Email Marketing Trends Shaping 2020

1. COVID-19 forced an emergency reset in March and April

When lockdowns began spreading across the world in March 2020, inboxes were suddenly flooded with a wave of near-identical messages: “here’s how we’re responding to COVID-19,” sent by seemingly every brand a person had ever given an email address to. Marketers quickly learned that tone mattered enormously in those first weeks. Messages that leaned into pure sales language read as tone-deaf, while brands that paused promotional sends, acknowledged the moment honestly and offered something useful, updated store hours, remote support options, flexible return policies, tended to hold onto trust better through the rest of the year.

2. Email volume and engagement both rose

With people spending far more time at home and checking their phones more often, overall email open rates climbed through much of 2020 compared with the previous year, even as total send volume also increased as brands leaned harder on email once in-person events, trade shows and physical retail traffic dried up. That combination made email one of the few channels where marketers could point to higher engagement during a year when most other plans had been upended.

3. E-commerce email became the default growth channel

With physical stores closed or operating at reduced capacity for large stretches of the year, businesses that sold anything shippable leaned on email harder than ever to drive online sales. Abandoned cart sequences, back-in-stock alerts and simple promotional sends carried far more weight in the marketing mix than they had in 2019, since email was often the most reliable direct line a business had to a customer who couldn’t just walk into a store.

4. The holiday season moved earlier and online

Retailers anticipating a compressed, largely online holiday shopping season pushed Black Friday and Cyber Monday-style promotions earlier into November 2020 than in prior years, spreading email campaigns out to avoid straining shipping capacity that was already stressed by pandemic-driven order volumes. Subscribers saw “early access” and “shop now before the rush” messaging well before Thanksgiving, a shift driven directly by the unusual shopping conditions of the year.

5. Interactive and dark-mode-friendly design mattered more

With Apple’s Mail app and Gmail both supporting dark mode more broadly following updates rolled out in 2019 and refined into 2020, marketers had to start testing campaigns in both light and dark rendering to avoid emails that looked broken, invisible logos, unreadable text, once dark mode became a common device setting. Some brands also began experimenting with more interactive email elements like embedded surveys and simple in-email actions, aiming to keep subscribers engaged without requiring a click through to a website that might be dealing with its own pandemic-related slowdowns.

What tied these trends together

Every one of these shifts traced back to the same root cause: 2020 forced businesses to rely on the channel they owned when almost every other form of customer contact, in-store, in-person, at events, became unreliable or impossible for stretches of the year. The businesses that adjusted their tone quickly, leaned into e-commerce email sequences and paid attention to how their campaigns rendered on the devices people were now using more than ever came out of the year with a channel that had proven, under real pressure, how central it could be.

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Continue exploring: additional email marketing guides, everything from 2020 or the Digital Business Marketing Awards.