2025 is less than two years away but will be a big moment for everyone: We will be through the very first 25 years of a century. Sorry to make literally everyone feel old right now, but it’s true. It’s here. If you ask the youngins when email was created, they truly and accurately can reply, “In the late 1900s.” 

I’ll stop. 

So, let’s hear it for email whose death has been foretold for the last 10 years at the very least and today is still kicking!  

What comes next for email? This is a question looming large for a while, especially considering major innovation outside email, like social advertising or purchase intent-driven apps. Look at these articles from 2014 (lol), 2015 (yikes!), 2016 (actually, let’s not), and 2020 (wait.) 

The Future of Email in 2025 

When it comes to technology, advances happen in what feels like the blink of an eye. Sure, artificial intelligence (AI) must have been in the works for quite some time, but to the public, it’s roared onto the scene with a vengeance, and it feels like it’ll change the world. It has already, frankly, but where might it go tomorrow? 

Since email is kind of our thing, we turned out sights to what might happen between now and the closing of the first quarter-century of the millennium. Wow, that keeps getting worse to hear, doesn’t it? 

We asked some of the wisest and most forward-thinking email folks to give us their thoughts on what the state of email will be in 2025. Will there be big changes? Will the start of changes slowly emerge by 2025? Will email be our old standby we can trust in and rely on for another quarter century to come? 

From email developers to marketers to spam crusaders to internet service providers, you’ll see tons of facets of our community represented. 

Our Questions 

Before we get into who answered our questions and what they said, here’s exactly what we asked: 

• How do you see email fitting into the marketing mix in 2025? 
• What about email do you see as a nice-to-have for now, but feel will be considered table stakes by 2025? 
• What do you hope or wish to see change within email by 2025? 

This is a good place to let those questions marinate so you can come up with your own answers to see who might be aligned with you and who might have an answer you’d never considered. What do YOU think? 

Our Contributors

• Marcus Biel, Maildroppa
• Nout Boctor-Smith, Nine Lives Digital
• Tam Bond, Dotdigital
• Will Boyd, Simon Data
• Alex Brotman, Comcast
• Seth Charles, Iterable
• Kellyann Doyle, Zoek Marketing
• Louis Driving Hawk, SocketLabs
• Dr. Matthew Dunn, Campaign Genius
• Luke Glasner, Glasner Consulting
• Julia Janssen-Holldiek, eco
• Aubrey Miller-Schmidt, Main Street America Insurance
• Jaina Mistry, Litmus
• Tim Moore, SocketLabs
• Jennifer Nespola Lantz, Kickbox
• Dan Oshinsky, Inbox Collective
• John Peters, Campaign Monitor
• Melinda Plemel, Spamhaus
• Drew Price, HoneyBook
• Nicola Selenu, ActiveCampaign
• Sloan Simmons, beehiiv
• Bob Sybydlo, ENVERTAdigital
• Anne Tomlin, Emails Y’all
• Jordie Van Rijn, Email Vendor Selection
• Bill Volz, SocketLabs
• John Walsh, Nonprofit Campaign Lab
• Chad S. White, Oracle

Our Hopes and Dreams for Email in 2025 

First, we hope you enjoy this series. There’s so much great content from people who know email inside and out and you’re really getting a cross-section of different specialties. But more than that, we hope you’re inspired to stretch your mind to think about the amazing future email can and will have. Do you want to find new ways to use AI? Have you considered more interactive or hyper-personalized emails? Should you prepare for more strict legislation? How can you better protect your recipients and enjoy more success through email? 

The future of email is ours. We’re in the home stretch to 2025. 

What will 2050 hold? Start thinking about that now…you might hear from us in the future.