What’s next for email creative? Here are our top three email trends to look out for in 2016.

1. Interactive Email Creatives

A few brands have experimented with pushing the envelope of email design by creating carousel-type elements, hamburger menus, and interactive features in their emails. The very progressive and skilled email designers are looking to push email HTML5 to the limit with the mindset of developing a mini website-like experience in an email.

Email trends have progressively gotten more creative over the years, but we can expect to see even more clever email creatives in 2016.

2. Fluid Hybrid Design Will Become the New Normal

Fluid hybrid design, also known as “spongy” design, is quickly becoming the go-to framework for responsive emails. The technique is quickly replacing media queries and creates emails that look great on any device and in most email clients.

If you’re interested in learning more about fluid hybrid design check out this article.

3. Mobile First Design

Since mobile has risen greatly in the past year, designing emails for mobile-first will be a high priority. The mobile-first mindset is warranted, with the statistics showing that over 50% of consumers use their mobile devices to check emails.

For the ultimate list of email statistics check out this article.

Email trends for 2016 all have one thing in common: Responsive Experience

Businesses can’t ignore the numbers anymore. We have watched sites slowly make their way over to the mobile responsive world, with email lagging far behind. Only 17% of marketers are currently using responsive email design. This means the other 83% are missing out on a huge market of opportunity.

Progressive email designers and developers are going to keep innovating but must keep the mobile-first design mindset if they expect to use email marketing effectively.