Who can believe we’re almost into November of 2024? This year has gone by in a flash. We’ve seen some big changes in email marketing over the year, especially with Google and Yahoo! beefing up their privacy rules and some key emerging trends, which we discussed in an earlier article. As we head towards the festive period, let’s take a look at what we predict will be the top ten major trends in email marketing for 2025.
Hyper-Personalisation
As email marketers, we know the value of personalising our messages to better connect with our audiences. We predict that 2025 will see hyper-personalisation take hold if you really want to stay current and relevant to your audience. The rise in the integration of AI tools into email marketing platforms will assist with this massively, allowing for deeper segmentation, which will drive hyper-personalisation. These tools will help brands dynamically tailor their content and product recommendations and send times for optimised open rates based on each subscriber’s previous behaviours and preferences.
Interactive Elements
Human history has taught us that the more directly involved a person is with something, the more likely they are to stay engaged. Email marketing platforms are increasingly introducing interactive elements that can be embedded directly within emails, including polls, sliders, quizzes, and live countdowns. These elements encourage direct interaction within the email, prolonging and increasing engagement and reducing the need for recipients to navigate away from their inboxes. And, of course, all actions are trackable, so you can see which types of interactive elements work best for each subscriber. #winning
Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)
These enable users to create web pages that load fast on mobile devices. Because they use HMTL, they’re designed to be easier for browsers to interpret, hence the faster loading. What this means for email marketers is that it will enable recipients to interact with live content like cart updates, booking confirmations, and social media feeds from directly within emails. This provides a smoother customer experience and delivers more data on behaviour for future hyper-personalisation for the subscriber.
Increased Privacy Controls and Compliance Requirements
Privacy is here to stay, a growing and evolving challenge for email marketers. It will, therefore, become increasingly important for brands to prioritise consent management, like double opt-in, and transparency around data usage. Brands should consider using blockchain technology to increase transparency around data collection and usage, email tracking and authentication, storage and security.
AI-Driven Content Generation
We’ve all seen the rise in the use of AI tools to create copy and images. We predict this trend will take off in 2025, with every email marketing agency leveraging the power of AI to create email copy, design, and subject lines based on analytics from previous campaigns. Using AI in this way will allow email marketers to work faster and more effectively.
Leveraging Zero-Party Data Collection
As privacy trends increase, brands will increasingly rely on zero-party data collection, which includes information such as interests, purchase intentions and preferences collected through interactive features such as quizzes or forms where they specify what types of offers they’re interested in. As the user willingly provides the information, it’s privacy-compliant and comes directly from them rather than being inferred. It’s likely to be more accurate and, therefore, more valuable to marketers looking to hyper-personalise.
Predictive Analytics for Email Segmentation
AI steps in again with predictive modelling, enabling more accurate audience segmentation. This will allow brands to deliver the right message at the right time (again, hyper-personalisation), reducing churn and increasing retention.
The Rise of Voice Assistants
Smart devices are everywhere these days, and people are becoming more aware of ways to use them to make life easier. We see that, in 2025, email marketers will start using this technology to enable voice-activated actions within emails. This will allow users to make simple commands like marking emails as read or adding items to a shopping cart. Consider this: Amazon Alexa is the market leader in voice commerce revenue, with others such as Google Assistant and Apple’s Siri also taking a chunk of the hands-free market. As it stands, the voice commerce market is expected to exceed $19 billion in 2023, up from around $5 billion in 2021. Marketers would be crazy not to leverage this trend!
Accessibility
We’ve all discovered the importance of creating inclusive emails, and in 2025, we predict this trend will increase. Screen reader compatibility and proper colour contrast will be more critical and, with the increasing trend for viewing on mobile devices, we see that mobile-first design will become essential.
Sustainability
This trend will just keep growing so brands will need to do their part. Creating and sending emails takes energy – not something often considered – after all, it’s not direct mail! Brands will need to focus on sustainable email practices, from reducing email carbon footprint by sending fewer, more targeted emails to promoting eco-friendly messages and CSR in email content.
So, as always, it’s an evolving landscape that will require us all to be smarter about who we send our messages to, what we send, how, why and when. All of it adds up to ensuring that 2025 will continue the trend of keeping us all on our toes!
– email marketing that delivers!
Shaun Reynolds has been specialising in email marketing since 2005 and, in February 2019, launched Email-Postman. Since then, we’ve helped over 100 clients across a range of industries and sectors build successful email marketing campaigns across various email marketing platforms. For further information or to discuss getting help with your email marketing, you can arrange a free call-back today by clicking here!