The Future of Email Marketing: What Lies Ahead

Why email marketing remains a vital strategy

We’ve touched on several points above: email is widely popular because it opens a communication line with customers that isn’t easy to shut down. Here are some other bits and pieces:

• High open rates: the average across all industries is 35%. Ecommerce’s average is slightly lower — 30%
• Good click-to-buy ratio: 52% of purchases are made from email
• High ROI: email still stands at $36 for every $1 spent
• One of the leading marketing approaches: only social media and corporate blogs are more popular among marketers than email newsletters and emails themselves

Top email marketing trends to look out for

AI will become a big-time player

Marketers all over the globe are implementing AI to create content and use it for routine tasks like data analysis. Below, we’ve rounded up some of the areas in which AI can help brands out — or is already helping them out in:

• Advanced segmentation and hyper-personalization: AI will analyze large sets of consumer behavior data, spot trends, and form buyer personas, which, in turn, will allow you to speak to customers on a more personal level.
• Predictive analytics: the next step after hyper-personalization. By sifting through data, AI will be able to inform your future decision-making — what, when, and whom to target based on who’s more likely to respond.
• Automation: another area where a human hand on the tiller may be a shortcoming — humans tend to make mistakes after all! Outsourcing marketing flows (trigger events and such) to AI may straighten out and quicken the process.

However, while AI’s integration will continue to pick up the pace, several related factors influence buying decisions:

• Outsourcing creative tasks to AI is a dangerous game to play. People are seeking authenticity from brands: in 2024, there was a 60% uptick in customers questioning how real what they see is.
• People prefer human-made content. That’s why Google is cracking down on AI content. It’s not as helpful, more shallow, and repetitive on average. 50% of consumers are able to spot content written by AI: 52% are less likely to engage with it.
• Customers prefer a human touch when it comes to communication. And there are big question marks over AI’s ability to deliver personalized content. It can sift through data and help spot patterns and segment audiences. But a human touch is necessary to make the content feel like your brand is having a one-on-one conversation with the customer.

However, there’s no question AI’s use within different organizations will continue to grow. Marketers will integrate it into their workflow, outsource boring, repetitive, and time-consuming tasks, and ask their colleagues to do the same. But don’t worry, marketing jobs are not in danger, at least that what experts tell us. “I don’t think AI will take over every part of an email marketer’s job; rather, I think it will free up a marketer’s time so they can focus on what matters most — creating engaging campaigns that drive results,” co-founder of EmailStack & Email Love Andy King told Selzy in an interview. 

Hyper-personalization will take on greater importance

Let’s address the elephant in the room first: how is hyper-personalization different from the usual personalization? Here’s how:

• The usual personalization can be as simple as adding your customer’s name to the beginning of the email. That might be the only way it’s different from emails sent to other customers.
• Hyper-personalization means putting in the time and effort to study your customers in-depth. All interactions with your brand (site visits, viewing history, purchase history, etc.) come into play. Your segments get smaller, and your emails include specific mentions of this or that consumer’s behavior.

Today, people are seeking out exactly this level of attention to their persona. 96% of marketers reported a sales boost in 2024 after leaning into hyper-personalization. This is especially important for Gen Z (people born between the mid-90s and mid-2010s) as they will soon become the prevailing buying force.

Hyper-personalization will work best when paired with automated email campaigns and omnichannel marketing — we’ll cover both these things below. But hyper-personalization starts with gathering data about your consumers from different sources: website visits, past interactions with your brand, interest on social media, etc.

After you get enough data, you can start segmenting your customers into different groups — AI can help sift through the data — and figure out what and when they need to set up a line of communication with them. The ultimate goal is simple but not easy: send out the right message to the right customer at the right time.

As far as email marketing is concerned, we believe it will lead to emails becoming both shorter (cue the attention span jokes about Gen Z) and more interactive — with image carousels, dynamic content that changes based on who sees it and when, and fun elements like short questionnaires.

The example from Spotify below is a good example of personalizing email campaigns. Their annual “Wrapped” section speaks to each consumer on a personal level.

Omnichannel marketing will give you a better chance to reach your customers

Omnichannel (aka hybrid) marketing is about interaction with customers across multiple channels. On average, people need to see something five or seven times for it to stick, so omnichannel marketing takes care of that. So, you’ll need to ensure consistent messaging across all your channels as your consumers embark on their customer journey.

Email marketing is among the top communication channels in terms of getting your message across — only SMS are opened more often than emails, but they are shorter and feel more intrusive than emails. And, of course, it’s easier to adapt emails to changing consumer preferences. Because Gen Z is coming into force, the dominance of long-form is giving in to short-form posts and visual content. 

Deloitte makes a case that consumers are now expecting that your brand remembers who they are and their preferences — no matter which channel they use to interact with the company. Highly personalized messaging will allow you to bond with consumers, creating the feeling that you are talking to them directly — that’s why it’s important to have a CRM that tracks and stores all info about customer interaction with your company.

Automation will be both expected and easier to implement

Marketing automation software is a big-time player for brands: both Statista and Ascend2 claim 58% of marketers used email automation in 2024. No wonder the market was valued at $5.9 billion in 2024 — and is projected to rise to $6.5 billion in 2025.

Email automation will continue to play a key role in the future of email marketing, as 56% of marketers intend to take it to another level and outsource it to AI. It’s quite clear marketers will aim to put AI to good use to take sifting through data, segmentation, and drip campaigns to AI — and free up the time for more creative tasks.

This is where it gets a bit tricky, however, as automated campaigns need to feel personalized for the customers that open them. Human oversight will still be required to ensure the data was analyzed correctly and consumers are getting what they want to see in their inboxes.

Adapting email marketing to future challenges

There are several areas of marketing in general — and email marketing as part thereof — that present brands with challenges as well as opportunities. Below, we’ll cover how the changing landscape needs not only embracing but exercising caution as well.

Privacy will need to stay top of mind

Many customers are also concerned about security. Over half of consumers have experienced deep-fake attacks and scams for personal information or money in 2024, according to the Accenture report.

Customers are hesitant to share their personal data and distrust how it is stored and accessed. That’s the reason GDPR regulations exist in Europe, while the most notable US law on the matter is the California Consumer Privacy Act. There is, however, no federal US legislation — the American Data Privacy and Protection Act failed to make it to the Senate floor in 2022.

Third-party cookies are being phased out under new regulations as a security concern, so marketers will need to focus on collecting and storing first-party data from their customers. These might come in the form of loyalty programs, website interactions, and app engagement.

Managing audience preferences and expectations

An Accenture study from 2022 revealed several interesting insights about both company executives and their customers. Here’s what caught our attention the most:

• 9 in 10 executives think their customers are changing faster than their companies do
• 64% of customers are unhappy with that and believe businesses aren’t meeting their needs
• 3 in 5 customers agree that their priorities and behaviors keep changing as the world around them does
• 69% believe contradicting behaviors are both normal and acceptable

In short, consumers wait for the brands to keep up with them and are unhappy when they don’t. Another interesting finding is that consumers are okay with being multidimensional, but businesses (by and large) still regard their customers as just walking wallets.

The conclusion? Listen to your audience carefully by collecting first-party data, pay attention to life trends, and don’t disregard a human touch when shaping your email marketing strategy. That’s what makes it effective. 

Predictions for the future of email marketing

Mobile-first strategies will be prioritized

Brands will pay closer attention to how their emails look on mobile because the number of people opening their inboxes from smartphones will continue to grow. Here are some facts about smartphone usage among consumers: 

• 91% of Americans own a smartphone — this number goes up to 98% for Gen Z
• Over 70% of all emails are opened from a smartphone
• 3 in 4 Americans have bought something using a smartphone
• 3 in 10 shop online at least once a week

This tells us one simple thing: your email campaigns — and marketing efforts  overall — should be tailored for smaller screens first and desktops later. Another interesting insight is that the rise of AI and voice assistants has led to people shopping using voice commands only. 1 in 5 consumers shops this way, and half research products this way.

So here are the bits to keep in mind when adapting your email marketing efforts for mobile:

• Think of how your email will sound — cause it might be read aloud by Siri as opposed to skimmed by your customers.
• Use a responsive email design — one that looks good on smaller screens.
• Make your subject lines short (and enticing) so that your consumers actually open the email itself.
• Include interactive elements and clear CTAs. Remember, Gen Z and millennials make up the overwhelming majority of your base.
• Minimize the scroll. Attention spans are getting shorter, and people can just tune out at the sight of a long email. 

Spotify gets top marks again here: all the info you need is on a single mobile screen — effortles and effective.

This brings us to our next point.

Engagement will increase as interactive content does

Gen Z will soon be the main purchase force on the market — and they are visual learners. That’s supported by the fact that YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram are on the rise, as well as short-form content like social media posts.

So give them something to interact with. Videos will work best as it’s their preferred way of consuming content, but other visual aids, such as carousels and quizzes, also work well. While dynamic content will contribute to a more personalized experience, which Gen Z craves. Below, you can see how Ubisoft nailed an interactive email when promoting Assassin’s Creed Mirage.

But be cautious when it comes to AI: we already mentioned that customers seek authenticity and can often tell fake from real. You’d be much better off leaning into user-generated content (real stories from real customers), influencers, and even your own employees as brand ambassadors. Gen Z mostly discovers products on social media channels.

Success metrics will change

The current approach to analyzing success metrics will shift as marketers adapt to changes in privacy laws and other technical regulations. Why are we bringing this up? Because the process is already underway.

When Apple rolled out iOS 15, Mail Privacy Protection was a big talking point. It essentially sent open rates stats down the drain because users could now choose to mask their activity. So, while emails sent to Apple Mail showed up as opened, there really was no way of telling if they actually were.

Another big thing is a fake email address Apple could generate for users — in case they didn’t want to give up their actual email. They left a fake one, and emails from it were re-routed to their actual inbox. So much for your email campaign’s lead magnets.

So, what are marketers supposed to do? Experts underline that you can start by looking for the right solutions. “Recently, we’ve seen a big increase in robotic interactions — most notably in email opening, where more than 50% of emails are now opened by bots. This makes it problematic to evaluate campaigns based on these skewed metrics — it’s important to choose tools that can distinguish robotic interactions from human interactions and, therefore, provide better data,” CEO of Etnetera Activate Pavel Pola told Selzy in 2024. 

Plus, open rates are just one metric — and, frankly, not the most important one. You send emails with a specific action in mind that you want your readers to complete, so track that instead. Was the link clicked? Was the website visited? Were interactive elements, erm, interacted with?

While part of the overall growing privacy concerns, hiding email activity certainly didn’t kill email marketing. Like a ban on third-party cookies, it simply allows marketers to focus on metrics that really matter.

Wrapping up

Despite the changing landscape, email marketing is not going anywhere. People are opening emails well and purchasing things from emails, and it’s one of the best media to reach them. It also remains the only channel not susceptible to algorithm changes — whether from Google or social media platforms.

However, you need to be wary of certain trends that will affect email marketing. The AI boom is not going anywhere for the foreseeable future, people want personalized experiences to become even more so. Omnichannel marketing will raise your chances of making a connection with customers, while automation will lessen your workload and contribute to better personalization.

You’ll also need to stay abreast of consumers’ ever-changing behavior while keeping data privacy in mind. Finally, consider how you can cater to Gen Z as they come into force by creating mobile-first experiences and adding interactive elements.

We hope we’ve given you enough to go on above.