With over 17 years of experience helping our clients with their email strategies, DMi Partners is always looking forward to new trends in the email world. But unlike other agencies, DMi focuses on predicting trends that are too bold for many to take a risk forecasting.

We continue that tradition with a list of bold predictions for new trends in email that DMi Partners believes will occur in 2021. Longtime readers may notice some repeats from our 2018, 2019 or 2020 predictions. We remain confident that just because these trends haven’t happened yet, it does not mean they aren’t on the horizon in 2021.

Here we go!

1. Another wave of email newsletter startups burst onto the scene with even more concise, simplified summaries of the previous day’s headlines. Headlines like “Politics happened yesterday” or “There was weather” dominate the top of morning inboxes to help further simplify news consumption for readers. Also, probably one of them will be called “The Fluff.”

2. Email marketers pull back the curtain to let their subscribers better understand the important part they are playing in optimizing email campaigns. Subject lines like “15% off coupon enclosed!” will be paired with body messages like “Psych! We’re just testing out new subject lines to see how they affect open rates. Thanks for doing your part to help us improve our campaigns.”

3. Salutation predictors will become a thing. Gmail, Yahoo and others will roll out salutation predictor features that estimate the best signoff for your message based on the tone they inferred. This will be most helpful for when “Sincerely” just doesn’t summarize the mood of your email to the cable company, but something like “Bitterly,” “Stubbornly,” or “Irately Yours” would better convey the message.

4. Outlook will introduce “Read IOU’s” to build upon the success of “Read Receipts”. The “Read IOU” notification will allow the recipient to click ‘yes’ to notify the sender that they received the email but have not had time to read it yet - although they intend to.

5. CliffsNotes for emails from Mom. Major service providers will introduce a CliffsNotes plugin for those paragraph long emails from mom that start with sentences like “This time of year always gets me nostalgic for the days when…”. The CliffsNotes plugin will allow email recipients to click a button to get a simple, one-sentence summary of the purpose of the email; such as “Are you coming home for Thanksgiving?”.

6. Service providers realize they have overcorrected the spam messaging problem. Consumers begin to complain that they are receiving too few unsolicited marketing messages, so the service providers quickly add a ‘Request Spam’ button to the interface to help limit complaints.

7. “DMarc” becomes a top 100 baby name.

8. Popular food delivery services offer customized vanity subject lines for late night transaction emails. Users can swap in subject lines like “Thank you for your donation” in lieu of the traditional “Your cheesesteak is en route” to help cover their tracks the next morning.

9. Service providers will add a ‘Reply Some’ option to their email response choices. The feature will join the current options of ‘Reply’ and ‘Reply All’ and will give users the option of replying to an incomplete assortment of the email recipients which will be randomly chosen by the service provider.

10. “Funsubscribe” Buttons will become a thing. DMi doesn’t know for sure what function the button will serve, but we feel pretty strongly that this one will happen. Get ready.