Biggest Email Marketing Trends in 2025 — Your Blueprint for What’s Coming Next

Why keep up with the trends in email marketing?

You run email campaigns and they work pretty well. But numbers suggest there’s always quite a bit of room for growth. 

Right now, we’re sending more emails than ever before. According to The Radicati Group, daily email volume will hit 376.4 billion messages in 2025. That’s a lot of competition for attention in the inbox.

But here’s something interesting — people actually want to hear from you. 88% of people check their email every day, with 40% specifically looking for brand offers and discounts. This means your subscribers are already primed to engage with your content.

Smart businesses are turning this engagement into real results. One example is Fridja, an appliance e-commerce store. By staying on top of email marketing best practices and using pre-order campaigns, they managed to sell 25% of their initial stock through their newsletter alone.

Biovie, a fruit retailer, found that email marketing drives 90% of their limited-time release sales. Knowing this, they were able to sell 5 tons of mangos using well-timed email campaigns that connected with their audience.

So the reason to stay current with email trends is pretty straightforward — they help you communicate better with your subscribers. When you understand what works now (not five years ago), you can: create campaigns that actually get opened and read and build stronger connections with your subscribers, turning them into paying customers more effectively. 

The latest email marketing trends that determine its future

Well, email marketing in 2025 looks pretty different from what we’ve seen before. We’re talking about emails that change based on who’s reading them and artificial intelligence making the whole process smarter. And with this guide, you don’t have to travel to an email marketing conference to learn all about it! Let’s take a closer look at the most epic (and important) email marketing trends.  

Accessibility in emails

Making emails (and anything online, really) accessible for everyone seems pretty obvious, right? But lots of marketing emails are still pretty hard to perceive for people with different abilities. 

You might think it’s not that important, but let’s take the most obvious case when reading from the screen can be a challenge — vision impairment. 2.2 billion people have a near or distance vision impairment, and occurrences of complete vision loss are predicted to increase by 55% by 2050. 

The golden standard of online accessibility guidelines is the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Yet, when WebAIM measured the top million websites against WCAG guidelines in 2024, they found that 95.9% of home pages had detected WCAG 2 failures a slight improvement from 96.3% in 2023). So there’s still a long way to go.  

According to the latest report on the state of email trends by Litmus, quite a few marketers can’t call email accessibility a top performance driver, but they put some effort towards improving it because it just feels right. Unsurprisingly, in 2024, 99.9% of emails tested by the Email Markup Consortium, had “critical” or “serious” accessibility issues.

Here’s what making emails accessible actually means:

• Screen-reader-friendly (those programs that read emails out loud) content with proper markup
• Good contrast between the text and backgrounds, so everyone can read it
• Alt text for images (those little descriptions that tell you what’s in a picture)
• Simple, clear layouts that make sense when you zoom in
• Buttons and links big enough to click easily

Your email template builder should help with a lot of this. But the key is thinking about accessibility from the start — not trying to fix it later.

And yes, measuring how well accessible emails work can be tricky. But think about it this way — when your emails are easier to read and use, more people can actually see what you’re offering. That means more people can buy your stuff or use your services.

So while some marketers might skip accessibility because it doesn’t show up right away in their performance numbers, smart businesses are playing the long game. 

Dark mode in emails

Dark mode is going to be pretty important for email marketers in 2025. According to The State of Email Trends 2024 Report, companies using dark mode coding techniques saw better results in their email marketing performance.

So what does this mean for your email design? Your templates need to look good in both light and dark settings in all email clients. This goes beyond just swapping colors — your images, logos, and design elements should work well either way. When subscribers open your marketing campaigns in dark mode (which lots of people use at night or all the time), everything should still be clear and easy to read.

The technical side of dark mode might seem complicated, but email template builders can help you handle the initial steps. You’ll want to work with transparent backgrounds for your images and spend some time testing how your brand colors appear on darker backgrounds. Your calls-to-action need special attention too — they should stand out and stay clickable no matter which mode your subscriber prefers.

Dark mode isn’t going away. An increasing number of email clients and devices offer this option, so your email marketing strategy should include dark mode testing as a regular part of your campaign process. 

Prioritizing mobile experience

61% of people check their email mainly on mobile devices. The days of designing emails for desktop first are long gone. Your subscribers are reading your marketing emails on their phones while standing in line, sitting on the bus, or relaxing on their couch. And if your emails don’t work well on mobile, you’re making it hard for most of your audience to engage with your content.

On average, email marketers send between 4 and 7 emails per month to their subscribers. But the number matters less than how well these emails work on mobile devices. The best campaigns are built with phones in mind from the start. Your subject lines should be short enough to read fully on a mobile screen, and your templates should adjust smoothly to any screen size.

Everything from your images to your buttons needs to work well with taps and swipes, and your content should get straight to the point. For better readability on small screens, use bigger fonts: 10 to 14 pixels if you have a long body copy or 14 to 16 if it’s shorter. Your email template builder should help you create content that flows naturally on a phone screen. 

The most effective email marketing strategy in 2025 treats mobile as the default, not an afterthought. Your template builder can help you preview how everything will look on different devices, so you can catch any problems before sending. When your campaigns work well on phones, they tend to work well everywhere else too. And that means better results across the board. 

Advanced segmentation

About 90% of marketers agree that splitting the email list into smaller groups works very well and boosts the performance of their campaigns. And the case of Tumblr proved this. When they started sending targeted emails through HubSpot, they saw likes triple and shares increase five times. The best part? Their marketing team did all this without any coding or technical help. They just used built-in email service provider tools, like the ones available in Selzy, to create different subscriber lists and send daily targeted content.

Your email marketing performance depends on sending the right content to the right people. You can split your subscribers based on quite a few things, like what they buy and how often they shop, which emails they open and what links they click, where they live and what time zone they’re in, what topics and content they care about, how often they want to hear from you, and the list goes on.

Keep in mind that good segmentation isn’t about having as many groups as you can. It’s about having the right groups that make sense for your business and your subscribers. Even a few well-thought-out segments can make your email marketing campaigns work much better than sending the same content to everyone.

But getting segmentation right can be tricky. Many marketing teams struggle with managing their data and using it well. Your email service provider should help with this — look for tools that make it easy to create and manage different subscriber groups.

Personalization

More than 80% of marketers say personalization makes their emails perform better. And we’re talking about real personalization here, not just throwing someone’s first name into the subject line.

A good example is Suitsupply. When they got serious about personalization, sending emails based on customer behavior, they saw 5-7 times more engagement and their conversion rates jumped 5-10 times compared to their regular emails.

Your subscribers expect personalized emails now — it’s become pretty normal to get emails that feel like they were made just for you, including dynamic email content, real-time updates, and personalized subject lines, too. 

Despite that, 5% of companies still don’t personalize their emails at all and 24% complained about inadequate data for effective personalization. The key is starting simple — use what you know about your subscribers to make your content more relevant, then build from there. It’s all possible with good email template builders and some smart data collection.

Automation

Creating automated emails has become the top priority for marketers — and for pretty good reasons. 62% of marketers need two weeks or more to create a single email campaign, and a lack of appropriate email marketing resources is the second largest bottleneck in production

So while it might take about two weeks to create a single email campaign, smart automation changes this completely. Want proof? Look at the case of Snatcher, an online store that used automated cart recovery emails. They made $120,000 in extra sales, with half of their automated emails getting opened. 

Automation helps with all sorts of email marketing campaigns. Your welcome messages, birthday offers, and cart reminder emails can all be set up once and sent automatically. These campaigns work to engage subscribers and are more resource-effective than regular ones.

Using Artificial Intelligence

AI in email marketing has gotten more and more predominant. According to The State of Email Trends 2024 Report, 34% of email marketers use AI to write their content at least occasionally. And while AI helps save time, the results have been quite mixed so far. Same people unanimously rated all generative AI for copy and for images among the bottom three in terms of performance.

But when it works, it works. Here’s one case: a marketing company tried AI-generated emails and got some wild results — 2.9 times more opens and 11 times more clicks than their regular emails. They made 20 times what they spent on setting it up. So yeah, AI can work pretty well when used right.

The real power of AI shows up in how it helps create dynamic email content and personalized campaigns. Your marketing strategy can use AI to figure out: when to send emails to each subscriber, which products to recommend, how to write better subject lines, what content different subscribers might like — the list goes on and is only limited by your creativity. 

But there’s a catch: AI’s impact on your email marketing performance depends on having clean, useful data for the AI to work with.

There’s also good news: you can now generate email templates based on your specifications right in your Selzy account. Maybe an AI welcome email for onboarding a new coffee shop customer? 

All it takes is a message in the chat — and you’ll get any email you can think of. Best of all, you can generate a template in the email editor for free! 

Improved email security

Email security has gotten pretty serious gearing up for 2025. According to the Cofense Annual State of Email Security 2024 Report, malicious emails getting past security systems went up by 104.5%. And these bad emails come in fast — about one every minute.

Credential phishing (when someone tries to steal your login info) went up 67% from 2022. It makes up most of all email threats. And those scams with links hidden in QR codes you’ve been hearing about? They increased by 331%.

That’s why it’s getting not just trendier but more and more important to keep an eye on proper use and security of data, for both employees and the company’s customers. 

The Mimecast Security Report shows that 9 out of 10 companies now have cybersecurity plans. They need them — ransomware attacks (when the victim’s data is blocked by malware demanding to pay a “ransom”) went up 95% in one year, and the average payment jumped from $212,000 to $740,000. That’s quite a price tag for poor security.

Want to see what happens when email security (whether it’s email contents or email addresses) goes wrong? A company called Consilio got into pretty big trouble when they downloaded 10 years of private emails without proper permission. They had to pay $50,000 in damages. As business gets bigger, so do the fines. For instance, Ticketmaster was facing a $5 million lawsuit because hackers got their hands on customer data (emails included). 

Mail privacy protection

Privacy in email marketing has changed quite a bit. Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) has made it harder for marketers to track when people open emails or where they’re located. Marketers had to make some changes to adapt to the new reality of performance tracking. 

So what does this mean for your email marketing strategy? Well, the focus has shifted from open rates to other ways of measuring success. You should be looking at things like how many people click your links or make purchases instead.

Your subscribers care about privacy more than ever and pay attention to how companies handle their data. They’re likely to stick with brands that take privacy seriously.

For your email marketing campaigns, this means: being clear about how you collect and use data, making sure your email service provider follows privacy rules, looking at different ways to measure how well your campaigns work, and creating content that encourages real engagement

Security isn’t optional in 2025, it’s essential for keeping subscribers happy and protecting the company from PR disasters and financial losses.  

Visuals that are close to reality

Findings of the State of Email Trends 2024 Report, show that email marketing campaigns with genuine, relatable visuals get better results than those with super-polished, perfect pictures.

The best email design comes from testing different types of visuals. For example, add user-generated content to your email marketing strategy to make your campaigns feel more authentic. Real photos of customers using your products, genuine team photos, and actual behind-the-scenes content usually perform better than stock photos.

This makes sense. Your subscribers see hundreds of perfect, filtered images all day long. So when they get marketing email newsletters with real people and genuine situations, they like them and find things they can relate to.

Entertainment and gamification

Email marketing will get way more fun in 2025 since marketers have already been adding games, quizzes, and interactive elements to their campaigns. And all of these work pretty well — just look at what happened when Stripo tried it out.

Stripo ran an interesting test with their Easter email campaign. They sent two different types of emails offering the same discount. One group got a regular discount code, while the other group had to play a game to win it. The results? The gamified emails brought in 200% more sales. 

So what makes entertainment and gamification in email marketing work so effectively? Well, your subscribers see hundreds of marketing emails every month. But when they get one where they can actually do something — play a quick game, take a quiz, or join a contest — they’re more likely to spend time with it.

The cool thing about gamification? It works for both you and your subscribers. They have fun and maybe win something, while you get better engagement rates and more data about what your customers like. You can use this information to create even more relevant campaigns later.

That said, any activity in your email marketing campaigns should make sense for your brand and your subscribers. Adding random games all the time won’t help if they don’t connect with what your subscribers actually care about. The best interactive ideas come from knowing your audience and giving them something they’ll want to experience.

3 tips to implement current email marketing trends

So we’ve covered quite a few email marketing trends for 2025. Dark mode, AI, gamification — it might feel like a lot to handle. But implementing new trends doesn’t have to be overwhelming. The key is choosing what makes sense for your business and adding changes gradually, one step at a time. 

1. Start with better data management

About 21% of marketers say improving data management is their top priority in 2025. And this makes sense — without good data, none of the cool email marketing trends we talked about will work right.

So begin by cleaning up your email lists and organizing your subscriber information. Selzy has tools to help you track which email newsletters your subscribers open and how they interact with them. Use this data to create better-targeted campaigns that actually matter to your audience.

2. Add lifecycle emails to your strategy

Well, here’s something interesting: less than half of marketers use lifecycle and onboarding emails. That means most companies miss out on connecting with subscribers at key moments. Your email marketing strategy should include messages for different stages of the customer relationship — welcome series, post-purchase follow-ups, and re-engagement campaigns all work pretty well

These automated campaigns don’t need to be complicated. Start with a simple welcome series, then add more types of emails as you analyze what works for your subscribers.

3. Focus on consistency over complexity

You don’t need fancy AI or complicated games in every email. What works better? Regular emails that give your subscribers something useful, interesting, or valuable.

Your email marketing performance will improve more from sending consistent, quality content than from trying every new trend at once. Pick one or two trends that make sense for your business and subscribers, test them properly, and build from there.

B2C companies are usually more experimental with their emails compared to B2B brands. But no matter what type of business you run, these three tips will help you get more from your email campaigns. Start with good data, add lifecycle emails, and keep your content quality high and consistent. 

Final thoughts

Well, here you have it. Email marketing in 2025 comes down to making your campaigns more accessible, mobile-friendly, and personal, with features like dark mode support, better security, and mail privacy protection becoming pretty important. Advanced segmentation, automation, and AI help make everything work smoother, while entertainment, gamification, and realistic visuals keep subscribers engaged — and all of this works even better when you have good data management and consistent content delivery.