Email marketing is a powerful tool for businesses to reach their audience effectively. However, in the constantly changing digital landscape, it’s important to keep up-to-date with the latest design trends in order to stand out from the competition. For 2023, cool email designs include a variety of color palettes, typography styles, layouts, animations, and accessibility features. By utilizing these emerging design trends within your emails, you can ensure that your content stays fresh and your email marketing strategy continues to deliver the results you want.

Let's explore some of this year's exciting email marketing trends!

All the images are from templates you can use and personalized directly in Cakemail. We have + 700 templates for you!

Color Trends for 2023

Knowing which color palettes are most effective in email is essential. Since people often respond more positively to specific colors than others, understanding how different hues may be perceived can help you create a design that resonates with your audience. Popular color palettes for 2023 include muted pastels, bright neons, and rich jewel tones.

Consider colors like:

• Electric or neon green
• Yellow
• Emerald
• Light purples
• Periwinkle

Bold colors are back in style, and brands that use them can make their emails or websites pop for the user.

Additionally, creating depth through gradient effects is also becoming increasingly popular. Gradient effects add dimensionality to emails by transitioning between two or more colors in an ombre-style pattern. This technique is particularly effective with complementary or analogous colors, as they blend well without overpowering each other.

This works by adding depth to CTAs, too.

Experimenting with various shades within the same hue can also help create a visually appealing effect for emails.

Basically, if you've been waiting for lots of colors to come back and dominate your computer screen, now's your time!

Typography Trends for 2023

In addition to colors, typography is another important element of email design for

Creating clean font combinations that are easy to read and visually appealing can help engage your audience and make your emails stand out from the crowd. When choosing fonts for an email, it’s important to select ones that have a similar style but still offer contrast in their appearance.

For example, pairing a serif font with a sans-serif font creates an interesting visual combination while also providing clarity when reading text within the email.

- Sans-serif fonts include Visby, Helvetica, Proxima Nova, Futura, and Calibri.

- Serif fonts include Times New Roman, Georgia, Garamond, Baskerville, and Didot.

‍

Layout Trends for 2023

Layout trends come and go, but those that embrace current trends in order to make their emails more engaging are likely to stand out.

Embrace Minimalism

One of the biggest layout trends for 2023 is minimalism — keeping designs simple and allowing the content to be the focus. This means refreshing your email layouts with clean lines, clear sections, and plenty of whitespace.

A proper minimalistic layout:

• Limits content and copy
• Provides negative space
• Includes shorter emails
• Uses fewer buttons
• Features images

Shapes

Shapes are another layout trend for 2023! Incorporating shapes into your emails can help create an eye-catching design while also providing a subtle way to separate information.

This could include circles or ovals, triangles, and diamonds, or even custom shapes unique to the brand or product. You can use these shapes in the background of an email, for headers and footers, and for highlighting CTAs.

Rounded Corners

Boxy images or sharp corners are not only dangerous for small children, they might also be hurting your email subscribers' eyes. Consider using rounded corners on images and design elements to provide a friendly and inviting look.

‍

Product Shots - No Background

Once upon a time, it made sense to display your products in their natural environment. Now, it's all about isolation. Removing the background of product shots allows them to pop out in an email, creating contrast and adding interest.

Collages and Overlap

Fans of scrapbooking are going to love this one. Collages or overlapping images are back in style big time! And we are here for it. This technique can help create a fun and dynamic layout that guides the reader's eye around the email and tells a story about your brand.

Animation Trends for 2023

In addition to the design trends mentioned above, exploring animations in emails is becoming increasingly popular for email marketers. The old days of stale, black-and-white emails loaded with copy are all but over. People are bombarded with emails every day, and if you're going to catch their eyes, you better be doing something different.

Animations allow businesses to create a more engaging experience for their audience by adding movement and life to their messages. This can be done by incorporating simple GIFs or videos into an email layout and utilizing interactive elements such as hover effects which provide users with additional information when they move the mouse cursor over some aspects of the email.

Additionally, transitions between different sections of content are also essential when it comes to creating smooth user experiences in emails. By ensuring that all transitions are seamless and visually appealing, you can ensure that readers remain engaged throughout your entire message instead of feeling overwhelmed or confused!

Dark Mode

Dark mode is another email trend that isn't going anywhere in 2023. The beauty of dark mode lies in its ability to provide a more immersive experience for readers while also helping them focus on the content and visuals that matter most. Plus, it looks great and it's easier on the ol' eyeballs.

Of course, dark mode presents a slurry of challenges for email marketers. And if you're going to take advantage of this trend, then you should know what it is.

What is Dark Mode Anyway?

Dark mode is an in-demand, reversed color palette that features light-colored typography, UI elements, and icons on dark backgrounds. It provides the ideal brightness for lowlight or nighttime conditions and has become one of the most sought-after digital design trends over recent years. Most popular operating systems such as Apple's OS along with applications like Twitter, Slack, and Facebook Messenger now feature a user-enabled Dark Mode option.

Dark Mode is preferred by many because:

• Light text on a dark background is far more pleasing to the eyes, especially in settings without adequate lighting. It will enable you to reduce eye strain and fatigue significantly!
• By dimming your screen, it will preserve your battery life and help you stay connected for longer.
• Adding whitespace to your content can drastically improve its legibility, making it easier for all users—whether on desktop or mobile—to understand and consume.

Preparing your emails correctly to handle dark mode is beyond the scope of this particular blog post, but you can find all this precious information in this article: Create the perfect email to be displayed in the complex dark mode.

Artificial Intelligence (AI)

The final trend for 2023 we want to talk about is artificial intelligence or AI. There is a lot to unpack here as the usage of AI (thanks to open AI platforms like ChatGPT) has dominated the news lately. Even if you know nothing about using AI in emails, or the thought of evil robot overlords taking over your computer screen keeps you up at night - don't sweat it.

As with any new or emerging technology, the early adopters will have you believe that the time is nigh, while the old hats will try to scare you off that human jobs are in danger and we should burn it all to the ground. The truth, of course, lies somewhere in the middle.

What is AI Good For Right Now?

In our experience with AI, we've found that AI does an excellent job at simple tasks. Writing some copy and creating images quickly. It's also been helpful to come up with many ideas that we might not think of immediately.

But it lacks sounding genuine (like a human, basically), telling the truth (fact-checking what your AI creates is a must!), and being creative.

In other words, AI can be a great helping hand to round out our email marketing efforts, but it is far from replacing the need for humans anytime soon.

If you're thinking of replacing your staff or using AI instead of a copywriter or designer to do your bidding, you may want to hold off at least a few more years and instead learn to use it like a tool–albeit a fun one that you can use for hours and hours a day.

‍

Overall, the email marketing trends for 2023 are leaning towards more immersive experiences and leveraging technology to help improve user engagement. Dark mode provides an aesthetically pleasing design that is easier on the eyes, while AI can be a helpful tool to create content quickly.