Brands spend a lot of time and thought on their email marketing; it’s disheartening when those emails don’t reach their intended audience. Whether emails are met with low open rates, poor deliverability, or end up in the dreaded spam folder—it can feel like a waste of time and effort.

In this blog post, we’ll cover the state of email marketing in 2025, the latest challenges, email list best practices, and steps to build a strong email foundation. We’ll also discuss how brands, agencies, direct mail providers, and list brokers can adapt to the latest trends and challenges in 2025.

The State of Email Marketing in 2025

Email marketing is changing. Between advancing technologies, increased privacy regulations, and ever-evolving consumer preferences, brands are questioning whether email marketing still makes sense.

Email marketing continues to be a key channel for communicating with digital-focused consumers. In fact, 51% of consumers still prefer email as their primary channel for brand interactions. And, 59% of consumers say marketing emails influence their purchase decisions.

The fundamental strength of email remains: email is a direct, personalized communication that can cut through the clutter, deliver hyper-targeted messages that drive conversion, build brand loyalty, and nurture the development of meaningful customer relationships.

While social media and emerging digital platforms offer new ways to engage audiences, email remains a direct and highly effective method for nurturing leads, driving conversions, and building brand loyalty.

Email Performance Metrics in 2025

The latest email metrics show positive momentum for email marketing performance:

• Open Rates: The average open rate across industries has risen to 37.27%, up nearly 1% from the previous year. 
• Click-Through Rates (CTR): The average CTR remains steady at 2.44%, underscoring the need for compelling calls to action and audience-specific content.
• Bounce Rates: At an average of 2.48%, bounce rates continue to be a challenge, especially as clients pause campaigns due to concerns over deliverability. Maintaining a clean email list and verifying data sources is more critical than ever.

These performance metrics show room for improvement; marketers who stay ahead of email marketing challenges and trends will outperform the average.

Challenges Facing Email Marketers in 2025

Despite its effectiveness, email marketing faces new hurdles, particularly in privacy and compliance, inbox placement, deliverability, and more:

• Data Privacy & Email List Management: Stricter data privacy regulations require marketers to refine their data collection and consent strategies. Additionally, email addresses decay rapidly; industry experts estimate that 25% or more of consumer emails decay annually. Poorly maintained lists can lead to higher bounce rates, damaging sender reputation and increasing the likelihood of future campaigns being flagged as spam.
• Inbox Placement & Gmail’s Promotions Tab: While less than 30% of users have Gmail’s Promotions tab enabled, most of those who do check it daily. This statistic indicates that the new layout has no significant impact on email performance. However, staying out of consumers’ spam folders remains a priority for marketers.
• Digital Fatigue: The average consumer receives over 100 emails per day. Businesses have a more difficult time standing out, and consumers experiencing digital fatigue are far more likely to ignore messages.
• Campaign Pauses Due to Deliverability Concerns: Clients concerned about bounce rates and inbox placement may hesitate to launch campaigns, making email list hygiene and high data quality essential for long-term success. Beyond sender reputation and authentication, reaching the inbox is increasingly challenging due to advanced spam filters, evolving inbox algorithms, and growing competition for inbox space.

As email marketers navigate these industry changes, they must leverage high-quality data, personalized content, and multi-channel strategies to maximize engagement and ROI.

Privacy-Proofing & Compliance in Email Marketing

Email senders are under increasing scrutiny from regulators and inbox providers alike. As new privacy laws come into play and major players like Google and Yahoo enforce stricter sender requirements, marketers and advertisers must adapt to maintain deliverability and audience trust.

Email Compliance: CAN-SPAM, GDPR, CCPA & More

Privacy regulations such as GDPR, CCPA, and CAN-SPAM have reshaped how marketers collect, store, and use email data. As consumer privacy expectations continue to grow, ensuring ongoing compliance, protecting your sender reputation, and avoiding penalties is essential.

Key compliance factors for 2025 include:

• Stronger consent practices: Use double opt-in and permission-based marketing to avoid spam traps and ensure high-quality email lists.
• Stricter data governance: Be mindful of where and how you collect subscriber data, ensuring compliance with all applicable privacy laws.
• Easy opt-out: Gmail and Yahoo now require single-click unsubscribe options to help users easily control their inboxes.

Google & Yahoo’s 2025 Email Rules: What Marketers Need to Know

Last year, Google and Yahoo began to enforce new requirements for bulk email senders, defined as anyone who sends more than 5,000 emails per day. Any mass email sender—including sales and marketing teams—will face email deliverability challenges. According to MarTech, the new guidelines will focus on authenticating domains, spam rates, and the ease of unsubscribing from emails. 

Sender domains must be authenticated, spam rates should remain below 0.3%, and contacts must be able to opt out of all marketing and sales emails with a one-click unsubscribe. These restrictions are applied at the domain level, meaning that sales teams that fail to follow these guidelines will negatively impact email marketing efforts across the organization and vice versa. 

This makes it critical for companies to address potential issues as quickly as possible or face every email marketer’s worst nightmare: landing in the spam folder.

Innovating with AI: Ideas for Email Marketers

While most marketers are familiar with using artificial intelligence for content writing or image generation, that’s not the only use case for AI in email marketing! Here are some top uses of AI in email marketing campaigns, aside from content creation:

• Generating Subject Lines: Subject line generators like SubjectLine.com can integrate with ChatGPT, making it easy to use AI to generate subject lines.
• Email Segmentation: As Mailchimp explains, AI can help automatically divide recipients into segments.
• Send Time Optimization: Most email marketing platforms now have an AI tool to optimize send times, ensuring emails are sent when recipients are most likely to engage.

As AI continues to evolve, marketers will likely have more opportunities to improve their processes and become more efficient.

Planning & Executing a High-Performance Email Strategy

Email marketing can provide a cost-effective, quick-to-deploy solution that yields an immediate impact on your business. However, to be successful, you need a strong foundation. We recommend beginning with the 12 steps outlined below.

1. Understand and Implement Email Authentication

Email authentication enables email service providers and the recipients of your campaigns to verify the legitimacy of your message. It helps protect your brand reputation and improve inbox deliverability. At the same time, it also helps prevent phishing, spoofing, and spam. 

2. Establish Your Campaign Objective

Each email you send needs to have a specific purpose and messaging to match. Outline the primary objective of your campaign—acquire new customers, build brand awareness, or drive online traffic—along with how you will measure your success. 

While helping to set the tone of your campaign, this exercise will also enable you to communicate your expectations to project stakeholders and partners.

3. Select the Target Audience

The goal of your campaign directly impacts the audience you target. Acquisition campaigns may require a partner provider to identify and deploy messaging to the inboxes of opt-in addresses. Brand awareness and loyalty efforts rely on permissioned addresses from your current customers. 

In either scenario, the goal is to choose a high-quality audience whose needs match your brand’s products or services. Ensure your email list, or the list your provider uses, is cleaned and maintained regularly.

4. Have a Compelling Subject Line

Over 60% of email recipients open an email based on the subject line alone. While your subject line needs to relate to the content within, it also needs to make the recipient take notice. Ask a question, make an intriguing statement, or use symbols or emojis. However, avoid using words that are known to trigger spam:  “free,” “act now,” or “clearance.”

5. Develop Your Offer and Call to Action

Your offer needs to generate excitement while reinforcing the overall objective of your campaign. When writing your offer, remember that relevance to the audience and perceived value are key. The offer should be clearly worded, easy to understand, and hard to resist. 

Next, add the call to action. The call to action tells your readers exactly what you want them to do—be it call, click, download, or purchase. You’ll want to reiterate your primary benefit and expiration date here; creating a sense of urgency to respond is essential.

6. Design Strong Creative

When it comes to email marketing, have your overall design strategy be clean, simple, and easy to navigate. The goal is to showcase your brand, offer, and benefits; these crucial elements can be muddied if your design is overly complicated. Beyond the actual design, consider the following:

• Stay Above the Fold: To catch the reader’s attention, place the most critical content within the top 2 – 4 inches of your email. 
• Say Something Meaningful: Your email communication needs to add value and be relevant to the recipient. 
• Add Value: Whether you recommend complementary products, include links to download user guides, or provide a discount for their next purchase, take advantage of another opportunity to spread awareness of your offerings.
• Use Segmentation: Segment your messaging to meet the audience’s needs and interests, promote engagement, and reduce the number of unsubscribes and spam complaints. 
• Make it Readable: When developing your copy, use small paragraphs, easy-to-understand language, and skimmable headlines.

• Be Mobile First: Most consumers open emails on smartphones, so design your emails with mobile devices as the primary focus. Mobile-first designs improve user experience through simplified layouts, compressed images that load more quickly, tap-friendly CTA buttons, and more.
• Test Your Creative: To ensure a design renders correctly in multiple environments, including mobile and webmail, test the creative before deployment. 
• Be Consistent: Your emails should reflect your brand identity to build connections and avoid confusion. 

7. Make it Social

Social share buttons allow fans of your content to easily continue the conversation online by sharing your information through social media channels. These can easily be added to your email creative and should also be included on your landing page and individual content pieces.

8. Be Spam Compliant

Reviewing your campaign’s critical and creative aspects for CAN-SPAM compliance is a priority. Doing so will promote your position as a reputable email marketer while helping you avoid costly fines. 

As an added benefit, compliant campaigns have a better chance of increased recipient engagement. The following guidelines will help: 

• Authenticate your emails to verify your sender identity 
• Avoid the use of false or misleading header information, as well as words and phrases known to trigger spam filters 
• Avoid the use of deceptive or unrelated subject lines 
• Identify the message as an advertisement 
• Provide a physical address and telephone number 
• Include an opt-out mechanism 
• Honor all opt-out requests promptly 
• Regularly remove inactive or invalid email addresses from your list 
• Monitor what others are doing on your behalf or on behalf of your company

9. Provide a Landing Page

Landing pages directly impact conversion rates. A landing page is a webpage that serves as an extension of your email communication. The goal of your landing page should be a quick re-introduction to the offer and call to action, along with a mechanism to capture contact information. 

Limit the information you require on your contact form to the essentials; long, complicated forms may discourage someone from signing up. Consider including relevant content like a case study, newsletter, or white paper. Keep both the copy and functionality simple. From a design perspective, have the landing page mimic the email.

10. Track Your Responses

Email service providers and self-service platforms offer tracking reports highlighting campaign metrics, including open, click-through, and unsubscribe rates. 

Each of these measurements is essential to consider as you optimize your campaigns, but you don’t want to stop there. Understanding response and conversion rates, as well as the consumer’s engagement with your website, will go a long way toward helping you communicate with them more effectively.

11. Deploy in Multiples

Your email campaign should not be “one and done.” Having a follow-up plan is essential. Multiple impressions are often needed for a consumer to take notice, so be willing to commit to a strategic sequence of additional deployments. With these, you’ll want to maintain your brand consistency to build familiarity, but you can make small changes to your creative and copy.

12. Optimize Through Testing

With email marketing, each component of the process can directly impact the results you experience. Creating a testing strategy is the best way to ensure you send the right creative with the right message to the right audience. 

Testing does not have to be complicated; you can begin by changing one component at a time to see how your response rates are impacted. Test often as it is the ideal way to optimize your marketing efforts and increase your overall success rate.

Email List Best Practices

Whether you’re using first-party customer data or a third-party email list, the quality of your email lists is crucial. Poor quality lists increase bounce rates and spam complaints, lowering domain trust.

For First-Party Email Lists: 

Consider using an email validation tool to ensure you only send email campaigns to users with valid email addresses. However, remember that many large email providers, including Gmail and Yahoo, have mechanisms that block or interfere with automated email validation attempts. 

This results in inconsistent validation processing and even responses that vary from day to day. Generally speaking, most of today’s automated validation services have an efficacy rate of around 80%.

Additionally, data hygiene services, followed by an email append, can ensure the email addresses in your database are your contacts’ most-used, up-to-date addresses. Deep Sync can append 100% opt-in email addresses to your consumer postal file—where an individual- or household-level match can be made—with a 70%-90% match rate. 

For Third-Party Lists: 

It’s important to power your email acquisition campaigns with high-quality data. Email lists from a reputable provider can help you grow your audience with the right contacts.

However, be aware that well-known email broadcast services such as Constant Contact, Mailchimp, and MyEmma prohibit the use of purchased lists. Make sure to read the terms and conditions of your particular broadcast service to ensure that they allow third-party lists.

Elevate Your Impact with Modern Email Marketing Techniques

With a solid foundation, it’s time to apply advanced techniques to help your messages stand out! Here are some recommendations you can implement to deliver value, increase engagement, and drive conversion.

Personalization & Segmentation for Higher Engagement

Audiences typically respond better to emails that feel relevant to them. For this reason, personalization and segmentation are key pieces of data-driven email marketing. When done right, these tailored communications can greatly improve email engagement metrics.

Segmentation

Segmentation enables you to group recipients on key behaviors and preferences, as well as demographics and geographical location. With segmentation applied, you can create customized, valuable content that resonates with various audience groups. 

Rather than sending a mass email to your entire list, break your audience into smaller segments and tailor your messaging to them. Consider creating an “engaged audience” segment that would include contacts who are—for example—active customers, newsletter subscribers, have opened marketing emails in the past, or have engaged with your content on another channel. 

Personalization

Consumers seek value in the interactions they have with your brand; generalized communications that lack focus and a personal connection cause consumers to turn away.

Personalization no longer means simply including the recipient’s first name; the most effective personalization is based on your audience segments and their unique qualities. 

Some popular personalization tactics include:

• Geographic: mentioning the recipient’s city in the subject line can increase email open rates.
• Life Events: tailor your communications to specific audiences, like new movers.
• Interest or Past Purchase: mention products or services that align with recipients’ past behaviors.
• Company Type: communicate differently with segments based on company type, like brands versus advertising agencies.
• Dynamic Content: With dynamic content, the content a recipient sees changes based on who they are. For example, highlighted product offerings can be variable so that they are relevant to the recipient based on their past purchases or preferences indicated.

Our best advice: Start with the segments you have available and brainstorm ways to personalize your emails based on their qualities and attributes.

Create Opportunities for Interaction

Adding interactive email elements can help you gather valuable insights about recipient preferences and behaviors. As a bonus, elements like countdown timers, games, quizzes, polls, and videos add a fun and interesting touch to your email that can lead to higher open and click-through rates.

For an additional engagement boost, you can also share links to interactive quizzes, polls, and videos on your social channels.

Choose Send Dates Based on Research

Research shows that when—and how often— you send your email can impact your engagement metrics. Our email marketing calendar provides the best dates to send B2B and B2C marketing emails. This can help marketers structure campaigns throughout the year for better results.

Open rates for emails tend to be higher if sent on a weekly cadence, with an average open rate of 48.31%.

Optimize Subject Lines and Messaging

Subject lines are the first thing recipients see in their inbox, so they can significantly impact your open rates. While tools like SubjectLine.com can provide insights into subject line optimization, A/B testing subject lines can be hugely beneficial.

Supplement Your Email Campaign with Omnichannel Touches

While email tends to be a favorite channel for marketers, these new changes may make things difficult. Putting more attention towards social media, SEO, direct mail, programmatic advertising, and other channels can help marketers decrease the impact of the changes.

An omnichannel strategy ultimately reinforces brand awareness and allows audience members to consume content and respond using the channels they prefer. Reaching consumers across channels can help improve campaign effectiveness, so consider adding additional touchpoints to complement your email marketing strategy.

Ask your data partner whether your email list can also be activated for programmatic, social, or other channels—either through data onboarding, appends, or other data services. Deep Sync makes cross-channel data activation possible. For example, Enhanced Onboarding can activate first-party lists across digital channels like Meta, TikTok, Google, and The Trade Desk. This makes it possible to reach the same exact audience across multiple channels.

Email Marketing Best Practice: More Resources

Whether used separately or in conjunction with other channels, email marketing delivers your message directly into the hands of your current and prospective customers. Engage your target market anytime, anywhere with tools designed to reach highly connected audiences. 

Deep Sync’s data assets and digital platforms bring a new level of connectivity to multi-channel campaigns. Learn more in these resources:

• Stay ahead of Emerging Marketing Trends, like Google and Yahoo’s changing restrictions.
• Reach new customers with Email Acquisition. Deep Sync data helps you convert prospects into customers through high-performing email acquisition campaigns. 
• Significantly increase your email append match rates with Deep Sync’s exclusive multi-source Email Enhancement process.