7 ways to invigorate your email marketing in 2025

Ready for 2025? We’ve gathered tips from various experts—including our Marigold subject matter experts—to help you build a results-driven email marketing program, with upleveled results by this time next year.

Email marketing in 2025 will hone in on hyper-personalization, sophisticated automation and data security. To remain competitive, marketers will leverage more AI-generated insights, implement robust security measures, and continuously refine email strategies based on solid, data-driven decisions. Wondering how to make it happen?

Below are key areas of focus for your 2025 program:*

1. Internal benchmarks: Learn how to set and use benchmarks to monitor and enhance performance.
2. Deliverability: Explore tactics to guarantee your emails land where they’re intended.
3. Data protection: Understand the best ways to securely collect and guard your data.
4. Journeys: Confirm that your automated flows are running smoothly and error-free.
5. Performance testing: Discover where to find testing motivation and how to develop a testing roadmap.
6. Technology: Know your platform requirements, contracts, and terms in order to stay organized and up-to-date.
7. Competitive analysis: Pinpoint what your competitors are up to — and surpass them.

Now read on to see our roundup of top recommendations and predictions to make 2025 your best year yet for elevated email marketing success.

1. Internal benchmarks

To create and use internal benchmarks, take the following steps (tweaking them as you may need, for measuring your own standard KPIs):

• • Identify key metrics: Focus on open rates, click-through rates, conversion rates, unsubscribe rates, and any other engagement measurements you define. Try to focus on the most important/meaningful ones – not just ‘vanity metrics.’
  • Regular monitoring: Track progress weekly or monthly using data charts, line graphs, word clouds, or other graphical measurement methods. You’ll determine the best format for you.
  • Establish baselines: Collect initial data to serve as a starting point for comparison. You’ll be glad you took the time to do this in the end. So, take time and really consider the best baselines for your business. 
  • Set SMART goals: Create specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound objectives. Compare KPIs consistently and systematically: Ensure you’re comparing similar metrics over time for accurate analysis. [SMART: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound]
  • Identify key channels: Pick your top three. Will you be focusing on LinkedIn, email, and webinars? Or perhaps email, ad campaigns, and social? Choose your top 3 to focus on, and dabble in others when it’s called for, depending on the campaign.

2. Deliverability

For deliverability, consider the following: 

• • Cleanse email lists regularly: Remove inactive subscribers and hard bounces to maintain the integrity of your list. Double check unsubscribes, routinely, for regular list hygiene.
  • Implement authentication protocols: Use SPF, DKIM, and DMARC to verify sender identity.
  • Use double opt-in: Verify subscriber intent, which will reduce bounce rates and improve engagement.
  • Segment your audience: Target subscribers based on behavior, customer demographics and preferences. 
  • Monitor sender (your own or 3rd party vendor) reputation: Regularly check your domain’s reputation with ISPs. This will ensure credibility and allow for potentially better open rates.

3. Data protection

Data protection is crucial as it helps to build and maintain customer trust by ensuring their personal information is kept secure. It will also ensure compliance with privacy regulations, which require marketers to handle subscriber data responsibly.

1. • Implement strong encryption: Use transport layer security (TLS) for email transmission and end-to-end encryption for sensitive content. 
   • Use secure storage solutions: If you can, avoid third-party services that may compromise data integrity.
   • Employ strong passwords: This may go without saying, but worth mentioning: Regularly update complex, unique passwords for all accounts.   
   • Conduct regular and often security audits: Assess any vulnerabilities which may be present in your email marketing infrastructure. 
   • Comply with privacy regulations: Adhere to GDPR, CAN-SPAM, CCPA and other relevant data protection laws.

4. Automate journeys

To optimize automated customer journeys: 

• • Leverage AI and machine learning (ML): Create intelligent workflows based on real-time data with or without the use of your chosen AI agent/platform.
  • Implement behavior-triggered emails: Set up automated messages based on customer actions: email opens and CTAs, included.
  • Integrate cross-channel automation: Assure consistency across email, SMS, blogs, and all social media.
  • Personalize content dynamically: Use AI and past customer data to hypercustomize messages to individuals’ preferences. Use eye-catching, personalized subject lines and salutations. Weave in any metrics you might have kept on your customers, individually and strategically.
  • Regularly review and update: Ensure all your automations are without error and aligned with your current goals and mission. (This is a key step, not to be skipped.)

5. Performance testing 

To build an effective testing plan:

1. • Analyze industry-best benchmarks: Compare your performance against sector-specific standards where possible. 
   • A/B testing key elements: Experiment with subject lines, content, and send times, ad copy or social media content. This will help you determine what’s working or what’s not,
   • Use AI-powered tools: Leverage predictive analytics and gen AI for optimizing email components. This can work in various ways. See our post on Marigold AI for more.
   • Monitor engagement metrics: Track open rates and click-through as well  as conversion rates. Each of them gives you different clues on the levers you can manipulate to improve your campaigns.
   • Iterate based on results: Continuously refine your approach based on ongoing test outcomes. When you change tacks mid-campaign, be sure to keep track of the results.

6. Technology

Keep it up to date: In today’s digital landscape, maintaining an up-to-date and efficiently running martech stack is essential for a successful email marketing program. 

• • A robust martech stack integrates various tools that streamline processes, enhance data analysis, and improve customer engagement. 
  • By regularly assessing and updating your stack, it ensures you’re leveraging the latest innovations. 
  • By prioritizing seamless integration, you can maximize the effectiveness to deliver personalized experiences that resonate best with your audience. 
  • For a more detailed explanation and to audit your current martech stack, you can reference our blog posts, here and here, as well as our Higher Education RFP Guide (which can be a baseline for all sectors). 

7. Competitive analysis

To understand and compete with competitors:

1. • Subscribe to your competitors’ mailing lists: Analyze their emails for content, frequency, hot topics  and design.
   • Use competitive intelligence tools: Monitor competitors’ email marketing strategies, as well. Keep tabs on them, (chances are your customers and prospects are, too).
   • Analyze published industry reports: Stay informed about sector-specific trends and best practices across your ICP. (Examples of these include the Forrester Wave, Gartner Magic Quadrant and peer review roundups like those from G2.)
   • Differentiate your approach: Develop unique value propositions based (partially) on competitor insights. Distinguish yourself with your particular set of distinctive features.
   • Benchmark against top performers: Set goals based on industry leaders’ performance metrics, as well as your past year’s, company-wise, in terms of goals made versus targeted.

By focusing on these main areas above, you can enhance your email marketing programs for better results, ensuring better engagement, deliverability, and overall performance in an increasingly competitive landscape.

On to the predictions, and ways Forrester projects these and other tactics will shape the new year, including how to amplify your program while taking them into consideration.

Predictions and setting your own plan

In a webinar on loyalty with Forrester analyst Emily Collins, we shared a few predictions including what they find will be most important for marketing in the new year from their report: Predictions 2025: B2C Marketing – CMOs Clear out the Clutter (10.22.24). We’ve added a few of our own, from our internal subject matter experts. Let’s get into it. [As we do, be aware that this is a Forrester-generated report, which is timely for the new year, gathering from their most recent research which paints a backdrop for you to move confidently into 2025.]

Forrester

Forrester Predictions for 2025 

• •  GenAI’s evolution: From efficiency to strategic impact: GenAI will push 1 in 4 CMOs to codify their marketing operations function.
  • AI agents: How they’ll assist (but not replace) your team in 2025: AI agents won’t affect marketing departments’ headcount in 2025; and how you’ll involve them in your department’s process.
  • Privacy laws: Navigating a fractured compliance landscape: First-time enforcement of new privacy laws will fracture marketing-legal relationships.
  • And more, predicting the year’s trends and highlights to streamline operations, boost efficiency, and seize emerging opportunities in 2025.

** If you’d like to read their overview of predictions in its entirety, you can access this subscriber-only Forrester report by filling out this form.

Marigold predicts

From Michele Fitzpatrick, Marigold’s VP of Global Strategic Services:

• Prediction 1:

The human experience effect: Brands need to accelerate the transition from customer experience to human experience in 2025 – Time to get personal.

• Prediction 2:

Loyalty will undergo rapid revolution and transformation in 2025 – Loyalty to brands: 37% of customers have switched away from favorites, (according to our most recent Brand Rankings Report): time to bring them back!

• Prediction 3:

Generational differences will matter more in 2025 and beyond – This is the opposite of what was being reported just 2 years ago. Make sure your campaigns and content can address anyone from Gen Z/Alphas to Boomers.

You can examine your own program against all ten of Michele’s predictions by viewing the webinar recap: Marigold’s: Top 10 Marketing Predictions for 2025.

[Note: Do not neglect the implications Apple’s iOS18.2 might have on your email marketing program. You can read more about these changes, including the use of RCS in messaging, here. ]

Wrapping it Up

B2C CMOs will face a year of transformation. From implementation of AI, to streamlining martech and loyalty stacks, teams will be tasked with cutting through the noise. Loyalty programs in particular benefit from added AI-enabled features, (such as order prediction and hyper-geotargeting). Privacy laws will remain key, in keeping with past norms, as well as the implications of AI and new iOS18 messaging rules. Be aware and familiarize yourself with all of these for utmost deliverability.

Bonus

View our webinar with all of Michele Fitzpatrick’s ‘Ten marketing predictions for 2025’ (with Chris Marriott) in this on-demand webinar. Register to get the link.

(If you’re looking for more on the above 7 areas of focus for email optimization, the January 21st webinar with Jeanne Jennings will highlight them, as well: “7 Marketing areas to optimize your email marketing impact,” found on LinkedIn: here.)

* Seven areas of focus list, solely – credit: Jeanne Jennings, in her Checklist for Email Marketing Success in 2025: 7 Areas to Optimize for Impact report. Jan. 2025.