Email marketing continues to evolve, blending timeless strategies with cutting-edge digital innovations. As time goes on, the most successful marketers are those who are finding new ways to build stronger connections, deliver more personalized experiences, and stand out in increasingly crowded inboxes. Here are six email marketing ideas to keep your audience interested, engaged, and ready to act.

Design

Traditionally, marketers have paid some attention to things like headers and images, but the bulk effort has gone toward developing good copy. Times are changing and content alone isn’t going to swing it. These days, effective campaigns are as much about the visuals as the words. Start adding design elements such as icons, illustrations and colored buttons to your emails and you should notice increased engagement by your readers: more opens, more clicks and more traffic to your website.

Video Content

Video content currently makes up about 82% of all internet traffic, and 66% of consumers report short-form videos as the most engaging content that they come across. Combine all that with the fact that email platforms are making it easier to deliver visual pieces in campaigns, and this should be the year that you start experimenting with video elements in your email marketing efforts as well.

Personalization

Personalized communication increases engagement, client satisfaction and retention. One-to-one customization transforms the relationship between your brand and subscriber by ensuring that your emails don’t read like spam. It is so easy nowadays to personalize your emails with a recipient’s first and/or last name. Not only does it help improve open rates, it can also prevent your messages from heading to the junk mailbox. You can also send targeted emails to subgroups based upon the data you capture from browsing, email preferences, and open and click rates.

Artificial Intelligence

For email specifically, AI can already help you develop effective content (topics, subject lines, etc.), optimize send times/frequency and predict audience actions. AI-powered systems now make it possible to set up automated or drip campaigns that are driven by audience data. The technology uses interests and browsing behaviors to organize automated campaigns that are designed to nurture your leads. AI can also help you determine what kind of content and images are going to be most effective to achieve the highest engagement and conversion metrics.

Interactive Content

Interactive content includes anything that your audience can click on, swipe, hover or engage with. According to Martech Advisor, “interactive email content increases the click-to-open rate by 73% and adding videos to your email content can boost click rates up to 300%.” Here are a few ways interactive content can be included in your e-marketing campaigns.

  • Infographics: This is one of the most shareable forms of content. On average, companies that use infographics have 12% traffic growth over those that don’t.
  • Surveys/Polls/Quizzes: These are a great tool to gain insight into your subscribers (which then feeds into your ability to increase personalization.) If you decide to go this route, be sure to tailor your questions to your audience, make them simple, and offer value in return for participation.
  • Images or Custom Font: Simple things like using an animated GIF, unique background image, or interesting font can spice up your email enough to engage your audience and increase traffic back to your site. Studies show images alone can boost traffic by 94%.
  • Video: see #2 above.

Privacy Regulations

As artificial intelligence becomes more deeply integrated into marketing workflows, privacy concerns continue to grow. Recent years have seen an expansion of global data privacy regulations, with laws like the EU’s GDPR setting the tone for stricter standards worldwide. In the U.S., the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) has been joined by additional state-level laws, and federal privacy legislation remains a topic of active debate. For email marketers, this evolving landscape means it’s more important than ever to handle personal data responsibly—complying with regulations, securing consent, and being transparent about how information is collected, used, and stored.

The first email was sent in 1971. Since then, email marketing has exploded, and how email campaigns are developed and refined continues to evolve. If you want your email marketing to be effective, you have to keep up with the times.