With over 16 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 10 bold predictions for new trends in email that DMi Partners believes will occur in 2020. Longtime readers may notice some repeats from our 2018 and 2019 predictions. We remain confident that just because these trends haven’t happened yet, it does not mean they aren’t on the horizon in 2020.

Here we go!

1) Gmail rolls out a “Draft Completion Automator” function. Once a half-typed message has been sitting unsent in your draft folder for over a week, Gmail will message you with a completed message for you to consider sending. For instance, if you drafted a message intending to tell your mom that you are spending the holidays at your in-laws but just couldn’t hit send, Gmail will help you complete the message complete with loving stories of Christmas past and photos of you as a kid to help your mom understand how much you wish you could be there. Thanks Gmail!

2) Online invitation providers solve for the annoying reliability of evite deliveries. Digital cards are great for the environment and for easy RSVPing, but they are terrible for being able to pretend that your weird uncle’s invitation must have gotten lost in the mail. Providers like Evite and Punchbowl will create a paid feature where they will vouch for you if reach out to accuse them of having lost an invitation in transit. Just remember to cc Uncle Barnie on the message.

3) Drawing inspiration from Gmail, USPS issues new mailboxes with three slots for “Primary”, “Social”, and “Promotions”. I think we can all agree that this one is a genuinely good idea.

4) Email providers build on the wild success of ‘auto-complete’ with ‘completion encouragement’. Gmail and Yahoo will introduce chatbots that lightly prod you to finish as you are drafting an email. Chatbots will chime in with things like “It doesn’t need to be a novel” and “Just hit send already” to help expedite the messaging process.

5) Spam fights back. The popular Hormel Foods canned meat finally takes a stand against the email industry by creating a robust PR campaign to get the word out that “Spam is delicious, not malicious”. Unfortunately, they choose to blast that message to a rented list of 100 million email subscribers unaware of the irony.

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.