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The State of Email Marketing and Newsletters 2025

Jan 30, 2025 | Blog

Is your email strategy ready for 2025?

When implementing a new email strategy, it’s always important to consider how new changes in the industry can affect your performance and email deliverability.

In this blog post, we’ll guide you through some of the biggest trends and changes in the landscape of email marketing in 2025 – including major changes from email clients like Apple and Gmail to new AI opportunities.

 

Staying relevant – is it more important than ever?

One of the biggest challenges in email marketing is keeping your emails out of the spam folder. Originally, spam was a term used for unsolicited online messages – often in the form of emails. Back then, all you had to do to stay clear of the spam box was to avoid specific “spam buzzwords” like “free”, “win” and “congratulations”.

Today, spam is no longer just illegal and unsolicited messages but also irrelevant content. This means that email clients (like Gmail and Outlook) are looking at your sender reputation based on how active your subscribers are. Do you have a very low open rate? Then email clients will most likely consider your content to be irrelevant, sending more of your future emails in the spam box. However, other factors like clicks, replies, spam rate etc. also affects your sender reputation.

 

Gmail’s 2024 guidelines for a “safer, less spammy inbox”

In 2024 Gmail introduced new Email Sender Guidelines, in their war against “spammy inboxes”. The guidelines are based on 3 specific requirements.

  1. Verifying your sender profiles by setting up SPF, DKIM and for bulk senders (sending more than 5,000 email per day); setting up DMARC.
  2. Subscription requirements: Make sure recipients opt in to get message from you and consider unsubscribing recipients who don’t open or read your messages. And more importantly; make it easy to unsubscribe. For bulk senders (sending more than 5,000 emails per day), this means setting up a one-click unsubscribe link. And for all senders, always include an unsubscribe link and make sure it works (deleting the recipient within 48 hours).
  3. Send relevant content. You show Gmail (and other email clients) that you’re sending relevant content by having subscribers who interact and engage with your content (opening, clicking in and replying to your emails). This entails that you do not use a “no reply” sender – you can read more about the pitfalls of a “no reply” sender here. Furthermore, according to Gmails guidelines, your spam rate should always be under 0.10% and never above 0.30%.

Email changes in Apple’s iOS 18 update

In 2024 Apple also introduced changes in the way they handle emails in their app. For email marketeers, there were specifically two important changes in the iOS 18 update.

1: Automatic categorization of emails in 4 different folders: Primary, transactions, updates and promotions. When you’re sending marketing emails, there’s a very big chance that your emails will end up in the promotions folder. And this could have a negative impact on your performance, because now, Apple users must actively choose to access their Promotions folder in order to see your email. And there’s a big risk that users will rarely access this folder compared to the Primary and Updates folders.

2: AI summaries of emails: Now, users can get a short summary of the email (before they open it). The summary will replace your preheader and could also have a negative impact on your performance. One scenario could be that you spend a lot of time writing good content and building up the email, while recipients using Apple’s mail app only will see is a summary like “discount on t-shirts”. There goes all the effort of storytelling.

Gmail’s and Apple’s changes both show the importance of sending relevant, interesting content and building up trust when you’re working with email marketing in 2025.

 

Subscribers expect personalization

Personalization used to be a competitive advantage when working with email marketing. Today, recipients expect personalization, making it a “need to have” rather than a “nice to have” in an effective email strategy. Luckily, most email platforms help you by offering important data from your subscribers:

  • Personal information
  • Interactions with your emails
  • Interactions on your website
  • Customer data

All this data is crucial for building segments, offering personal product recommendations, and building email automations based on triggers from your customers’ interactions with your emails and on your website.

 

Explore the advantages of first-party data

First-party data is the data you collect without third party channels. The data you collect through emails are considered first-party data, and by collecting large amounts of these, you gain a lot of advantages:

  • You own the data.
  • You don’t rely on a third parties and their rules – you decide which data you collect and how to use them.
  • When prices on ad channels (like Meta and Google) rise, you have an alternative.

While there is generally a greater focus on user’s privacy, your work as a marketer changes – for example, when Apple introduced new privacy features in 2023 and Google’s announcement on ending the third-party cookie, forcing marketeers to rethink their approach to digital marketing.

As consumers, we often applaud these new measures, as they’re meant to secure our private data. However, as marketeers, we need to work in new ways. And one of those ways is by collecting our own (first-party) data and using them how we want – within the boundaries of the GDPR rules, of course.

 

New possibilities with AI

Artificial intelligence (AI) is no longer the future – most companies have already implemented AI in some form as an integral part of their digital presence. AI technologies like ChatGPT and advanced algorithms can revolutionize marketing efforts and provide businesses with new opportunities to optimize processes. In terms of email marketing, there are several areas where AI can help improve your content and processes. 

Using AI in email marketing

Here are some specific areas where you can implement AI in your email efforts:

  • Personalization: There’s a wide range of platforms that can help you personalize your emails using AI. One of the latest innovations is the Danish system, Alvas.ai, which helps deliver personalized content in emails. Additionally, there are intelligent recommendation tools like Raptor and Relewise that provide personalized product recommendations based on the recipient’s individual behavior.
  • Proofreading: Use AI tools like ChatGPT or Gemini to find and correct typos and grammatical errors in your emails.
  • Subject Lines: Generate concise and specific subject lines that capture the recipient’s attention.
  • Short Texts: Let AI draft text copy or descriptions of product benefits, which you can then adapt to your own style.
  • Text Summarization: If your text is too long, AI can help trim it down to a desired number of characters while keeping your core points and messages.

By integrating AI into your email marketing processes, you can streamline your work and ensure your newsletters remain relevant and engaging. However, always remember to adapt AI-generated content to your own tone of voice to maintain the authenticity of your messages.

 

Conclusion

There are many important factors to consider when implementing your 2025 email marketing and newsletter strategy. As this blog post shows, email clients are making changes that can affect your email performance, demanding new measures to maintain a high deliverability. Changes in the marketing landscape in general also show the importance of a clear and effective email strategy, collecting and using first-party data, relying less on third-party channels.

Heysender blog

Read our other blog entries to get new inspiration for your transactional emails.

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