Email in 2025 Featuring Dan Oshinsky, Inbox Collective

Please welcome Dan Oshinsky!

Dan Oshinsky runs Inbox Collective, a consultancy that helps news organizations, non-profits, and indie newsletters get the most out of email.

Dan Oshinsky works in an industry less common than others; lots of newsrooms and nonprofits. Their communications are markedly different than a typical B2B or B2C email campaign. He shines a spotlight on something super unique but applicable (and important): personalized data and how to consolidate it and make decisions based on it rather than sending mail and hoping for the best. Take a deeper look at his thoughts about the future of email.

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

One thing I’ve always loved about email is that it doesn’t change all that fast. Email today still looks a lot like email when I first got into this space over a decade ago. And I expect that in 2025, marketers will — surprise! — be using email in similar ways to 2023. 

One small change in the years ahead: I expect more brands to put thought into how SMS and email can fit together, and how to deploy SMS for transactional messages (like credit card processing issues or shipping updates) instead of relying solely on email. 

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

Too many marketers fail to incorporate reader feedback into their strategy. Whether it’s using surveys to understand what and when to send, using feedback to improve marketing copy, or talking to readers to better understand how to identify and segment specific audiences, there are so many opportunities where surveys can be useful.
If you’re not making time to listen to your audience, you’re missing an opportunity to build a better email strategy. In 2023, this is something many marketers say they know they should be doing but aren’t. By 2025, I hope it’s a best practice everyone is implementing.

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

So much of my work is with newsrooms and nonprofits who tend to be a bit limited by the data they collect. The data often exists, but lives in several different tools. Without all the data in one place, they sometimes miss out on opportunities for new tests or products.
For instance, a publisher sending breaking news alerts should be able to segment readers into interest-based alerts based on what that reader does on site. The reader who reads several stories per week about the local football team but who rarely reads political news should be getting breaking news alerts about the football team and almost nothing about politics. But publishers and nonprofits often struggle to connect the dots between email, site, and SMS data. I’m hoping more email platforms will make it easier to pull in data from multiple sources, allowing operators in this space to better segment, test, and send.