Role of AI in email design: How it’s changing email marketing

While there has been a focus on creating witty subject lines or hyperpersonalized content, nothing beats having beautiful and visually impactful emails to catch your audience’s eyes.

But let’s be real. Creating high-quality and visually creative emails day in and day out can be time-consuming.

That’s where AI comes in. As your design assistant, AI helps you nail your email campaigns, from finding the best font to instantly creating the right layout for your audience’s device.

Join us as we take a look at how AI is transforming email marketing and which tools you can use to elevate your email designs.

How to use AI in email design

You’ll be happy to know that despite the huge number of emails bombarding a person’s inbox, 73% of people still prefer to receive emails from brands, while 59% say that email marketing influences their purchasing decisions.

It’s clear that email marketing is the way to go if you want real results, but how can you keep up with consistently creating and designing multiple emails? That’s right; you can do it through AI. AI can be incorporated into your email design in the following ways.

AI for automated email template designs

Creating your layout, designing your visuals, and checking for responsiveness take a lot of time and effort. AI removes all this tedious work for you.

One example is Stripo’s AI-powered email templates. Instead of manually building your email from scratch, you can access email templates that already have AI-generated images and copies. These templates are available in various content types: sales promotion, welcome emails, product announcements, and more.

Stripo ensures that all templates are fully responsive by default. This means that your email layout and content will automatically adapt to fit your audience’s screens, whether mobile or desktop.

Another tool is Mailjet. Mailjet’s email generator works similarly to image generators. Simply input a description of your desired email campaign (say, a Black Friday promo), and a design and layout that fits your request will then be generated.

Have an eCommerce store? Mailmodo has an AI email template generator that can be synced with your Shopify account. Simply choose what campaign type you need the email for and which product you want to promote. Mailmodo will instantly generate a design that integrates your Shopify products and branding.

AI to create email visuals

Tired of spending hours just to create a banner or hero image? With AI, email marketers like you can now get the visuals they need without designing them from scratch.

One tool you can use is Canva’s Magic Media, which allows you to generate images and illustrations based on a prompt or keywords. Ideally, you should provide as many details as you can to produce the image that you are looking for.

Canva also gives the option to render the image in various art or photography styles, such as Retrowave, Oil Painting, and Long Exposure. You can also change the orientation of the image to Portrait, Landscape, or Square. After the image is generated, you can generate a request for the AI tool to give you more images, or you can add elements yourself, such as icons, texts, and filters, via the Canva editing tools.

Adobe Firefly is another image generation tool for creating email visuals. Like Canva, you’ll need to enter prompts to get your desired image.

Firefly’s extensive customization options set them apart. Firefly can render images in various styles; set the color, lighting, or camera angle; or adjust the visual intensity of an image.

Firefly also has a matching feature where you can upload a reference image to emulate its composition or style. This way, you’ll get images that are more accurate than what you want.

Last on the list is DALL-E, which you can access via ChatGPT.

DALL-E’s edge over other tools is that it allows you to request changes and revisions to the image instead of generating a new one. This saves you even more time and effort!

AI for image compression

While it’s important to have beautiful and eye-catching images, it’s even more critical to ensure that image files are small. Why? Large images hurt your email campaigns. No one is going to wait for your images to load. Worse, your emails might not be sent because the file is too big for your receiver’s server.

Luckily, there are image compressor tools you can use to optimize your email visuals. These are TinyJPG, TinyPNG, and Compressor.io, which you have probably heard of before. You’ll manually upload your image, choose the file size or type you need, and it’s done.

Did you know that there are now AI-powered image optimizers to make this process even faster and easier? These tools use AI algorithms to analyze each image and automatically choose the best compression technique. AI can also selectively reduce quality in unnecessary areas, thereby keeping the file small without sacrificing visual impact.

An example is Kraken.io, which offers AI-powered image optimization to automatically compress and resize your images without any quality loss.

Another is Topaz Labs. Its editing features can be used to sharpen and enhance images while saving them in the smallest size possible.

Other tools to consider are Vance AI, Nero AI, Optimole, and Cloudinary.

AI for font optimization

Fonts do more than just look pretty in your emails — they influence how people perceive your brand and message.

Your font combination also affects readability. Fonts that look identical with minor differences can cause visual conflict. Your brain will subconsciously notice these slight differences and will get distracted into trying to find what’s wrong. Thus, some contrast is needed to make fonts easier to read.

However, too much contrast is bad as well. Your email will then just look haphazardly designed, and your audience will find it too distracting or difficult to read.

AI can help you make smarter font choices. For example, Fontjoy uses machine learning to generate font pairings for headlines, subheadings, and body text that have an overarching visual theme while still having contrast. It uses AI that studies typographic measures, such as x-height, obliqueness, and ascenders, to determine font combinations that have the right contrast.

The result is a visually balanced and readable email design.

Another tool is Adobe Fonts. It has a Recommendation tab powered by its AI algorithm, Adobe Sensei. This tab shows fonts similar to the one you’ve chosen, plus suggestions on the best font pairings with it.

How does it work? AI studies the visual characteristics of the font, such as stroke width, serifs, x-height, and curvature, to group them by tone or feel. This makes it easier for the tool to recommend similar or contrasting fonts, depending on your needs. It also ensures that your font combinations will lead to a cohesive and readable design.

Some email marketing tools, such as Mailchimp, also offer an AI-powered content optimizer feature. This feature reviews the font size and style used in the email and automatically adjusts them to keep them consistent with each other. It also pings the user if the text styling is too much, making the email look too fancy and complex. This helps create more professional and easy-to-read emails.

AI for automated email branding

If you want to build brand awareness, you’ll need to ensure that your branding is always present in your email campaigns. However, this also means applying your logo, font, color scheme, and imagery style to all your emails. Sounds like a lot of work, right? AI can make this simple.

Mailchimp has an AI-powered creative assistant that imports your brand assets and creates email templates that automatically use your brand’s font, color, logo, and images.

Canva’s Brand Kit can be combined with its AI-powered Magic Design tool. Once you set up your brand assets in the Brand Kit, it will automatically apply your branding across all materials you create in Canva. You can then use Canva’s Magic Design to generate email designs.

Consider Stripo’s Brand Guidelines kit generator. While not AI based, it works just as fast and easy as any AI-based tool.

After choosing an email template as a base, the tool will automatically create and compile brand assets, such as fonts, colors, and logos, to make the design process easier by keeping everything on the same page.

Don’t have brand assets yet? Don’t worry, AI can help you get started. You can check out tools like an AI logo generator, AI color palette generators, and art-style replicators. These tools work just like the other generators on the list: Simply add a description or keyword, and AI will automatically create a suitable design.

AI for content creation

Email design is not limited to your color scheme, photos, and illustrations. Your content matters, too. For example, the tone of your email can contribute to the overall “feel” of the design.

Imagine expressing a somber tone with your text while using a color palette of bright yellow and orange — what a mismatch, right? It might be tricky to get your content right, but luckily, AI is here to help.

Jacquard can help generate the best subject lines and headers based on your brand voice. It also uses machine learning to predict the lines that will get you more clicks and opens.

Stripo also has an AI subject line generator. Simply enter a prompt and choose the style you prefer. Styles can range from Scarcity to How-To, Authority, and more, so you will surely get the right tone you need.

What if you’re stuck on the actual content? Well, you can always rely on content generation platforms, such as ChatGPT, Copy.ai, and Jasper, to give your body copy, CTA, and blurbs.

You can ask these platforms to write in a specific tone or style. But, if you want to make it even easier, Jasper has an AI-powered email marketing template that allows you to automatically use your brand voice.

Other email tools, such as Hubspot, GetResponse, and Klaviyo, also offer AI writing assistants to help you generate and optimize your content to be suitable for your campaign type and target audience.

AI for campaign analytics and testing

AI doesn’t just help you create beautiful emails; it also helps you improve them over time. Email marketing tools, such as ActiveCampaign and Seventh Sense, harness the power of AI to analyze email performance.

ActiveCampaign offers heatmaps to help you track the part of your email that gets the most attention. This can help you adjust your layout or design to influence click-through rates.

For instance, you may find that the top part of your email gets more clicks, so you can move your CTA button higher.

ActiveCampaign can also A/B test the use of GIFs against the use of static visuals, the color of your CTA button, a single-column layout against a multiblock layout, or a different header font. AI then tracks click-through rates, engagements, and conversions and reports which visual content is performing better.

On the other hand, Seventh Sense uses AI to optimize email send times by analyzing individual recipient behaviors, ensuring messages are delivered when engagement is most likely. By integrating with platforms like HubSpot and Marketo, it facilitates A/B testing, allowing marketers to refine strategies based on real-time analytics and behavioral data.

Benefits of AI in email marketing design

Now that you know how AI can help you, let’s discuss why you should embrace AI in your workflow. AI helps in:

• speed and efficiency: What used to take hours or even days can be done in seconds;
• scalability: AI allows you to keep up with increasing demands without sacrificing quality or needing additional resources;
• data-driven decisions: AI is powered by data and predictive modeling. No more guessing what would work. AI can tap into data to give you designs that will get clicks and engagement;
• personalization: AI can refer to your brand’s visual style and voice, or your subscribers’ data to give them content that is tailor-made for their preferences and needs;
• creative boost: Ran out of creative juices? AI can give design suggestions and new layout ideas, or serve as a starting point for your design process.

Wrapping up

AI has transformed email design from a long, painstaking process to a smooth, streamlined one. Whether you are having trouble with illustrating from scratch, coming up with fresh layout ideas, or writing with the right tone and style, AI is here to make your life easier.

We hope that the list above has helped you find the right AI tool to serve as your design assistant. Till next time!