Four Top Marketing Trends for 2026

By the end of 2026, it’s predicted that people will send and receive 392.5 billion daily emails. With a 68:1 ROI for emails, this may seem like a blessing for many companies. However, breaking through the noise can be challenging as email permeates through so many peoples’ lives. Adding to the challenge are the drastic changes in organic search performance and visibility due to large language models (LLMs).

How will marketers develop their strategies to break through the noise to remain competitive and increase their brand awareness in the coming year and beyond? Here are four marketing predictions I see taking hold in 2026.

The End of Bad Emails, Finally

Creating aesthetically pleasing, content-relevant emails used to be challenging, especially for smaller brands with limited time, best practice knowledge, and resources. Those days have mostly passed. In 2026, we’ll see more personalized emails from brands of all sizes.

With the help of artificial intelligence (AI), modern-day marketing platforms allow companies to easily create effective email strategies by combining segmentation, personalized content, and behavioral cues that influence buying decisions. Marketers can use their marketing tools to create intuitive segments, product recommendations, and marketing copy that tap into behavioral cues such as price anchoring and a sense of urgency, all with the literal click of a button.

The tools and information on what’s supposed to be done are out there, but the challenge for many has been connecting these best practices with a brand’s unique voice and strategy. With AI, this is no longer a daunting task.

Marketers Will Realize the Value of Email Automation

Email automation isn’t new, and although it’s been around for two decades, it hasn’t been utilized to its full potential by most brands. However, the awareness of marketers of its high-ROI potential and the ease with which it can be implemented is a combination that I expect will drive high adoption in 2026.

The cost and performance of paid ads, by nature, fluctuate, and cutting through the noise of crowded social platforms poses challenges for brands. When consumers shop, these feeds often become even more crowded with targeting ads. The user experience leaves a lot to be desired.

Behavior-based automated email, however, has the opposite effect. Because automated emails are sent only when users take actions, such as abandoning a shopping cart or viewing a specific product page, they are naturally timely and relevant. This explains why one in three customers who click on an automated email makes a purchase compared to just one in 18 from scheduled email campaigns. Social media can’t compete with a 33% conversion rate.

Another reason I expect to see an influx of brands adopting email automation is that marketing platforms make it easier than ever to create and deploy automated messaging. Modern-day platforms combine automation templates and AI tools to ease the creation process and remove any strategic knowledge gap that may exist for the marketer, once common reasons why brands were slow to enact automation.

Brands, even those with limited resources and knowledge, can create and deploy automated messages that generate 37% of all email marketing orders in only a matter of minutes.

Marketers Who Don’t Adapt to AI Will Be Left Behind

Today’s marketers live in the AI era, and the rate of change is faster than ever. Experienced marketers who rely solely on existing knowledge will find themselves being displaced by those who adopt new technology in their everyday workflows. The challenge for many is how to keep up with different platforms and their capabilities, which move seemingly daily.

Because of this, I expect we’ll see more professional development and experimentation among marketers than is typical. Marketers will be well served to make time each day to learn and experiment with how AI can improve their day-to-day tasks. Take, for instance, the junior email marketer tasked with creating multiple automated workflows to increase sales. This task may have once required multiple people and previous experience to accomplish. Today, a single marketer can use their marketing platform to accomplish the task in minutes, not days.

This same approach will be taken regardless of position, seniority, or type of company. While AI will not replace people, those who do not embrace and learn how to use it effectively will be left behind.

So Long SEO, Hello LLM

It’s a new day in search and discovery. Due to AI overviews and increased adoption of AI platforms, website traffic is declining. Being visible in LLMs is no longer a nice-to-have; it’s essential. Next year, marketers will be in an all-out race vying for visibility on LLMs.

Those who succeed will do so by studying and learning what prompts results in their company and competition being referenced, and which sources are used to determine those results.  One of the best ways to do this is to reverse engineer what the LLM is responding to, identify the patterns, and then create similar types of content or influence the sources individual LLMs rely on.

For example, some LLMs may prioritize business and trade publications. Companies wanting to be included in those searches will need to find ways to be included in those publications. However, not all LLMs pull from the same sources, so marketers need to test and optimize for multiple LLMs.

The Year Ahead

Whether it’s creating automated emails or improving visibility in LLMs, 2026 promises to be a year of efficiency driven by AI. Marketers who want to keep pace with their peers to drive their companies forward must learn how to implement AI into all aspects of their daily workflows. Failure to do so will not only cause sales to slow but also make catching up even more difficult.

Evaldas Mockus is the VP of Marketing with extensive experience in SEO at Omnisend, an email & SMS marketing platform designed to help ecommerce businesses grow faster. Results-oriented and with a demonstrated history of working in IT and Saas companies, Evaldas helps businesses grow in the digital space through the implementation of proper SEO techniques paired with Content marketing and PR strategies.