What’s in Store for Email Marketers in 2025?

It’s that time of year again when we either look back at what happened over the past year or what’s coming in the year ahead. Looking back and writing about what happened is easy, so I figured I would try to tackle some predictions for the New Year. I promise to revisit this article at the end of 2025 and see how I did. For what it’s worth, I predicted the Chicago Bears would have a good season this year. If you follow the NFL at all, you know that I missed that one by a pretty hefty margin. So, can I do a better job at predicting how the digital marketing and email industry will perform next year than my favorite NFL team? Let’s find out.

1. Email Marketing Keeps Growing

OK, first an easy one. Email will keep on keeping on. That’s not exactly a hard prediction, since it’s been doing exactly that for over four decades. But I’ll go out on a limb and predict that email will grow as a part of the marketing mix for many companies.

One reason for the growth is that other channels will become more challenging to execute while complying with new regulations. One example is the new rules around one-to-one lead generation, which will have major impacts on channels like SMS and call center marketing. Audience targeting will become more difficult as technology and data privacy laws evolve, impacting online ad targeting. These types of changes will open the door for more budget shifting to email marketing, especially among performance marketers. That additional budget should also support the email channel as it evolves to meet changing technology, as well.

2. Video Use will Grow Dramatically

Wait a minute. I’m pretty sure we’ve already had ‘the year of digital video’, haven’t we? Yes, but if you think video was a big part of digital marketing in 2024, just wait for 2025. Why? AI of course. If you haven’t had a chance to check out what AI is already capable of doing with video and audio creation, get ready, because it’s going to make the creation of professional-looking video much faster and easier than ever before.

While still in its early stages (most AI video tools can’t create true high-definition video… yet) the early functionality is already impressive. AI can modify existing video or create entirely new video content from scratch, based on effective prompting and guidance. Much like any type of AI content creation, you get out what you put in, so prompting will continue to be an extremely valuable skill set. As marketers get better at directing AI tools regarding the video they want to create, the volume of video content being produced could skyrocket. We’ll see it everywhere. On websites, social platforms, and most certainly in email.

3. AI will have a Big Impact on the Way People Interact with their Email Inboxes

AI again? Yup, it’s pretty unavoidable already, and that’s only going to become more true in 2025. Directly related to email, AI is definitely going to become a bigger part of our inbox experience. Here are two places I expect to see it.

1) AI Preview Text

This is already being experimented on by the major inbox providers. Marketers are used to controlling the preview text associated with the emails they send. Creating that preview text is a part of every marketer’s workflow. Well, AI is going to start stepping in and providing summaries of your email content, creating its own preview text that will display in the inbox. Inbox providers see this as a way to more transparently let email recipients know what is in an email when scanning their inbox. However, this is a challenging issue for marketers on many levels. If AI is going to write that preview text in each consumer’s inbox, marketers really need the email content to come through accurately. How will those AI models summarize humor or emails that are a bit more complex? Will some of the mistakes we see AI currently make in content summarization crop up? Will it force marketers to become more literal in their email copy? We simply don’t know right now. That’s a big part of the challenge.

2) AI Inbox Curation Tools

These have been slowly developing in the past few years but expect them to take a major step forward in the new year. Tools that will help organize or filter inboxes will gain more traction with average consumers and not just the more tech-savvy folks. It’s probably debatable whether some of these are ‘really’ AI or just algorithms sifting through data and making recommendations, but for the consumer, it all just comes under that AI generalization.

4. More Data Privacy Laws will be Passed

We’re at 20 and counting when it comes to U.S. states with their own data privacy laws. It’s safe to say that number will go up in 2025. But the big question is whether or not we’ll see a federal data privacy law next year. Out of curiosity, when I asked AI, the response in my search results says “...it’s unlikely that a comprehensive national data privacy law will be enacted in the US in 2025.” So, that answers that! LOL!

We’re about to welcome a new administration, along with shifting control of Congress (with a very slim majority). Will all this lead to movement on a federal data privacy law or will it take a back burner to other issues? Part of me wants to predict something will happen, but in reality, I think the status quo will remain for at least another year. So, keep those privacy policies updated as more states pass their own laws around consumer data!

5. Marketers will Run Into the Law of Diminishing Returns in Email Personalization.

For as long as I can remember, the holy grail of marketing has been the ability to put exactly the right offer in front of the right consumer at just the right time. True 1-to-1 marketing was considered to be the ultimate marketing campaign optimization. While no one I’ve seen has predicted this marketing ‘singularity’ would produce the end of the world (like CERN or sentient AI) I have started to see more marketers question if this really should be the goal.

In a perfect world, absolute 1-to-1 personalization would be the ultimate marketing relationship with consumers. However, achieving that becomes more expensive (in both money and time/effort) the closer you get to it. There comes a point where moving even closer to perfect personalization may not drive enough incremental performance and revenue to be worth the investment. More marketers will reach this conclusion in 2025 and find a happy medium where they dial up personalization to a certain point where it still drives enough improvement to merit the effort (which will vary from one company to another).

So, those annual ‘death of email’ predictions won’t be holding any water in 2025. That day, should it ever come, is well down the road and certainly not something we’ll be dealing with in 2025. Now about the Chicago Bears next year…

Happy New Year, everyone!

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash