Email Marketing Trends for 2025: Competitive Differentiators

Email marketing is constantly evolving, so it can be difficult to know where to invest your time and energy from year to year. Just a few of the recent changes and challenges that email marketers have faced include:

• Economic uncertainty caused by global trade disruptions, high inflation, and high interest rates
• Changes at inbox providers, including broader BIMI support, Apple’s launch of iOS 18, and Gmail’s increasing use of Automatic Extraction
• Generative AI raising concerns and opportunities across the marketing spectrum

To help you prioritize your email marketing efforts this year, we surveyed Oracle Digital Experience Agency’s hundreds of digital marketing experts for the sixth year in a row, asking them to rate the current adoption of a range of email marketing technologies and tactics, as well as the impact they predict each will have in 2025. Then we mapped the results into adoption-impact quadrants.

In this post, we’re looking at the Competitive Differentiators, which are in the low adoption–high impact quadrant. The technologies and tactics in this quadrant are not completely proven, but some companies are already seeing great results from using them. They offer a significant competitive advantage with considerably less risk than our Unproven Opportunities. 

But, there are still risks, including the acquisition of smaller providers, frequent process and feature changes as the technology stabilizes, frequent changes in best practices as knowledge grows, changing cost structures, scarcity of needed skills, and other issues. These hassles and expenses are easier to accept, however, because many adopters are already seeing sizable returns on their investments. Their willingness to accept some uncertainty in exchange for good returns gives them a distinct advantage over their competitors, most of whom have yet to embrace these tactics and technologies.

Of the 26 trends we surveyed our digital marketing experts about, seven of them were rated as being in the low adoption–high impact quadrant for 2025. Let’s talk about each of them in turn.

C. Generative AI for Email Design and Coding

Generative AI has already proven to be effective at accelerating code development. For instance, here at Oracle we’ve created an LLM that assists our developers with writing in APEX. And plenty of other models exist for writing in other computer languages. 

GenAI models for email HTML is only a matter of time, although the effort will most certainly be hindered by the lack of email coding standards, wide variations in coding quality for training purposes, and routine and unannounced code support changes by inbox providers. 

“Despite challenges, new tools are being introduced to the market that enable the development of email design and HTML through easy assist prompts that leverage the brand’s visual standards and style guide, along with their existing modular architectures and templates,” says Lauren Gannon, Vice President of Agency Services for Oracle Digital Experience Agency. “Expect the adoption of these tools to grow in the next 12 to 24 months.”

Tommy Hummel, Analytics Manager for Analytic & Strategic Services at Oracle Digital Experience Agency, adds, “While AI has the potential to streamline a lot of workflows for project management and design work, it won't replace the need for strong human oversight.” 

D. Generative AI for General Email Content Creation 

Using genAI to assist copywriters as they craft content for different campaigns, different content blocks, and different personas and industry segments is probably the least risky way today of using generative AI for marketing emails. But even here, our experts are of two minds on the technology.

“While the industry rightfully sees the long-term potential of generative AI, most enterprise brands are pretty far away from being able to scale the technology in a meaningful way to have a big impact on their business this year,” says Peter Briggs, Director of Analytic & Strategic Services at Oracle Digital Experience Agency

“Concerns around legal ramifications and creative control hinder its progress,” says David Chang, Senior Director of Agency Services at Oracle Digital Experience Agency. “We are fielding questions constantly about generative AI and how to safely incorporate it. It’s the hottest topic.”

Explore the concerns and opportunities we see around genAI for creating text, images, and code.

E. Generative AI for Personalizing Emails

Having generative AI create copy and other content under the direction of copywriters, graphic designers, and other creative experts is one thing. But allowing genAI to craft personalized content at scale that isn’t and couldn’t possibly be reviewed by a human is something else.

I’ve shared my trepidations around using genAI to craft individual marketing emails, including the danger of over-personalization. Some of my colleagues share my concerns. 

“Brands are constantly working closely with their legal teams to craft messages that are compliant,” says Scott Lederer, Senior Account Manager at Oracle Digital Experience Agency. “This is especially true in highly regulated industries, such as pharma, financial and legal services, and government. So, handing the keys over to AI tech without having every message reviewed by legal teams seems like a roadblock we are not yet ready to overcome in 2025.”

Alex Stegall, Director of Analytic & Strategic Services, Oracle Digital Experience Agency, adds, “As genAI pushes very hard into the content creation space, the results are still a bit of mystery. When our efforts transition from something recognizable as traditional personalization into creating bespoke 1:1 messages, we may actually see the email experience degrade.”

However, plenty of our digital marketing experts are excited about the possibilities.

For instance, Rufino Cudia, Senior Product Consultant at Oracle Digital Experience Agency, says, “GenAI will remove the complexity and empower brands to focus on what truly matters—delivering messages that feel tailor-made for every person, every time.” 

F. Email Annotations & Schema

Gmail’s Email Annotations and Yahoo Mail’s schema started as a way for brands to replace their preview text of their promotional emails with preview content that can include key information such as expiration dates, deadlines, and promo codes—even featured images. However, the additional coding effort, limited email client support, and the tendency for schema to make emails look like ads turned off the vast majority of brands.

Today, nearly all of the schema-powered content in Gmail and Yahoo Mail appear because Google and Yahoo have forcibly applied schema to the senders’ emails. Gmail calls this policy Automatic Extraction.

Unfortunately, this policy routinely leads to preview content that’s redundant with subject line content, conflicts with subject line content, simply wrong, or otherwise undermines the email campaign. It has also inflated adoption perceptions. So, while this was the first year that annotations and schema have graduated from our Unproven Opportunities quadrant into our Competitive Differentiators quadrant, there’s compelling evidence to believe this graduation wasn’t rightfully earned.  

Related post: Email Annotations & Schema: ‘Automatic Extraction’ & Controlling Your Preview Content

G. ML-Powered Subject Line and Copywriting Tools

While genAI-powered subject line writing tools have become increasingly common, they have little to nothing in common with the machine learning subject line and copywriting tools that have been around for about a decade. These ML tools use your brand’s historical email performance to recommend words and phrases that generate better results from your particular audience.

While the primary benefit of using genAI for copywriting is time-savings, the primary benefit of ML tools is higher performance. While inaccuracy is less of an issue with these ML tools, off-brand suggestions are common.

“Without brand-directed guardrails, these models tend to create very open-baity subject lines with lots of all-caps and exclamation marks that diminish subscriber trust,” says Hummel. “But more importantly, the return on investment just isn’t very compelling, despite the maturity of these tools.”

Confusing matters, many ML-powered tools are adding genAI functionality. However, the addition hasn’t made these tools any more attractive—at least not yet. But perhaps over time, the combination of machine learning and generative AI will improve these models, both saving brands time and leading to more effective copy.

Related post: Using AI Subject Line and Copywriting Tools Successfully

H. Brand Indicators for Message Identification

As a reward to brands that fully authenticate their marketing emails using SPF, DKIM, and DMARC, Brand Indicators for Message Identification (BIMI) displays the sender’s logo next to their sender name in the inbox. BIMI has only seen moderate adoption because of complexity, high costs, and limited support.

However, those last two issues have largely disappeared. The tradeoff is that BIMI has become significantly more complicated. The three supporting inbox providers—Gmail, Yahoo Mail, and Apple Mail—now all have different logo requirements and application and approval processes.

On the upside, marketers who adopt BIMI can expect their logo to appear with more than 90% of the emails they send on average, according to Litmus’s Email Client Market Share data. That’s up from the roughly one-third of emails that appeared with BIMI support a year ago. This greatly expanded support will turn BIMI from a nice-to-have to a must-have.

“By the end of the year, the majority of large senders will have adopted BIMI, at least partially,” says Adam Tosh, Associate Account Director at Oracle Digital Experience Agency. “At that point, other brands will be playing catch up, with their emails looking suspect without this form of secure sender identification.” 

Related post: BIMI Email Standard Gets Big Boost by Becoming Less of a Standard

I. CSS-Based Email Interactivity

Using CSS and HTML, email marketers are able to add interactive components to their emails that consumers are used to seeing on websites, including:

• Hamburger menus
• Carousels, accordions, and tabbed content
• Hot spots and hover effects
• Radio button selections and form fields

However, there are limitations. “Support is limited primarily to Apple Mail and it takes much more time and effort to create, code, and optimize,” says Katie Anderson, Art Director for Creative Services, Oracle Digital Experience Agency. “Although we love to use them, this trend seems to have peaked.”

Indeed, our survey results show both the adoption and impact of CSS-based interactivity as being essentially flat since 2022. Even so, if a high percentage of your subscribers use Apple Mail, then this kind of interactivity is worth exploring.

Related post: Interactive Emails: Use Cases & Considerations for CSS-Based Interactivity [with on-demand webinar]

Trends on the Move

Readers of our post on 2024’s Competitive Differentiators might recognize that email annotations and schema have made the jump into this quadrant. As already mentioned, there are reasons to be skeptical of whether this move will stick or if schema will slip back down into the Unproven Opportunities quadrant, where it spent the previous 5 years.

For a full look at all 26 email marketing trends to watch for in 2025, also check out our posts that examine: 

• Unproven Opportunities, which are high-impact trends with low adoption
• Proven Essentials, which are high-impact trends with high adoption (coming soon)
• The Biggest Shifts in Email Marketing Trends for 2025

Also, for a better understanding of how all of these email marketing trends are evolving, check out our Email Marketing Trends posts from last year:

• Email Marketing Trends for 2024: Unproven Opportunities
• Email Marketing Trends for 2024: Competitive Differentiators
• Email Marketing Trends for 2024: Proven Essentials
• The Biggest Shifts in Email Marketing Trends for 2024

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Need help with your email marketing campaigns? Oracle Digital Experience Agency has hundreds of marketing and communication experts ready to help Responsys, Eloqua, Unity, and other Oracle customers create stronger connections with their customers and employees—even if they’re not using an Oracle platform as the foundation of that experience. With a 94% satisfaction rate, our clients are thrilled with the award-winning work our creative, strategy, and other specialists do for them, giving us an outstanding NPS of 70.

For help overcoming your challenges or seizing your opportunities, talk to your Oracle account manager, visit us online, or email us at OracleAgency_US@Oracle.com.

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