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On average, it takes an email marketing team two weeks to create a single email.
That means two weeks of tinkering with email copy, email design, and email coding before the message is ready for approval, testing, and ultimately sending to the world.
And 46% of email marketers have up to five emails in production at any given time. When we asked email designers the same question in 2023, only 23% of respondents said they have up to five emails in production at any given time.
Email marketers are being asked to significantly increase their efforts (which probably comes as no surprise).
We know that email workflows can quickly become complex. But we also know that there are many new technologies that help make one of the most fun parts of the email workflow – design – smoother.
For our State of Email Innovations report, we asked over 1,000 email marketers how exactly emails are created and what tools their teams use. Here's what we found:
Email designer still <3 Adobe
You just can't get rid of Photoshop and Email Designer.
The graphic design programs most commonly used by email marketers continue to be dominated by Adobe programs such as Photoshop (37%), Illustrator (22%) and InDesign (14%).
There's a reason Adobe products rank at the top: they're some of the most robust tools you can work with.
While graphic design programs like Photoshop are favored by designers, they can sometimes add challenges to the overall email marketing workflow. That's because Photoshop (and its cousins Illustrator and InDesign) require training before you can use them effectively. The same reason these tools are so great to work with—the amount of customization and control you have as a designer—makes it difficult for others to stop by and give feedback.
This could be the reason 40% of email marketers said email design delays production.
Coordinating copywriters, designers, developers and reviewers for email campaigns is one of the biggest challenges for email marketers.
…but DIY design tools are becoming increasingly popular
Anyone-use tools like Figma and Canva are growing in popularity as email marketers need to learn to do more with less.
In 2023, Adobe ranked 1st, 2nd, and 3rd among the most popular design tools, but this year Figma moved up to 2nd place. Canva held on to its 4th place as it is considered the best tool for non-designers.
For teams that don't have a designer in-house (or just want a tool that doesn't require 10,000 hours to learn), Canva is a great option.
These tools are easy for anyone to learn, without 10,000 hours of training and a degree in graphic design. This is precisely why teams looking to speed up the email approval process—notoriously one of the sticking points in any email workflow—may switch to a more beginner-friendly tool.
How email design trends influence email design tools
One reason DIY design tools like Canva and Figma are becoming increasingly popular is that the way email marketers design and create emails has fundamentally changed.
In the past, emails were more like a full-page ad in a magazine. Something with pictures, like this:
Source: Really Good Emails
It’s easy to imagine such an email campaign in a magazine, even without the scroll-friendly messages.
This email from 2015 captures the photogenic, picture-perfect design trends of the time. Emails from the 2010s contained many more elements that made them look like the kind of layered designs often found in magazines at the time. Photoshop (and similar products) make perfect sense for this kind of design.
Even today's most fantastic email designs, with their many blocks of color, don't have as much going on as these emails—and they're not even the worst offenders of our time.
Source: Really Good Emails
(I'm not harboring millennial ~*nostalgia*~ for this outfit that I 100% wore to work in 2016.)
This was before the kind of extensive personalization we know today. Back then, it was a revelation if you used a first name in a subject line or in an email.
Email marketing certainly wasn't easy then, and it isn't easy now, but without the demand for personalized “Recommended for you” style blocks or other behavior-based triggers, creating an engaging email was much easier.
Here's another example from 2018 that looks like it was taken straight from a 4th of July catalog cover:
Source: Really Good Emails
Today, the dual requirement of personalization and the use of bells and whistles digital effects makes email design a much more modular experience.
You can see that with ESPs. WYSIWYG editors are much easier to use and have more sophisticated built-in tools that allow for quickly sharing images, text, and code. When we asked email designers about the coding tools they use, 20% named the code editor in their ESP, which is the first time it's ranked first. This shows that more and more ESPs are doing the heavy lifting for email marketers and adding features that consolidate the marketing tech stack.
Instead of swapping out templates or designing completely from scratch, highly productive teams combine different email elements for each campaign. Designers put different building blocks together in different ways, which is much better suited to a UX-centered design tool like Figma.
Here is an example of the same brand from 2024:
Source: JCrew.
Not only is there one main animation, but there is also a huge selection of clothing blocks with a left-right-left design. It feels exactly like scrolling through a website rather than an advert or recreating the feel of a real magazine.
This trend toward more modular design processes could also be due to email marketers increasingly being asked to do more with less. With this focus on modular components, email design has become more about creating fully functional email design systems than designing individual emails. And creating design systems is something that ideally works with Figma.
44% of marketers create two to three versions of each email, so it's no wonder we're all trying to save time.
All of this means that we're likely to continue to see disruption in the most popular email design tools as teams design and create emails more individually in the future.
Smarter email design with Litmus
If you feel like you're constantly juggling a million different tools to send an email, we understand.
That's why Litmus doesn't add any more steps to your production process, but integrates with over 100 different ESPs. No more jumping from one tab to the next – save time and reduce errors with a seamless workflow across all your favorite tools.
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