Email Marketing is Changing Fast: What’s Next?

2025 is already here, and 2024 has been a whirlwind for email marketers.

AI is enabling mass personalization, Google is cracking down on spam more aggressively than ever before, and new platforms are springing up left and right, offering hot new interactivity options.

As someone with limited time and a limited budget, where do you put your energy with so many email marketing strategies competing for it?

In today’s blog, we’re doing a deep dive into 2024’s email marketing trends to cut through the noise and offer some actionable insights. 

The Evolution of Email Marketing: Why Trend Analysis is Crucial

Why Listen to me?

I’ve ghost-written newsletters for Saas and renewable energy CEOs for the last five years, all while growing my own newsletter, The Modern Mythmaker, to over 2000 subscribers with 49% open rates and 4% CTRs. I’ve also written targeted email sequences for clients across more than twenty industries.

As marketers, we now have access to a previously unimagined volume of data. Every campaign offers a million different data points, with every click followed across all platforms. Amidst all of this, we have to leverage data to make the best possible decisions.

With open rates no longer being a reliable predictor of a campaign’s success, marketers are turning to analysis of different trends to measure campaign effectiveness, like: 

• Engagement over time

• List growth rate

• Email influence on the customer journey

• Subscriber lifetime value

• Conversion rate

Before AI, each of these would have been difficult to measure, but now that we’re able to crunch massive data in a very short amount of time, we can use the data to create better campaigns. 

Predictive Analysis and Future Forecasting

If you’re unfamiliar with ‘predictive marketing,’ it’s one of those hot buzzwords making the rounds right now. Predictive marketing uses predictive analytics (gleaned from customer data) to get the right customers down the funnel at the right time.

A helpful definition comes from an Itransition article on the topic:

“Predictive analytics in marketing means using data mining, predictive modeling, and machine learning to predict marketing trends, customer behavior, and campaign outcomes.”

In the simplest possible terms, predictive analytics is the process of using data to predict customer’s buying behavior. 

The predictive analytics market is projected to be worth 35.45 billion dollars by 2027. The market loves it, and for good reason! In today’s world, where new technology is popping up all the time, it’s important to have an edge. Predictive analytics can offer one to even the smallest companies.

Predictive Analytics gives marketers a host of tools they can use to their advantage by hyper-personalizing communication with prospects in ways that were previously impossible. 

Leveraging Predictive Analytics Tools

In a world where everything is personalized, simply adding {{first.name}} to your subject line isn’t going to cut it anymore. 

It’s now possible to:

• Avoid spam blockers by finding out which ISPs are most likely to block emails

• A/B test the same email to send to customers at different stages of the buying cycle depending on whether or not they’ve opened it, then use the open rate and engagement data to segment our audiences. 

• Personalize email at scale with individual information from prospects’ LinkedIn and social media presences. 

• Send personalized welcome emails to every prospect that joins your list based on where they came from and when. 

Historical Progression of Email Marketing

Email marketing started in 1978 when Gary Thuerk, now known as the “father of spam,” sent the first unsolicited mass email to 400 recipients (a campaign that resulted in $13 million in sales). For the first twenty years, email marketers enjoyed wild-west style freedom until the first spam folders were created in 1998. Since then, it’s been a battle between the senders and the regulators, with each side figuring out new and clever ways to foil the other’s plans. 

In 1989, industry experts predicted that the fax machine was going to eliminate email completely. Very few people saw email’s potential. 

Case Studies: Successful Email Campaigns

Quite a few writers and brands have used beehiiv’s suite of analytics tools to make informed decisions about growing their subscribers. beehiiv’s 3D analytics dashboard lets almost anyone dig deeply into their newsletter to find out exactly what’s going on behind the scenes. 

Geoff Sharpe, co-founder of Lookout Media and writer of Ottowa Lookout, was able to scale from 0 in October 2021 to more than 32,000 people today (with more than 50% open rates), and he credits beehiiv’s 3D analytics with a large percentage of Lookout’s success. Geoff uses paid acquisition to grow Ottowa Lookout and uses 3D analytics to find out exactly where he should put his money. 

Image Credit Ottowa Lookout 

“The tool makes it really easy,” he said. “I can segment by time frame, I can segment by source. If I query ‘all ads,’ it’ll pull up all the data of all the different ads, and I can look and see how engaged the audience is, what the open rate is, what the unsubscribe rate is.”

-Geoff Sharpe

Another success story is Matthew Berry, one of the world’s leading fantasy football experts and writer of Fantasy Life. Fantasy Life has a huge organic audience (Berry himself has more than 1 million followers on X). Now that they’re focusing on paid acquisition, they can see exactly what’s working and what’s not. 

Fantasy Life has grown to more than 300,000 subscribers, and after switching to beehiiv and leveraging their new suite of tools, they’ve managed to gain 100% growth in open rates and a 200% increase in CTR.

“One of the things I really like about beehiiv is their built-in analytics platform, especially their segmentation, where you can create easy segments to track different data. Segmentation allows us to sort every different type of audience, so I can understand exactly what my open rate is from the website versus TikTok versus Facebook. That will allow me to understand what the open rate is, what the click-through rate is, what the churn rate is, and what the referral rate is to get true metrics of what this audience is.”

-Eliot Crist, CEO of Fantasy Life 

Key 2024 Email Marketing Trends to Watch Out For

Hyper-personalization and interactive emails  are the biggest email marketing trends of 2024. Personalization lets email marketers  avoid spam folders by ensuring each email is unique, and interactive emails drive engagement by including elements like: 

• Puzzles

• Videos 

• Add-to-cart functions

• In-email polls

• Games

• Image carousels

• Product customization

The Role of Personalization in Future Email Campaigns

Personalization works. Even in today’s world, where everyone’s seen it a thousand times, emails with personalized subject lines are still 26% more likely to be opened, and 52% of shoppers will go to a different store if emails aren’t personalized. 

Personalization Techniques and Tools

Using tools like Smartwriter.ai and Warmer.ai, you can outsource the client research part to write personalized emails with AI. Simply set your desired metrics, and your robot assistant will search through LinkedIn profiles, public personas, and more to send thousands of emails with personal touches that mention specific things about your ideal client’s digital presence. 

Another great way to personalize is by using your visitor’s browsing data on your site to re-target them with a one-click link to what they didn’t buy. Amazon does this spectacularly well, as do many e-commerce brands, like in this example from Aasics below:

Image Source

Advanced Segmentation for Improved Targeting

If you’re unfamiliar, email segmentation is the practice of breaking down a list of emails into small silos based on demographics and behaviors. You can then target each silo with different techniques that are more likely to convert.

Segment emails based on 

• Preferences

• Interests

• Engagement rates

• Geographical location, 

• Purchase history, and thousands of other data points. 

The Emergence of AI in Personalization

Several AI tools that personalize emails at scale have entered the market in the last two years, like Instantly.ai, compose.ai, or Smart Copy by Unbounce. There are endless personalization tools on the market now, all with their own little quirks. Each can pull info from different data points and mention it in email copy, but it’s important to test and quality control with these to find out what works best for you, or you’ll end up sending out a lot of sub-par emails.  

Take a look at this example below…

This personalized email example shows a catered list of books targeted at the buyer’s browsing and buying history 

Innovative Technologies Driving Trends in Email Marketing

Email platforms are now allowing very advanced segmentation, unprecedented automation, and the ability to embed interactive elements into emails. Emails like the Aasics example above are becoming commonplace, showing consumers what they missed out on by exiting before a purchase and offering targeted deals based on a user's purchase history.

Perhaps most surprisingly, the public’s reaction to all of this mass personalization is overwhelmingly positive. According to Hubspot, 71% of consumers say that they expect companies to offer personalized communication, and 76% get frustrated when it doesn’t happen. 

Whether we like it or not, the cat’s out of the bag. 94% of marketers say personalization leads to increased sales—the data doesn’t lie. 

Integration of Email Marketing with Other Channels

If you’re launching an email newsletter and you want to promote it, paid engagement on social media is a great bet, especially for finding people interested in becoming paying subscribers. Geoff Sharpe (mentioned earlier as the writer of Ottowa Lookout) credits paid engagement and ad spend as the reason he was able to grow to 32,000 subscribers. 

Because of 3D analytics, Geoff knows exactly how much it costs to acquire an email address on each channel. He cites his acquisition cost as $.50 to %.70 Canadian, or $.35-$.70 USD. He’s able to plan his ad campaigns accordingly and always be more efficient with his ad spend as time goes on. 

Another great cross-platform beehiiv success story is Payload. Before Payload switched to beehiiv, they were using a platform that didn’t allow them to segment their data. After the switch, managing editor Ryan Duffy, who’d worked at Morning Brew, decided to launch a referral program. 

He’d seen how successful referrals had been at their previous organization, and so he implemented a referral program that gave people access to swag, merch, and a secret monthly newsletter. Readers are encouraged to share their unique link across platforms, driving traffic and subscribers back to Payload’s page. 

Since people love exclusivity, this strategy has worked.

“Based on the initial success, and continued traction, we continue to invest and double down on our referral program. It’s actually really successful for us. It has been responsible for around 10% of our growth.”

-Ryan Duffy

Cross-Platform Marketing Synergies

The best and most proven way to earn subscribers through cross-platform marketing on social media is to offer value. If you routinely post on X, LinkedIn, or Facebook to your target audience, make sure that the posts you’re sending out offer something that the reader can use.

There’s no better “hack” than offering value. If you come across as a thought leader and routinely make the reader think that your content adds something to their lives, you’re going to grow over time.

This is the best way to create an engaged subscriber base that’s willing to pay a premium rate for your content on the back end. If you’ve given them advice they can implement in their lives and a lead magnet that they can actually use, you’ll have their loyalty. 

Make sure that your CTA is clear and easy to take action on in each post. Tell your target audience exactly what they’ll get by subscribing and how it will help them in their lives. 

Measuring Success: Analytics and Email Marketing Trends

With the new volume of data that any given marketer has access to, it can be tricky to know where to put the marketing budget.

The best practice is to create campaign goals first, and decide which metrics you’re going to assign the most weight to. 

• Starting a brand awareness campaign? Then open rates might be your best metric. 

• Trying to increase list engagement? Give more weight to reply rates and encourage reader feedback. 

• Experimenting with personalization? Make sure you test against an unpersonalized control group to make sure your audience likes personalized content. 

Advanced Email Analytics Software

beehiiv’s 3D analytics tool offers a huge volume of data that any email marketer can use to make better decisions. You’re able to see the results of any email you send, far past the normal tracking of open, reply, and click-through rates. 

You can: 

• Analyze data from any time period

• See where subscribers came from, down to what channel and what time

• See all subscriber demographics

• View when each subscriber is opening and engaging with each email

• Dive into open rates by subscribers segmented by the channel they came from

And much more. If you’re a data-driven professional who wants to build a profitable newsletter, then you must checkout beehiiv . 

Preparing for Change: Adapting to 2025 Email Marketing Trends

In my five years as a copywriter and email marketer, I’ve seen hundreds of trends come in that were ‘the thing that was going to change email marketing forever.’ Over a few months, they always transition from ‘the thing’ to ‘a tool.’

Remember, the hottest email marketing trends are no substitute for value. Each new trend helps you win the game of inches and moves you closer to your goals, but no trend is going to win the battle for you. If your newsletter/email campaigns are value-driven, you’ll win, even if you haven’t perfectly configured every piece of your campaigns with the latest AI. 

Focus on offering the best value in your category, and you’ll have raving fans. 

Adopting a Test-and-Learn Approach

Technology is moving fast in the AI arms race. Don’t get too attached to any new software tool. Utilize free trials and deals, and relentlessly test everything to make sure it’s a fit for you. If it doesn’t work, connect with the company to find out why. If they can’t answer your questions, cut your losses and move on. 

Embracing Flexibility and Agility

There is no ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach to email marketing. Success in the field requires the mindset of a mad scientist. Test, iterate, and eliminate until things work the way you want them to. 

Just because another company is using the newest strategy doesn’t mean you have to. Just because someone else designed their newsletter in a certain way doesn’t pigeonhole you into using that design. Be accountable to your audience first, and structure your testing around finding what works for them. 

Ready to use great data to inform your email marketing strategy?

Start your 30-day free trial of beehiiv today! People are joining beehiiv newsletters at a breakneck pace, and we’re notorious for crawling over broken glass to serve the needs of our creators. If there’s a feature you need, we’ll find a way to integrate it into your plan.