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It takes an email marketing team an average of 2 weeks to produce a single email.

That’s two weeks of tinkering with email copy, email design, and email coding before it’s ready for approvals, testing, and finally, sending it out to the world.

And at any given time, 46% of email marketers have up to five emails in production. When we asked email designers in 2023 the same question, only 23% of respondents said they have up to five emails in production, at any given time.

Email marketers are being asked to ramp up significantly (something that probably comes as no surprise to you.)

We know that email workflows can get complex pretty quickly. But we also know that there’s a lot of new technology out there that helps make one of the most fun parts of the email workflow—design—go more smoothly.

So we asked over ~1000 email marketers exactly how emails get made—and what tools their teams use—for our State of Email Innovations report. Here’s what we found:

Email designers still <3 Adobe

Photoshop, email designers just can’t quit you.

The most popular graphic design programs email marketers use continue to be dominated by Adobe programs like Photoshop (37%), Illustrator (22%), and InDesign (14%).

There’s a reason Adobe products come in at the top—they’re some of the most robust tools you can work with.

While graphic design programs like Photoshop are preferred by designers, they can sometimes pose challenges to the email marketing workflow overall. That’s because Photoshop (and cousins Illustrator and InDesign) require training before you can use them effectively. The same reason that these tools are great to work with—the amount of customization and control you have as a designer—makes it difficult for someone else to pop in and add their feedback.

That may be why 40% of email marketers said that designing emails tend to hold up production.

Coordinating copywriters, designers, developers, and reviewers for email campaigns is one of the biggest challenges email marketers face.

…but DIY design tools are becoming more popular

Tools that anyone can use, like Figma and Canva, have become more popular as email marketers have to learn how to do more with less.

In 2023, Adobe went 1-2-3 on the most popular design tools, but this year, Figma moved to #2. Canva held its #4 spot, as it’s known as the best tool for non-designers to use.

For teams that don’t have a dedicated designer (or simply want a tool that you don’t need 10,000 hours to become proficient in), Canva is a great option.

These are tools anyone can learn how to use easily, without 10,000 hours of training and a degree in graphic design. That’s 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 newbie-friendly tool.

How email design trends influence email design tools

Part of the increased popularity of DIY design tools like Canva and Figma is that the way email marketers conceptualize and build emails has fundamentally changed.

In the past, emails looked and felt more like a full-page ad in a magazine. Something image-driven, like this:

Source: Really Good Emails

You can picture an email campaign like this easily in a magazine, even without the scroll-friendly messaging.

This email, from back in 2015, captures the photo-forward, picture-perfect design trends at the time. Emails from the 2010s had a lot more elements that made them look like the kinds of layered designs often found in magazines at the time. Photoshop (and similar products) make perfect sense to use for this kind of design.

Even the most zine-y, color-blocked email designs today don’t have as much going on as these emails—and they’re not even the worst offenders of the era.

Source: Really Good Emails

(Not me having millennial ~*nostalgia*~ over this outfit I 100% wore to work in 2016.)

This is before the kind of in-depth personalization we know today. Back then, if you used a first name in a subject line or in an email, that was a revelation.

Email marketing certainly wasn’t simple then and it’s not now, but without demand for personalized “recommended for you” style blocks or other behavioral triggers, creating a beautiful email felt a lot more straightforward.

Here’s another example from 2018, which looks pulled straight from a 4th of July catalog cover:

Source: Really Good Emails

Today, the dual demands of personalization and bells-and-whistles digital effects makes designing email a much more of a modular experience.

You can see this with ESPs. WYSIWYG editors are much easier to use, with more sophisticated built-in tools that allow for quick swaps in images, text, and code. When we asked email designers about the coding tools they use, 20% said the code editor in their ESP, which is the first time it’s taken the #1 spot. It goes to show that more ESPs are doing the heavy lifting for email marketers, adding features that consolidate the marketing tech stack.

Rather than swap out templates or design completely from scratch, super-productive teams mix and match different email elements for each campaign. Designers pull various building blocks together in different ways, which is much more suited to a UX-centric design tool like Figma.

Here’s an example from the same brand, from 2024:

Source: J Crew.

Not only is there lead animation, there’s blocks on blocks on blocks of clothing to choose from, with a left-right-left design. It feels exactly like scrolling through a website instead of an ad or recreating an IRL magazine feel.

This move toward more modular design processes may also be because email marketers are increasingly 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 is ideally done with Figma.

With 44% of marketers building 2-3 versions of every email, it’s no wonder we’re all trying to save some time.

What this all means is it’s likely we’ll continue to see shake-ups in the most popular email design tools as teams design and build emails in a more individualized way in the future.

Email design made smarter with Litmus

If you’re feeling like you’re constantly juggling between a million different tools to get an email out the door, we feel you.

That’s why instead of adding more steps to your production process, Litmus integrates with 100+ different ESPs. Forget about hopping from one tab to another—save time and reduce errors with one seamless workflow for all of your favorite tools.