Email in 2025 Featuring Anne Tomlin, Emails Y’all

Please welcome Anne Tomlin!

Anne Tomlin is a freelance email developer and the founder of Emails Y’all. Specializing in email development for over a decade, she has worked with such brands as Discovery Inc., NPR, and Cameo. Anne is dedicated to coding accessible, responsive emails that render gorgeously in every major client. She runs Emails Y’all based on the principle that everyone deserves an excellent rendering regardless of their chosen client.

Make way, game-changer in the house! Oh, that’s Anne Tomlin, the jack of all email trades. Not only is she knowledgeable about email at large, but she’s also a developer who can sling HTML with the best of them. This wealth of knowledge is immensely insightful when exploring questions like this, because her view isn’t only grounded in performance. She also thinks about UX and how email should be BUILT. That’s no joke, so let’s listen.

How do you see email fitting into the marketing mix in 2025?

As multichannel marketing becomes more prominent, I expect an increasing focus on personalization. Brands will use all channels, including email, to gather subscriber information that is voluntarily provided.  

Journeys will be made for the explicit purpose of gathering data through games and other fun email-based activities. That data will then be used to send hyper-personalized emails that continue the dialogue between the brand and the subscriber.

What about email do you see as a nice-to-have for now, but feel will be considered table stakes by 2025?

The adoption of accessibility standards.
The Email Markup Consortium has already been so instrumental in spotlighting this issue. By 2025, all emails should have basic accessibility practices, like specific alt text for all images and wider adoption of live text for the body of an email, even by those brands that traditionally rely on imagery to sell their product. I expect ESPs will further the adoption of these standards by stopping a send that does not have alt text on all images.

What do you hope or wish to see change within email by 2025?

I hope to see most email developers start to transition away from tables and toward divs in preparation of Outlook’s abandonment of the Word rendering engine. Developers could then switch to a div-based layout with ghost tables and, after a few years, drop the ghost tables.