Email Marketing Trends for 2025: Proven Essentials

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 Proven Essentials, which are in the high adoption–high impact quadrant. The technologies and tactics in this quadrant are mature, but are still improving and delivering tremendous results.

Our Proven Essentials stand in stark contrast to our Unproven Opportunities, which still have significant risks associated with them and benefits that haven’t fully materialized. Our Proven Essentials also have a risk profile that’s the inverse of our Competitive Differentiators—that is, where our Competitive Differentiators offer a competitive advantage to early adopters, our Proven Essentials put late adopters at a competitive disadvantage.

Of the 26 trends we’re highlighting this year, 17 of them were rated by our digital marketing experts as being in the high adoption–high impact quadrant for 2025. Let’s talk about each of them in turn.

J. Universal Holdout Groups

How can you be sure that your emails are driving positive behavior? How can you be sure that your email program isn’t incentivizing behavior that would have happened anyway? Universal holdout groups are the answer.

You create a universal holdout group by taking a small percentage of your subscribers and withholding emails from them for a period of time. You can then compare the level of engagement, revenue, and profits for your subscribers who received emails to this holdout group. Doing this gives you a clear view of the lift generated by your email campaigns—beyond the lift you get from customers and prospects simply becoming subscribers. 

However, those insights come at a cost. The most obvious cost is the loss of engagement and sales to the holdout group, since these are people who opted in and expect to receive your campaigns.

A secondary cost is managing a universal holdout group. You want to maintain a large enough group to get meaningful results, while minimizing the impact. You also want to rotate your holdout group, but not too quickly. It takes discipline to run one—and also fortitude to not compromise it when you’re coming up short on a weekly or monthly goal, or planning to send a “really important” campaign.

Because of those costs and challenges, we often see brands run a holdout group for a year to gain a better understanding of the impact of their email program, then shut it down for a year or two before setting it back up again to refresh their data.

Related post: Universal Control Groups: The Path to Digital Marketing Measurement Clarity

K. Live or Real-Time Content

Most email content is determined at the time of send, but live content is determined at the time that an individual subscriber opens the email. That can significantly boost the relevance of your emails by keeping your content up to date.

The best use cases for live content involve content that changes rapidly, such as:

• Live countdown timers
• Account dashboards
• Real-time inventory
• Live poll results
• Live sports scores
• Local weather
• Social media feeds

Unfortunately, live content is undermined by the content pre-fetching done by Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection (MPP). To a much smaller extent, live content is also undermined by the pre-fetching that Gmail does, although it pre-fetches a single-digit percentage of emails and only those that a subscriber is highly likely to open anyway. Unlike Apple, which is trying to obscure opens by opening every email received by MPP users, Gmail is trying to reduce email load times and improve the user experience by pre-fetching email content.

Regardless of motivation, all pre-fetching negatively impacts live content, which is why we’ve been seeing interest in this tactic decline over the years.

Related post: Live Content in Emails: The Best Use Cases

L. Customer Data Platform (CDP)

CDPs like Oracle Unity not only serve as a central repository of customer data, but also keep that data clean, control access to it, overlay analytic capabilities, and make it available for activation via marketing and other systems in real-time.

“Brands need to understand the 360-degree profile of their customers,” says Cristal Foster, Senior Manager of B2B Consulting, Oracle Digital Experience Agency. “Customers expect the companies they do business with to know them and what products and solutions they own and use. They can then use this information to power messaging across channels.”

However, beyond providing this critical customer visibility and fueling omnichannel orchestration, CDPs are foundational for successful AI and machine learning programs. “Intelligence is rooted in data,” says Kaiti Gary, Senior Director of Analytic & Strategic Services, Oracle Digital Experience Agency, “and a reliable, trustworthy source of it is key to getting reliable, trustworthy results from AI.”

Related webinar: Unlocking the Benefits of a Customer Data Platform

M. Account-Based Marketing

Rather than focusing on industries or markets, account-based marketing (ABM) focuses on, well, accounts. It helps businesses focus on building and maintaining opportunities at select high-value accounts, rather than a huge number of small-value accounts. For the B2B organizations that it’s appropriate for, it can have a big impact.

The post-pandemic return of in-person events have reinvigorated ABM, as has a partial return to office, which allows more people to be reached via direct mail.

Among our clients, we’re seeing increased efforts to build out account details, says Patrick Maxwell, Senior Director of Solution Architecture, Oracle Digital Experience Agency. “Our B2B customers are continuing to focus on account-based marketing tactics,” he says, “while removing friction from the selection of potential individual contacts at qualified accounts by building fuller profiles of these individuals over time.”

Kaiti Gary adds, “As B2B focuses on enabling digital self-service, account-based marketing will need to evolve with it, moving from a marketing focus to an overall experience—call it account-based experience. Core to this shift is having quality data and the ability to act on it across the org.”

Related on-demand webinar: Evolving Your Account-Based Marketing Program 

N. Omnichannel Orchestration

In the early ’00s, the average consumer typically used two touchpoints when buying an item, according to research by Aberdeen, Oracle, and Relationship One. Today, consumers typically use several times that many touchpoints. More than ever, consumers don’t engage with channels; they engage with brands. 

Brands know they’ve badly lagged consumers’ expectations. However, challenges around customer data storage and availability have plagued efforts to react to consumers across channels in real-time with the latest cross-channel data and insights. Customer data platforms are finally overcoming these technological barriers.

“As adoption of customer data platforms grows, omnichannel orchestration and cross-channel attribution will be a big focus,” says Lauren Kimball, Group Vice President of Oracle Digital Experience Agency. “Brands are looking to innovate across channels to create ever more optimized customer engagement experiences that drive increased revenue and loyalty.”

Related on-demand webinar: How to Transform Your Customer Experience with a CDP

O. Inclusive Design & Email Accessibility

Accessibility is mostly about after-the-fact accommodations for people with disabilities, while inclusive design is about designing with the full spectrum of human abilities in mind from the beginning. It’s the difference between adding wheelchair ramps to a building and designing buildings that don’t need ramps so that people in wheelchairs, injured people using crutches, delivery workers, and parents with strollers all have easy access. 

“As we step into 2025, accessibility continues to play a pivotal role in shaping digital communication strategies,” says LC Castady, Associate Creative Director, Oracle Digital Experience Agency. “With the enforcement of the European Accessibility Act (EAA), businesses operating in the EU must align with accessibility standards, including the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), to ensure their email communications are inclusive and user-friendly for all audiences.”

Related checklist: Accessibility & Inclusive Design Ideas to Explore

P. Dark Mode–Optimized Email Designs

Instead of the usual dark text on a light background, dark mode provides the reverse: light text and a dark background. Today, it’s almost a standard feature across user interfaces, including those of email clients, and many consumers use it at least occasionally, if not all the time. Around 34% of emails are viewed in dark mode, according to Litmus.

Like so many other aspects of email rendering, dark mode is implemented differently across the inboxes where it is supported. That means, marketers need to use a range of email client–specific fixes to have their emails look good in dark mode everywhere.

“Unfortunately, many brands discover too late that their emails don’t follow dark mode best practices, leading to poor readability and broken designs,” says Sarah Gallardo, Lead Email Developer and Email Accessibility Specialist at Oracle Digital Experience Agency. “At this point, dark mode optimization is as critical as responsive design, as both help subscribers have a wonderful experience regardless of their device and viewing choices. It should also be seen as part of the movement toward prioritizing accessibility, as thoughtful dark mode optimization enhances readability and inclusivity for all users.”

Related post: Dark Mode for Email: How Marketers Should Adapt

Q. Advanced Performance Analytics

Basic reporting provides basic insights. Moreover, most standard reporting focuses on campaign performance rather than what brands should really be focused on, which is customer performance.

In addition to omnichannel orchestration, customer data platforms are enabling this shift from campaign-centric metrics to customer-centric metrics like:

• Subscriber lifetime value (and customer lifetime value)
• Revenue per subscriber (and revenue per customer)
• Subscriber acquisition cost (and customer acquisition cost)
• Omnichannel engagement

“There’s more and more data being collected for brands to learn from and use to create more relevant marketing emails,” says Henry Alva, Email and Web Developer for Creative Services at Oracle Digital Experience Agency. “And ML and AI will make it easier to analyze this data faster to uncover more valuable insights.”

R. Inactivity Management

It’s not enough to have subscribers that tolerate receiving your marketing emails. If you want to avoid serious deliverability problems, they also have to engage with those emails. That means marketers should send fewer emails to subscribers who haven’t engaged in a while, and even eventually stop mailing chronically inactive subscribers who haven’t opened or clicked in a long time.

However, by obscuring opens, Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection has intentionally made it difficult to tell which subscribers are engaging with your emails. At the same time, auto opens only occur when an email is landing in a subscriber’s inbox. So, while senders have lost an engagement signal, they’ve gained an inbox placement signal.

In response, many brands have been increasing their lookback windows on email engagement, and overlaying auto opens as signs that a subscriber is still safe to mail, even when any other measurable engagement is absent. As a result—and despite persistent legal risks, since both CASL and GDPR have 2-year limits on recognizing customer relationships—we’ve seen brand commitments to inactivity management wane in the past couple of years.

Related post: New Gmail & Yahoo Deliverability Requirements: What Senders Need to Do

S. Send Time Optimization

When is the best time to send email? This is one of the most popular email marketing questions of all time. It has also become a rather dated question. The better question is: When is the best time to send email to each of my subscribers?

To answer that question, you need sent time optimization (STO), which uses machine learning to examine each of your subscriber’s open and click time histories to come up with the best individual answer for each day of the week. As each of your subscribers engage with subsequent sends, the optimal send time for them is adjusted, so it’s always adapting to your customers’ changing behaviors.

However, while senders continue to adopt STO, in large part because it’s so easy to implement, their expectations for what it will deliver have steadily decreased in the wake of Mail Privacy Protection, Link Tracking Protection, and other efforts to aimed at reducing senders’ visibility into engagement. 

“To remain effective, send time optimization will need to add more subtle engagement signals, and it’s not clear if most senders will be able to easily do that,” says Brian V. Sullivan, Strategy Director of Email Deliverability Services, Oracle Digital Experience Agency. “If they can’t, STO adoption will slow as engagement signals continue to contract.”

Related post: The Best Time to Send Emails

T. Preference Centers & Progressive Profiling

Both of these tactics allow brands to better understand the needs and desires of their subscribers through the collection of zero-party data. The need for information directly from consumers has grown as platform privacy has tightened with the advent of App Tracking Transparency, Mail Privacy Protection, Link Tracking Protection, the sunsetting of third-party cookies, and more. 

Preference centers generally focus on long-term preferences—that is, ones that are unlikely to change for years. While they’ve traditionally been important during the unsubscribe process, allowing brands to substantially reduce opt-outs, list-unsubscribe mandates by Gmail and Yahoo Mail have allowed more email users to opt-out without visiting preference centers. Even so, preference centers can play an important role in engaging subscribers right after opt-in and in re-engaging subscribers after a period of inactivity.

Done through email polls, surveys, and quizzes, progressive profiling can also collect long-term preferences. However, it excels at collecting short-term preferences—that is, ones are unlikely to change over the next few weeks or perhaps months. For instance, a brand can ask about their subscribers’ spring lawn and garden plans or summer vacation plans, and then follow up with highly relevant segmented, personalized, or automated campaigns based on their individual responses.

Related post: Subscriber Needs Your Preference Center Should Address

U. Modular Email Architectures

Rather than having a bunch of different traditional templates for each of the types of emails you send, modular build systems allow you to create a variety of content blocks that you then stack to create a particular email.

“With our clients, we’ve seen email build times reduced by about 25% on average. However, that’s not the only benefit of modular architecture,” says Nick Cantu, Creative Director for Creative Services, Oracle Digital Experience Agency. “They also make it easier to do personalization, A/B testing, and overall maintenance on your email design.”

Related post: Modular Email Architecture: The Next-Generation Template [on-demand webinar]

V. Loyalty Programs

Brands have had a series of critical reasons to launch and build out loyalty programs—from the pandemic and supply chain problems to the impending sunset of third-party cookies to economic uncertainty. However, besides the usual goal of encouraging repeat purchases through old school spend-to-get schemes, more and more brands are also rewarding loyalty program members for their engagement with polls, quizzes, and other content.

This expanded focus:

• Allows brands to better understand and target their customers, in aggregate and on an individual basis, through polls, surveys, quizzes, and other progressive profiling efforts, as well as through click and browse behavior driven by loyalty messaging
• Keeps customers engaged and retained between purchases, especially when financial strains lengthen the time between purchases
• Builds buzz, increase share of voice, spur evangelism, and otherwise strengthen the brand

“Loyalty programs and CDPs will become even more impactful as brands build up massive collections of customer data to train brand-specific Gen AI models to help them better execute their marketing campaigns and a wide range of other tasks,” says Alex Stegall, Director of Analytic & Strategic Services, Oracle Digital Experience Agency.

Learn about: Oracle’s loyalty platform, CrowdTwist

W. Email Personalization

The ability to personalize email messages using dynamic content has become progressively more sophisticated, while at the same time becoming easier to execute and manage.

“Hyper personalization is always more compelling for me as a consumer—and it’s always been a compelling goal for my clients, too,” says John Briggs, Account Director at Oracle Digital Experience Agency. “To accomplish this, marketers not only need to collect useful data, but also put it to work in ways that are helpful and not intrusive. Beyond simply trying to sell subscribers more stuff, brands should try to add value for customers.”

X. Legal Compliance

The legal landscape in the marketing realm is likely to remain split in the years ahead. At the state level, well over a dozen states have signed their own privacy legislation into law, according to the International Association of Privacy Professionals. And more states are likely to do so in the months ahead, which will make compliance more difficult since all of these state-level laws are different to one degree or another.

All of those state laws should be driving more action at the national level to create a single modern privacy law, as well as to update the antiquated CAN-SPAM Act of 2003. However, our experts see both of those as highly unlikely.

“At the national level, I see the prospect of new privacy and marketing legislation falling by the wayside in 2025 with the change of leadership,” says Katie Anderson, Art Director for Creative Services, Oracle Digital Experience Agency. “While businesses don’t tend to like more regulations, the absence of a national standard just means they’re at the mercy of a patchwork of state laws instead.”

Related post: Pressure Builds for New US Privacy Law as State Laws Pile Up

Y. Email Segmentation

Segmentation and personalization are two sides of the same coin. Both help you get the right message in front of the right customer. However, while both can help with content strategy, segmentation is essential to an effective contact strategy, helping marketers send the right number of emails to individual subscribers to maximize conversions and minimize fatigue and opt-outs. In particular, segmentation and suppression are a key way to reduce subscriber churn and to maintain good email engagement rates, which are one of the seven key factors affecting email deliverability. 

“More brands are realizing just how valuable and effective RFM modeling and email segmentation are for influencing the bottom line,” says Heather Goff, Strategic Director of Email Deliverability Services, Oracle Digital Experience Agency. “Privacy concerns and the phasing out of third-party cookies has significantly increased the reliance on first-party data. As a result, we’re seeing marketers really focusing on optimizing circulation to touch more recipients, while minimizing subscriber fatigue and negative impacts on deliverability.”

Related checklist: Segmentation & Personalization Ideas to Explore

Z. Automated or Triggered Emails

Whether they’re triggered by action, inaction, date, operations, or an internet-connected device, automated emails deliver just the right messages to customers and subscribers at just the right times. And just like personalization and segmentation, automation is only becoming more powerful thanks to AI, machine learning, and the increased customer visibility delivered by customer data platforms and other systems.

But even without the fancier new stuff, automations are powerful, says Pete Hall, Senior Strategist for Analytic & Strategic Services, Oracle Digital Experience Agency. “While everyone’s excited about the potential impact of generative AI and other advanced AI systems, prescriptive trigger campaigns are table stakes. Every brand can get better with those programs, improving journeys, fine tuning trigger conditions, and refreshing the messaging and design of those touches. Don’t neglect the ongoing maintenance and optimization of your automations.”

Related checklist: Automated Campaign Ideas to Explore

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
• Competitive Differentiators, which are high-impact trends with low adoption
• 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 82.

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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