in 2021, you can effectively market your business via email. Email marketing is here to stay--but it's your job to stay on top of the latest trends. Here are the email marketing trends for 2021 that can help increase your engagement. (Looking for more email marketing trends? Check out this post from Jordie at Email Monday: The Future of Email Marketing & Marketing Automation. We're proud to be included!)

Email design trends are constantly evolving, and the pandemic has altered customer communications forever.

Minimalist design

Keep things simple by designing minimalistic emails that are uncluttered, visually stunning and get the point across. Minimalistic emails have fewer design elements; they’re less distracting so your reader immediately knows what you want them to do.White space, easily readable typography and muted colors are all components that can go into designing minimalistic emails. This message from Crate & Barrel is essentially just a header and one image. The color scheme is light and airy and it takes the reader just a few seconds to take in the email and CTA — Shop Now.Subject line: it’s on: CYBER WKND SALE

Email design trends 2021

Customer experience

With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, many customers transitioned to purchasing online instead of in-store. For many shoppers, these online buys may be their first digital shopping experience with your brand. So it’s your job to help them through the process as much as possible. You can incorporate customer experience into your emails by:

  • Providing a direct link to open a support chat
  • Answering FAQ’s about buying your products online
  • Offering tips for navigating your website

That's what VideoAsk does here by providing a link to its Help Center in the email footer. The link takes readers to a landing page where they can search tutorials and articles to find the answer to their question. When your customers have a good digital experience, they’ll return to buy from your site again and again.Subject line: Camera shy? We've got the cure

video-ask-email-support

Broken grid layout

Your email doesn’t have to use a traditional layout where all of your design elements are assembled in neat columns. One of the major email design trends for 2021 is a broken grid layout. Essentially, this type of layout makes it feel as if the email doesn’t have columns at all, switching up the structure for a different look. This BEE template is an example of an email with a broken grid.

Use this template in Beefree!

Use this template in Beefree!

Video in email

Video in email was a major email marketing trend we saw going into 2020, and videos will only increase in popularity in 2021. Videos can increase click rates by 65% and reduce unsubscribe rates by 26%! When you add videos to your emails, keep in mind that many big-name email platforms don’t allow video playback within an email (such as Outlook, Yahoo and Gmail). It’s best to embed a link to the video in your message (like GoPro does here) so your reader can open the video on your website, YouTube channel or a landing page.Subject line: Best of 2019 video

email marketing trends 2021

Dark mode compatibility

It’s absolutely essential to add provisions for dark mode into your email marketing strategy for 2021. Every day, more people start using dark mode to view email, so optimizing your emails to be read with dark mode turned on ensures everyone will be able to read your messages. Using transparent images, outlining black text in white and testing your dark mode emails are a few ways to make sure your emails are dark mode compatible. This winter-themed message from Litmus showcases dark mode and light mode done right.Subject line: Live Optimization comes to you, more stats than you can shake a stick at, and more

litmus email light and dark theme

Connection and empathy

2020 has changed many things forever. The way companies communicate with their customers is one of them. This year, brands have learned to connect with their customers on a new level, keeping them informed about everything that’s going on and reminding them we’re all in this together. And that email marketing trend should carry over into 2021 and beyond.This empathetic message from Tuft & Needle’s CEO was sent in mid-March as the COVID-19 pandemic rapidly accelerated in the U.S. It kept customers in the loop and encouraged them to take care of themselves. But you don’t have to wait for a global crisis to show empathy to your customers. Focus on putting your customers’ needs first at every time of year.Subject line: An update from our CEO

email design 2021

Bold colors and text

One of the final email design trends in 2021 that we’re expecting to see is bold colors and text. Many brands are putting text across their hero image, like this stunning example from The North Face. This tactic is a good way to grab your reader’s attention and start the email off strong.Subject line: Get 30% off gear (and gifts) before they’re gone

email design trends 2021

Wrap-up: BEE editor

Start off the New Year on the right foot by using the BEE email editor to design your marketing emails and email newsletters. With BEE’s simple drag-and-drop editor, it’s easy to stay on top of the email design trends for 2021 and create emails that will get more engagement. Start designing for free today!

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two email and email design trends for 2021

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Creating professional emails and landing pages can be challenging for businesses of all sizes. Whether you're designing a newsletter, promoting an event, or driving a marketing campaign, ensuring that your emails and landing pages are visually appealing, engaging, and efficient to produce is no small task. That’s where Beefree comes in.

Beefree is a robust tool for designing emails and landing pages with ease, offering templates, automation features, and seamless integrations. Regardless of your industry or goal, Beefree empowers you to craft high-quality communication and marketing materials quickly and effectively. By providing an intuitive and user-friendly experience, it helps businesses transform their creative ideas into polished campaigns without requiring extensive technical expertise.

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Why use Beefree for professional email campaigns?

Before we jump into the nitty-gritty of using Beefree, let's quickly go over why this tool is worth your time. There are a lot of email marketing tools out there, but Beefree stands out from the crowd for a reason. Let’s break down the unique benefits that make it an invaluable asset for anyone serious about email marketing:

Design made easy:

According to HubSpot, well-designed emails can drive open rates as high as 30%. Maybe you’re following up with leads from a recent webinar or you want to reach potential clients after a product launch. But you're finding yourself stuck because crafting professional emails and landing pages that capture attention is no easy feat.

With Beefree’s intuitive design tools and a library of over 1,700 templates tailored for various industries and purposes, you can achieve professional results without the guesswork. The wide variety of pre-designed options ensures that you can find a solution that aligns perfectly consistent with your brand.

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Time-saving features:

Speed is key, especially if you’re running time-sensitive campaigns. Beefree simplifies the design process with reusable content blocks, real-time collaboration tools, and the ability to transform emails into landing pages with a single click. These features enable you to produce high-quality materials in less time, allowing you to focus on strategy and content rather than struggling with technicalities.

According to a Beefree report, 82% of users report faster email creation. The ability to save and sync reusable content blocks means you can replicate what’s working without reinventing the wheel each time. Once you find a winning format, you can use it again and again with minor tweaks to fit the audience or campaign.

Maybe you’re following up with leads from a recent webinar or you want to reach potential clients after a product launch. With Beefree’s templates, you can get those messages out quickly and make sure your brand stays top-of-mind for your audience.
Using email cadence software like QuickMail ensures that outreach campaigns maintain a structured and effective flow, preventing overwhelming inboxes while keeping engagement high.

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Increased engagement:

A significant 64% of Beefree users report an 11% or more increase in click-through rates after using the platform. By enhancing the visual appeal and personalization of your emails, Beefree helps you achieve better engagement with your audience. The ability to test and iterate your designs ensures continuous improvement in performance.

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Getting started with Beefree templates

Alright, now that you know why Beefree is so powerful, let’s talk about how you can get started with their massive library of templates. This section will walk you through choosing and customizing a template that works for you.

1. Choose your template

The first thing you want to do is pick a template. Beefree’s catalog has templates for just about every sector—whether you're in retail, healthcare, SaaS, you name it. With a variety of options, you can find something that suits your goals perfectly, whether for a simple newsletter or detailed marketing report templates. Say you're promoting a webinar—just pick a template that’s built to highlight your CTAs, and you're off to the races.

The best part? You’re not starting from scratch. You save hours by picking a pre-designed template, and then it’s just a matter of customizing it to fit your brand. Beefree's templates are super flexible—add or remove elements, change colors, switch up the fonts, rearrange layouts—make each email uniquely yours without the hassle. This flexibility is especially beneficial for maintaining a low code architecture in website design.

2. Personalize

Consistency is key to building trust, and when your emails have a cohesive look, it helps recipients recognize your brand. It is also important to follow a brand style guide for your email campaigns so that the audiences can associate elements like your logo, colors, and fonts easily with your brand.

When using a template, customization is key to making your emails and landing pages feel unique and relevant. With Beefree’s drag-and-drop editor, you can easily tweak templates to align with your branding. Adjust colors, fonts, and layouts, or add personalized content such as recipient names and company details. The flexibility ensures that your final output is as distinctive as your brand’s voice.

Plus, with so many people opening emails or landing pages on mobile devices, Beefree’s mobile design builder guarantees that they look great no matter what device they’re on. When your emails look good, people trust your brand more, and that makes them more likely to click through and take action.

Personalization isn’t just a nice touch; it’s essential for engagement. According to Campaign Monitor, personalized subject lines can increase open rates by 26%. By tailoring your designs to speak directly to your audience, you can create a more impactful experience. Furthermore, the platform’s collaborative features allow team members to provide input and make edits in real-time, enhancing efficiency and creativity.

1. Export

So, you’ve picked and customized your template—now it’s time to send those emails.

One of the coolest things about Beefree is that it plays nice with just about every major email platform out there—Mailchimp, HubSpot, Outlook, Quickmail—you name it. This means you can create a killer email in Beefree, connect it to your favorite email platform, and schedule it all from one place. For more advanced needs, many businesses choose a CRM with email integration, to seamlessly combine customer management and automated outreach.

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Beefree simplifies the process of creating visually appealing, professional emails and landing pages, saving you time and boosting engagement. Whether you’re looking to streamline your workflow or enhance your marketing efforts, Beefree offers the tools and flexibility to meet your needs.

The best part? You’ll save time and see increased engagement, connecting with your audience in a meaningful way. In a world where everyone’s fighting for inbox space, Beefree helps you stay ahead of the game by simplifying the process while delivering professional results. So, why wait? Dive into Beefree today and see how it can transform your email campaigns.

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For user these spam filters help ensure a smooth email experience, free of spammy and fishy emails. However, as email marketers, these filters lead us to be overly cautious out of fear that our emails are not accidentally filtered out.

Whether you’re employing a lifecycle email marketing strategy or simply confirming an order, we’ve outlined the basics of how spam prevention works, why it matters, and how to avoid running afoul of some commonly used triggers.

Why you need to avoid email spam triggers

Whether you’re an ESG reporting software or a travel company email spam triggers can email marketing performance and in turn hurt your business. For one, there’s the obvious reason that if your emails get sent to the spam folder, they probably won’t be seen. That's time and effort wasted.

Beyond that, being sent to the spam folder too many times delegitimizes your email marketing, which damages what’s known as your sender reputation. When just starting out, this reputation is effectively neutral. But if it gets too low, it could damage your marketing performance and even result in being blocklisted.

How email spam filtering works

As mentioned above, spam filters are implemented as a form of quality assurance and protection for end-users. Here's how ESPs determine content to be spam:

  • Sender reputation analysis: ESPs check sender reputation based on authentication, user complaints, bounce rates and sending patterns. They’ll also check the reputations of your IP address and web domain.

  • Content analysis: Content filtering uses triggers like keywords, formatting and error detection to distinguish spam from legitimate email marketing.

  • Blacklists: Along with sender reputation metrics, ESPs also cross-reference email senders against any of several blacklist databases. Being on even one of these means you’ll struggle to climb out of the spam folder at all.

8 common email spam triggers and how to avoid them

Now let's get to the good stuff. Prevention is generally the best strategy when it comes to avoiding email spam triggers. Here are seven factors commonly used by ESPs to filter spam emails, and the simplest solutions for dealing with them.

1. Lack of authentication

Missing authentication is one of the first red flags an ESP will pick up on. Authentication shows you’ve taken certain steps to establish legitimacy. It’s also used to prevent fraudsters from impersonating your brand online. There are three commonly used forms of email authentication:

  • Sender Policy Framework (SPF): This means publishing a list of mail servers and IPs with permission to send messages using your domain. This is one reason it’s important to conduct email marketing through a branded business email, rather than a personal account.

  • Domain Keys Identified Mail (DKIM): A cryptographic signature which shows a message’s original content has not been altered during sending. Think of it like the tamper-proof seal on a bottle of milk.

  • Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance (DMARC): A way for you to establish how you want receiving platforms to handle authentication failures related to your domain.

2. Shady linking practices

Link placement and presentation play an important role in email marketing. Aside from engaging recipients and securing click-throughs, using links appropriately helps avoid your emails looking like spam.

Questionable linking practices include:

  • Links to domains with poor reputations
  • Excessive numbers of in-email links
  • Compressed, modified or obscured links, particularly when generic link shorteners are used

Only link to your own authenticated domain. Also, use an unlimited bandwidth VPS to help ensure your website access speed is always stable and fast. This will give visitors the assurance that your site is legitimate.

Don’t forget to make the purpose of any in-email link absolutely clear.  

3. Content

Although the reason for an email landing in a spam folder is often related to authentication, reputation, or poor formatting, content can at times be the culprit. Here are elements that you should look at if you suspect that your content is why your emails are not reaching their recipients:

  • Typos
  • Irrelevant content that doesn’t foster positive engagement
  • Poorly translated text
  • Partner content with poor reputation
  • Possibly offensive content
  • URLs or images with poor reputation

Another thing to note is language detection filters. Various words, phrases and tone choices have strong associations with scam emails. This includes certain buzzwords, vague or exaggerated claims, or excessive sales jargon. However, this is only really an issue when you already have a bad reputation.

Nevertheless, let’s say you’re beginning to build your reputation back up and are conducting Black Friday email marketing. While it’s important to use engaging language and strong CTAs, you should avoid terms like:

  • Limited time only
  • 100% free
  • Make money from home
  • Avoid bankruptcy
  • You have won

4. Bounce rates

A ‘bounce’ is when an email doesn’t arrive in the recipient’s inbox. This could be due to it being sent to a fake email address, an out-of-date email that is no longer in use, a full inbox, etc.

When a sender frequently experiences high bounce rates for their emails, this damages their reputation with ESPs.

But how do you improve bounce rates and, therefore, your reputation? The best way is to have good segmentation practices to ensure the right content goes out to the right people. You should also keep your list clean by regularly evaluating it and removing hard-bounce email addresses as well as inactive subscribers.

Moreover, ensure you send relevant messages that your audience actually wants to receive. Of course, always be mindful of the rest of the triggers on this list to make sure you’re protecting your sender reputation.

5. Misleading email subjects

Even if you’re not trying to do anything malicious, misleading subject lines can trigger email spam filters. For example, an email might claim to promote educational B2B content about internal audit controls. Then, instead, link the user to a landing page to sell them a product.

Always set clear topic sentences as email subject lines. Try to summarize the content and intent of the email. If you’re sending a welcome email for customer retention or promoting, say, a product or sale, make it obvious before the recipient clicks on it.

6. Poorly written and formatted emails

Poor formatting and low-quality writing are other important email spam triggers. Common writing triggers include:

  • Overly vague language lacking personal detail
  • Typos and spelling errors
  • Being too brief

A marketing email can trigger spam filters if it lacks formatting of any kind, or if there are inconsistencies. It’s also suspicious when marketing emails lack branded color schemes, imagery or the correct logo design.
Avoiding these email triggers is simply a matter of emphasizing professional communication standards in email marketing.

7. Poor engagement

Low engagement manifests itself through a lack of interaction with your emails from the recipients—low open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates, as well as low subscriber count are all indications. 

Consistently low engagement will likely result in your emails being filtered into spam. To combat this, you should strive to deliver good and captivating content tailored to your audience. More specifically, you can:

  • Use segmentation to personalize your emails and craft the most compelling content for each segment.
  • Put together attractive subject lines
  • Make use of solid and clear CTAs

8. Getting blacklisted

Improving your sender reputation, also means you don’t run the risk of being blacklisted. Blacklists are a useful prevention tool, but if you end up on one of these lists, your email marketing is more or less guaranteed to end up in spam folders.

Aim for prevention with email security and compliance training, and don’t send unsolicited marketing emails. You can also use a blacklist checking tool to make sure your sender emails haven’t been compromised.

Maintaining your sender reputation is essential

Email spam triggers aren’t all bad, they ensure that your well crafted messages aren’t drowned out and that users are able to easily see the emails they’re interested in. 

To reap these benefits, you need to keep an eye on these triggers and protect your sender reputation. Don’t worry, though. It’s easy to deliver marketing copy that avoids email spam triggers once you know what they’re looking for.

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