It is understandable, but chances are you are already working on this platform to connect with your audience. Yes, we are talking about email marketing here. 

While it is the choice of a majority of marketers and brands to connect, engage, and sell to their audience, people rarely do it the right way. The 420% ROI number you see is the upper limit, and it takes a lot of planning, designing, strategizing, and hustling to get there. 

So how do you get there? What changes the effectiveness and value of a branded email?

So how do you get there? What changes the effectiveness and value of a branded email?

While there are many tools to personalize, segment, and automate your emails, there is a common thread to the success of all these. And that undoubtedly is the email design.

Design affects customers’ brand perception, emotional connection, and user experience to the greatest extent. If you get that right, you are more than halfway there.

In this blog by Kimp, we bring you the latest trends in email design for 2022 with notes to help you adapt them for your brand. This way, you can get the most of your email marketing campaigns in 2022. 

Let’s get right into it. 

Kimp’s 10 Email Design Trends for 2022 

We know many of you are apprehensive of the phrase design trends because most of them may not suit your business requirements. And that is a completely valid apprehension that we wholeheartedly understand.

However, the reality is many design trends are born out of analyzing and understanding customer preferences for better results. Design trends, in particular, help you optimize the performance of your advertisements and marketing campaigns. When you make the message attractive, you are 50% there. 

In that vein, let’s take a look at the importance of email design trends. While email marketing has the highest ROI of all channels, getting through to the customer and making them click on your CTAs is still a challenge. 

By 2022, we will send 347 billion emails every day. And that is an enormous cluster to stand out from.

What better tool to do that with than graphic design and visual marketing in an attention-deficit and fast-paced world? 

In this section, Kimp brings you the top 10 effective and responsive email design trends for 2022. These design trends can help you design and launch better and more profitable email marketing campaigns in the coming year.

1) Minimalistic design style 

The cliche “less is more” works the best in this context. Just consider the last branded email you received. Where were you when you opened it? Were you able to give it undivided attention, or was it one of many things you were handling? Also, what was the device you used to access the email?

Design thinking or thinking from the customers’ perspective will give you a clear idea of why we recommend a minimalistic design style for email marketing.

If you are anything like the average email consumer, chances are you accessed the email on a mobile, felt distracted when you read it, and closed it in a hurry. 

Cluttering your email with too many details, lines of text, and difficult to load images can kill the appeal of your email. 

Minimalistic design style allows you:

• Champion a singular message to your customers with no distractions 
• Bring the customer to the CTA faster without losing them midway 
• Enhance the appeal of your images, copy, and other visuals in the email by leveraging negative space and other principles of visual hierarchy. 
• Improve user experience

Consider this email from Solomon. The email has a single color tone, ample negative space, and a hyper-focus on images that customers cannot miss. 

Need help creating designs like this? Try a Kimp Graphics design subscription to get the most effective and minimalistic email designs for your brand.

2) Build micro-interactions 

It is not news that we live in an attention-deficit filled world. The way we perceive, understand, and engage with information has completely changed over the years. Social media has also brought in features that define our experience in these spaces immensely. Micro-interactions are one of them.

Customers expect motion or some action to occur when they tap, hover, swipe, and click on elements in your design style. Building these into your email makes it interactive.

Some examples of micro-interactions that you can build in your email designs are: 

• Gamified content such as crosswords, word finds, GIFs, and treasure hunts within the email 
• Videos or GIFs that customers can tap to play 
• Pop-ups when they hover on certain elements 
• Image carousels that customers can swipe through and explore 
• Tap or click buttons throughout the email so that you spread the CTAs across, and customers can choose to pursue any product they like

Kimp Tip: When building micro-interactions, always ensure that the images you build into them do not make the email difficult to upload. Optimize the email for the best quality without compromising the user experience. 

3) Dark Mode design style 

We are all slowly becoming nocturnal beings wherein bright lights hurt our eyes. Even with all the filters on our screens and spectacles, many consumers do not prefer white light. And maybe that is the reason that in a 2020 survey, 82% of people agreed they prefer dark mode on their devices and apps. And another 10% say they oscillate between dark and light modes. This means close to 90% of customers prefer dark mode while interacting with digital media. 

Hence, it only makes sense that in 2022, the email design trends shift towards dark mode compatible designs to finally give customers what they want. 

Every social media platform, app, and the device has a dark mode now. If your email design elements do not work with these dark modes, then you lose out big time. 

By not implementing dark mode designs, your emails will not:

• Load well
• Appear in the layout you intended it to 
• Depict the design style in the right manner 
• Convey the complete message of your email

So the time to create design elements that work well with the dark mode is the need of the hour. 
Need help with your designs? With Kimp Graphics and Kimp Videos’ unlimited design subscriptions, you can create as many variations of a design as you need. Book a call with the team now.

4) Bring in motion to engage readers 

We have spoken of the value of micro-interaction, but motion graphics go a step further. They change the pace of the entire email and provide an incentive for the customer to click your emails.

Small motion graphics elements like GIFs and spot animations excite customers to no end. The same need to tap, view, and engage with the design element is a major driving factor here too. What they get from animation is loads more than any block of text can offer them. 

Video is a major game-changer in email open rates and CTR as well. Even if you are not able to embed the whole video in your newsletter, we recommend the following for better performance of your email design in 2022:

• Provide a follow link with the play button in an email that takes them to a browser or your website 
• Post screen grabs from the email as GIFs or screenshots to bring in interest for the video 
• Include simple animations in a storytelling format to play the role of a video. 

If you are looking for a team to handle all your motion graphics requirements for a flat fee check out Kimp Video.

5) Mobile-friendly designs 

This is a simple non-negotiable element. Gone are the days when customers opened emails on PCs, tablets, or even laptops. It is now the era of mobile. A study says that consumers will access 66% of emails via mobile phones by 2022. This means mobile-friendly designs are your only choice.

Mobile-friendly email designs:

• Load faster on mobiles without a considerable wait time 
• Have a clean and easy to navigate layout 
• Are simple and to the point so that the customer does not scroll too much 

When you are working on mobile-friendly designs, you must ensure that: 

• Email design elements respond well to touch, swipe, and tap
• You include motion graphic elements to engage the user
• Your design team optimizes the graphics for ideal experience on a mobile device

This email from Procreate is a perfect example of a mobile-friendly design anyone can access and engage with with ease. 

6) Use typographic variations 

2022 email design trends are all about attracting the customer and making them reach the CTA you have designed the email for. And in this list, the latest addition is the play of typographic elements that can enhance the value of your email design. 

There are many typography styles that you can choose for your email design based on your audience, brand design guidelines, industry, product, or even the content. The aim is to stand out from the crowd and grab the user’s attention the minute they come across your email. 

Some popular typography trends that you can follow in 2022 include: 

• Animated typography wherein you can play with a custom typography style and include a motion in it 
• Contemporary serif fonts for a more professional and elegant impression
• Colorful fonts to grab the readers’ attention and reinforce your brand’s visual identity 
• Geometric fonts to reinforce a modern brand identity with clean, sharp lines

You can read our guide on 2022 typography and font trends to know more about this. 

Experimentation is key for this email design trend. So play around with different options to see what will reinforce your brand’s visual identity best.

7) Feature social proof 

Social proof will be more valuable than gold for marketing in 2022. And email marketing is one of the most effective channels to share the social proof with your subscribers. Are you wondering how this relates to an email design trend?

Well, in 2022, your email designs must adapt in a way that they not only feature your social proof elements such as user-generated content, reviews, testimonials, and more, but they end up championing it. 

In other words, you need to present your social proof in a manner that customers are intrigued and engrossed in these designs.

Some design trends that we expect to reign for social proof presentation in emails are: 

• Segregated sections designed minimalistically to highlight the content 
• Image-first approach where the customer and UGC come first before any text
• Embedding videos and social media posts in your email within a preset template for best results

8) 3D images 

It is the visual value of your email designs that will lead you to success. So any technique, tool, and design trend you adopt must work on enhancing that visual appeal. This email design trend for 2022 is mostly for product-centric brands or brands that feature inanimate objects in their emails. 

And that trend is the inclusion of high-quality, interactive, and realistic 3D images in your email. With this, you can bring your ecommerce or retail store to the customers’ doorstep and skyrocket your sales. 

3D images in an email will make the customer sit up and notice your email design twice because of the impact 3D usually has on us. By bridging the gap between physical and digital product displays, you can expect to see a higher CTR from these emails.

9) Graphic design trends for emails 

We have repeatedly established that email is becoming a highly visual medium. So it is absolutely right to leverage the most popular graphic design trends in email designs as well. 

As per our report on graphic design trends, we recommend the following design styles for your 2022 email marketing campaigns:

Color pop email design – A mixture of bold colors that pop off the screen the instant someone accesses the email. The bright colors may also help send the right emotions to the customers. Right from the principles of color psychology to the overall design appeal, Color Pop designs work well everywhere. 

Nostalgia-inducing designs – Anything that takes customers down memory lane can improve the connection between the brand and them. The communication instantly becomes personal, and you can convey your message quite easily. Some approaches to this could be the 80s design style, Pop Art, and vintage design style. 

Illustrations – The era of stock images is over, and people expect to see custom and unique designs from customers. What can be more unique than custom illustrations?

10) Accessible and inclusive designs 

Last but not the least, we must talk about accessible and inclusive designs. In the year ahead, customers expect better from us and we must deliver with no exceptions. 

Not just social media content, blogs, or websites, emails too must be accessible and inclusive to people from all walks of life. But how can you build accessibility in your email designs for 2022? 

• Use minimal contrast in your images, text, and overall layout to avoid triggering people with flash 
• Position the copy on an easy to read background 
• Avoid the use of flashy animations 
• Include alt text for images wherever possible to accommodate users who access emails via screen readers 
• Leverage the power of negative and avoid overwhelming users with too much information

Kimp Tip: Building an accessible design is not a one-time process or something you can achieve in a day. For best results, build a checklist so that you keep a check on every email that you share with your customers

Leverage the email design trends of 2022 with Kimp

Email marketing is an ongoing exercise. You must consistently reach your audience for them to open, engage, and click on your email and help you achieve your marketing goals. 

Handling design trends, automation, scheduling, and follow-ups can be overwhelming for any brand. So why don’t you delegate the design end of your email marketing to our expert teams of designers with a Kimp Graphics design subscription?

We also offer unlimited design services to help you create unlimited designs and revisions, across a ton of design categories for your brand.

Sign up for the free trial to get started.