2025 top email marketing tips from personalization to performance

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The Litmus team is constantly abuzz discussing new email marketing ideas and predictions.

Trends like interactive emails will shape the industry in the next twelve months. We’ll spend more time perfecting lifecycle email marketing strategies and data management while leaving room to experiment with the latest personalization and automation tactics. 

Marketers will aim for goals like increased engagement and retention throughout the customer journey. 

Of course, we can’t forget about the AI in the room. AI tools will continue to help marketing teams reduce time spent on repetitive tasks, but they also might shake up your strategies. 

In this article, we broke down what marketers should focus on in the inbox this year. Who’s ready to plan your best email year yet? Let’s go!

Bring lifecycle emails, segmentation, and dynamic content to the forefront

It’s not enough to make a pretty email—messages need to be relevant, timely, and personalized. Emails today should focus on three facets of personalization to hit the mark:

• Lifecycle marketing: As customers move through different phases of their subscriber journey, like awareness or onboarding, email serves different roles with varying goals. 
• Segmentation: Dividing your audience into categories, like new versus returning customers, lets you customize what and when you send. 
• Dynamic content: Dynamic email content creates ultra-personalized emails without the (frankly, impossible) task of creating countless email versions by hand. 

Let’s zoom in on each of these elements and ideas to work them into your email plans. 

Tip: Use lifecycle email marketing for business sustainability 

Lifecycle email supports retention and engagement for business sustainability, which is important for long-term success—especially if funding or growth feels a bit stinted.

“It used to be easier to raise money and say, ‘Let’s just throw more ads!’ or ‘Let’s plug retention and onboarding problems by just putting more people at the top of the funnel.’ And now that’s no longer the case, and people have some holes that we need to plug.”

However, our research found that only 44% of marketers use lifecycle emails. Why’s that? It’s a combination of effort and attribution. For starters, organizing a new lifecycle email takes more upfront planning than a simple newsletter. Second, you can’t simply count the clicks to understand if your lifecycle emails are working—you need to chop it up into activation, engagement, and retention.

In the new year, slowly build your lifecycle email repertoire without taking too much time away from your other email marketing campaigns. Here are some of the lifecycle emails you can use this year to keep customers engaged from their first visit to their fifth purchase (and beyond!).

1. Awareness

• Goal: Introduce potential customers to your brand, product, or service.
• Email touchpoints: Welcome emails for new subscribers and brand story introductions.

2. Engagement

• Goal: Use content to encourage your audience to engage with your brand and increase email read rates.
• Email touchpoints: Newsletters and lead nurture email programs.

3. Consideration

• Goal: Provide content/info to guide customers into considering your product/service.
• Email touchpoints: ‘Which product is right for me?’ messages and testimonial roundups. 

4. Activation/Conversion

• Goal: Drive the customer to take action, like purchasing a product or service.
• Email touchpoints: Promotional offers, new product alerts, transactional messages for orders, and social proof.

5. Onboarding

• Goal: Help customers get the most out of your product with smooth onboarding.
• Email touchpoints: Tutorials and user guides.

6. Retention

• Goal: Keep customers engaged + satisfied enough to consider repeat business.
• Email touchpoints: Loyalty programs, personalized offers, post-purchase follow up, product updates, and customer surveys.

7. Loyalty/Advocacy

• Goal: Create brand advocates out of happy customers. 
• Email touchpoints: Referral programs, reviews and testimonials requests, social sharing incentives, and community building.

8. Reactivation/Win-Back

• Goal: Re-engage inactive customers and return them to the customer lifecycle.
• Email touchpoints: Re-engagement email series for inactive subscribers, special offers, and surveys to understand why they lapsed.

Tip: Power your lifecycle marketing with segmentation 

Email segmentation helps you figure out who should receive which lifecycle campaigns, like welcome emails for new customers and special offers for top buyers. Even within the same lifecycle stage, you can use segmentation to make messages more personal. For example, self-selected preferences, like favorite topics or product categories, let you conduct a/b testing to learn which types of emails perform best within segments. 

These are just some of the ways you can segment your email audience this year:

• Demographics like identity, company size, role, or age. Send relevant content and test new messaging or offers.
• Geography and time zone: Customize your language and send time.
• Purchase history: Send special offers to top customers or boost engagement with potential buyers.
• Email engagement: Focus on engaged subscribers to maintain healthy deliverability.
• Devices and email clients: Experiment with more or less text-heavy messages between devices.
• Self-selected preferences: Let subscribers opt in and out of content for holidays, events, or product categories.

Email segmentation is the tactic more likely to improve email performance.

 

Tip: Increase conversion rates with dynamic content

“Hey, %%first_name%%!” is so 2018. Subscribers have seen basic personalization a million times, and marketers need to step up and stand out. Enter dynamic content. 

Dynamic content in email are elements that change based on who opens the email, when they engage with it, or where they are. 

Implementing dynamic content examples like live polls, progress bars, countdown timers, social feeds, live weather updates, and other personalized elements can significantly enhance email engagement. 

With tools like these—and personally, we’re partial to Litmus Personalize—email marketers can create hyper-personalized emails that convert to capture attention and foster stronger connections with their audience. It ultimately drives higher conversion rates and customer satisfaction.

Brands have seen a serious boost from dynamic content, too: 

• Kate Spade used live content to increase revenue 174% and boost click-through rate (CTR) by 36%.
• P&O Ferries saw a 43% increase in clicks and a 50% increase in CTR thanks to dynamic content.
• Litmus Personalize users have seen a 52% increase in conversions with dynamic content personalization.

Not sure where to start? We have free email templates with Litmus-tested live elements.

Letting subscribers vote on their favorite products is fun for them while giving you information for future personalization. See more live poll examples here.

Invest in specialized design & automation tools

We’ve said it once, and we’ll say it again—you need a dedicated email designer! And ideally, one armed with the right tools for the job. (Psst: we use Litmus.) As email continues to grow and develop into its own medium, which is still one of the marketing channels with the highest return, specialization is essential.

Beyond having an email designer on the team, marketing teams should also take a good, hard look at their automation tools, too. Here’s where to place your attention.

“We’ve been playing checkers for too long and not enough chess. Looking at things more holistically and diversifying our investments with automation will go a long way. There’s just a bit of a mindset shift that we need to do.”

Tip: Set up your email design and development program for speed 

19% of marketers say a lack of appropriate email team resources is their biggest email production cycle obstacle. Need help getting buy-in? Check out our guide to getting executive buy-in for your email program.

In the meantime, try these tips to make design efforts go further: 

• Use email templates to start the design process a few steps ahead.
• Consider email building tools that cut development time in half.
• Add your brand assets, reusable HTML email templates, and code modules to an email design tool.
• Test out AI design tools to see if they speed up your workflow, like generating variants of layouts, colors, styles, or images.
• Use Litmus Assistant to translate your email across languages using generative AI.

Tip: Let automation bridge your lifecycle marketing gaps

Focus on automation if you want to build up your lifecycle email marketing program this year. Since you can use a single automated email over and over, the effort you invest into production goes further than one-to-one messages or batch and blast campaigns. Once your lifecycle campaigns like onboarding, re-engagement, and loyalty programs are up and running, use Litmus Email Guardian to monitor them 24/7 for broken elements.

Your next campaign awaits

Choose from a wide range of professionally designed email templates to make your campaigns stand out and save time.

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Integrate email tools and prioritize data management for effective lifecycle campaigns

Email automation and enhanced personalization are top goals for marketers. There’s just one little (scratch that, big) problem standing in their way—data. Data management is a recurring issue for many email teams, and as new ways to use data to personalize emails emerge, the need for accurate, cross-channel data and tools will only go up.

“Data collection and management is a continual challenge; it’s not a “set it and forget it” proposition. Be flexible on what you want to know from customers and how you’ll ask for it. Establish your own ‘why’ for collecting certain types of information, and form an actionable plan to make it come to life in a more personalized and contextually relevant customer experience. You’d be surprised how much information your subscribers will offer once you prove that you are asking them questions to make their life easier or better.”

Tip: Narrow your data management focus

Don’t do the math on how many email combinations exist when you consider every potential customer data point across the email customer journey for all the new email personalization and design options. You’ll break your calculator. Instead, pick a focal point to start improving your data management: 

Step 1: figure out what data you have and need 

Ideally, you can clean up or get creative with data you already own to try new personalization ideas. If you need to work with other teams to source intel, having a focused request helps. Make a list of:

• Data you have now, like customer segments or location.
• Data you can easily get, such as through preference centers or email polls.
• Data you’d love to have, like browsing history.

Step 2: pick a lifecycle phase to focus on 

Personalization and automation opportunities abound, but you only have so many hours in the workday. Choosing a single lifecycle or metric, like re-engaging cold subscribers or converting abandoned carts, narrows your focus. 

Step 3: brainstorm ways to personalize

With your goal on one side and available data on the other, it’s time to mix and match. How can you use what you have to create what you need? Sometimes, working within confines makes creativity easier. Of course, if there’s a glaring hole of data you need, you now have a clear direction to work toward.

 

Tip: Connect your tools to use advanced lifecycle strategies

Integrating your email marketing tools with the broader marketing tech stack is pivotal for achieving seamless, efficient, and data-driven campaigns. 

You can unlock so much potential by connecting email platforms with customer relationship management (CRM) systems, customer data platforms, email analytics tools, and marketing automation platforms. More insights, more personalization, and more transparency around results—to name a few. You might even add a data management tool for data consolidation. 

Even if you don’t have the most robust marketing tech stack, you can collect useful data within your emails. Use signup forms and preference centers to explicitly collect information, or get creative with email polls or quizzes to segment your audience. 

Tip: Work outside of your bubble

In addition to integrated tools for cross-channel marketing, you also need shared goals and perspectives. Here’s how to get more alignment across teams this year: 

• Plot out the entire customer lifecycle and multi-channel digital marketing touchpoints with other teams, like social media, to identify gaps in the customer experience and opportunities to collect personalization data.
• Talk to the data team about what measurement is possible, which data policies you need to be aware of, and whether you need new processes to make measurement possible.
• Choose goals for multiple teams to work on and clearly outline how each team will contribute.

Embrace generative AI for efficient content creation

According to our State of Email Innovations research, 60% of marketers use ChatGPT for AI tasks. If you’re part of the 11% of marketing teams who don’t use GenAI yet but plan to, here’s how we’d approach getting started.

“While usage is high for a new technology, the performance improvement reported by users is not. In fact, of all the email marketing elements and technologies asked about, respondents rated generative AI for copy and for images among the bottom three in terms of performance. GenAI is predominantly about time-savings, not performance increases—at least for now.”

Tip: Start small and work your way up to advanced projects 

Easing generative AI into your email workflow is a good idea, especially if anyone on your team is skeptical. You can start with simpler, ad-hoc tasks and then work your way up to advanced tactics. 

Easy

• Generate a list of campaign ideas (brainstorming is the most common use case among marketers who use GenAI).
• Create a list of subject line ideas with Litmus Assistant and then compare them with email subject line testing to achieve the best open rates.

Medium

• Adapt the tone of your email copy with Litmus Assistant.
• Change your audience- or industry-focus of existing email copy.
• Draft email copy from scratch.

Advanced

• Leverage your email service provider (ESP) or CRM data to serve custom content to subscribers, at scale, with email personalization tools.
• Generate images and videos to use in content.

Tip: Think beyond email copy

Written content is the most popular GenAI output for marketers, with 34% it to create it at least occasionally. Text-based outputs can range from brainstorming subject lines and campaign ideas to creating a draft project plan for your big onboarding email sequence overhaul. However, there’s so much more you can do:

• Email QA Testing: find errors in code.
• Review: fine-tune elements like writing tone.
• Analysis: compare campaign performance to find top-performing messaging, automations, or send times.
• Predictive product recommendations: automatically suggest products based on customer actions.
• Subscriber scoring: find your disengaged subscribers and predict who is most likely to buy.

Project planning: generate a draft timeline and task list for a big project.

“Since ChatGPT was popularized in 2022, I’ve found many ways to incorporate GenAI into my email process. Initially, I mostly used ChatGPT to help when facing writer’s block with email subject lines, body copy, or call-to-actions. As time passed, my ChatGPT use cases evolved. I began using it for audience segmentation, creating frameworks for email sequences, or even when I needed a second opinion on portions of email code. The next area I’d like to explore is using AI to automate more manual tasks in my email workflow.”

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Use newsletters as key relationship-building tools

Newsletters might not directly impact conversions or revenue like promotional messages do, but we’ll never stop advocating for their spot at the email marketing table. Staying top-of-mind with subscribers, building relationships, establishing trust, and increasing retention are all reasons to use newsletters this year.

“I would love to see more organizations build newsletters into their overall strategy because it is such a powerful relationship building tool. So many folks now are used to getting newsletters from the individuals, the organizations, the businesses, the nonprofits they like and trust. And so the more that you can try to build those relationships using newsletters, I think the better your marketing strategy will be in the long run.”

Tip: Use interactive elements to make newsletters fun

Newsletters let you show off your brand personality, share helpful content, and show up consistently to build relationships with your audience. With interactive elements like polls, they can even turn into two-way conversations that give subscribers a say in their experience. Plus, interactive content is fun and memorable. This year, stand out in your newsletter with:

• Live polls that let subscribers vote on brand-specific topics or just-for-fun questions like Team Cat vs Team Dog.
• Interest Signals that tally how many people have interacted with an item or link, like showing how many subscribers signed up for a webinar.
• Social feed counters that display your social profiles along with data points for each post, like the number of ‘likes’ each Instagram post has.
• Sentiment trackers to give feedback on how interesting or helpful the newsletter content is.
• Scratch-offs that reveal a special discount or reveal a fun message.
• Image carousels that let subscribers scroll through pictures.

“People are always asking, ‘Well, this is great for B2B but what about B2C?’ But I think there’s so much that B2B can learn from B2C and B2C can learn from B2B. We’re all trying to market to human beings. Putting these boundaries and barriers in place and just learning what this industry is doing is doing ourselves a little bit of a disservice.”

Tip: Take in all the inspiration you can get 

Writing any kind of email repetitively can leave you feeling creatively uninspired. So, we like to take in as much inspiration as possible. Look for new email ideas in: 

“I always encourage folks to sign up for newsletters and get on email lists of different sorts of companies and publishers and brands and individuals that are outside your orbit. See what they send you. Sometimes it’s stuff that you like, often it’s stuff that you don’t. But you can learn things from the stuff that you hate.”

Optimize for accessibility and inclusivity

Effective email marketing connects humans, and that means all of them. Making your emails accessible and inclusive to everyone in your audience is a must-have, even if the updates don’t directly boost the bottom line or your email marketing ROI. In addition to just being a nice thing to do, creating accessible emails builds trust and brand goodwill with people who might not be getting that experience from other brands or organizations.

“It’s worth recognizing that accessibility probably isn’t demonstrating sizable ROIs because brands have already alienated those audiences that appreciate accessibility the most. Accessibility is an investment in your ability to retain future subscribers at a higher rate.”

Tip: Follow accessible email marketing best practices

There’s a collection of elements to consider for accessible emails, so we have a guide dedicated to getting it right. As a refresher, here are some best practices to keep in mind:

• Use colors with a high level of contrast.
• Leave GIFs or videos with flashing content out.
• Avoid email designs that are just one big image.
• Use a font that’s at least size 14.
• Use semantic elements to give your subscribers who use screen readers the option to “scan” through an email by header.
• Consider offering text-only email alternatives.
• Build email designs with a clear visual hierarchy.
• Use inclusive language.
• Ensure the size of your bulletproof buttons are large enough to be used by thumbs and fingers on mobile devices.
• Use ALT attributes to describe email elements.
• Make unsubscribe buttons or links easy to find.

Tip: Test for accessibility before you hit send

Some email testing tools, like Litmus, have built-in accessibility checks. Reviewing your content before hitting send helps you maximize the impact of every email. Accessibility testing includes:

• Visual impairment filters to see what your email designs look like to people with different visual color deficiencies.
• Automatic accessibility checks that look for elements like alt-text, text justification, table-roles and more.
• NVDA screen reader preview.

The future of email

There’s an interesting blend in email marketing right now. On one hand, marketers are exploring ways to use tools like automation and AI to work more efficiently and reach more people. At the same time, we’re trying to figure out how to humanize our messages even more by creating inspiring personalized emails and prioritizing accessibility. 

Whether the top priority for your marketing efforts is to try advanced segmentation, focus on lifecycle emails for retention, have fun with interactive content, or engage subscribers with newsletters, we’ll be right there with you.

Want to learn more about how marketers use email? Check out our State of Email reports to get exclusive data and expert insights.

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