Email in 2025 Featuring Jaina Mistry, Litmus
Please welcome Jaina Mistry!
In her role as Director, Content and Email Marketing for Litmus, Jaina Mistry leads a team of fun-loving email and content marketers who strive to create captivating and educational content for email marketers of all stripes. An #emailgeek to her core, Jaina’s worked in and around email for over 15 years and has worn just as many email hats.
Jaina took three questions and gave us answers on answers on answers. She’s covered so much here without making us read for days, it’s hard to pull together one succinct point to call out to entice you to read more. Jaina is a very respected veteran email expert, so you’ll want to read it all. No spoilers or TL;DR, just get to reading.
How do you see email fitting into the marketing mix in 2025?
Email is — and will remain — the dependable pillar of the marketing mix. It may even begin to replace social media in providing a way to connect with your audience in an authentic and genuine way by being more dependable, measurable, and mainly, it’s an owned channel YOU are in control of!
Rather than trusting an algorithm to connect with a customer on a social media platform at the right time, brands will use email to more effectively connect with their customers. In Marigold’s Consumer Trends Index, they share email outperforms organic social media posts by 13%! You can’t sniff at that stat.
What about email do you see as a nice-to-have for now, but feel will be considered table stakes by 2025?
Newsletters.
Lots of companies and brands have them now, but with social media algorithms getting even more complicated and hard to “win” at, the only way you’re going to be able to truly connect with your audience through a channel you own and control is by using a newsletter. And when I say newsletter, I mean a newsletter that’s there to build trust and loyalty with your audience, but not necessarily sell to them. There’s not a single vertical out there that should ignore the idea of a newsletter, whether you’re in finance, health care, or retail. Give your customers something to look forward to in their inbox that isn’t another sales or promotional email. Give them an insight into your brand, the people at your company, or offer your expertise in a fun and engaging way. Newsletters provide another way to connect to your audience—so make that connection, build on your brand loyalty, and develop some consumer trust.
What do you hope or wish to see change within email by 2025?
We as an email community are no longer asking what best practices should we follow, but are creating our own best practices based on guidelines and data-based learning from our own email programs.
Seeing more brands and companies prioritizing accessibility in their emails. I’m talking dark mode-compatible, ALT-text touting, image-to-text ratio balanced emails… Accessibility isn’t just a trend, it’s a legitimate way to ensure more customers or subscribers can successfully engage with your emails.
Email design is seen as a design discipline of its own, just like product design, web design, app design, etc. Email design is a unique blend of UX and marketing design. As such, it has its own set of required skills. It’s taken a few years for email development to be seen as its own speciality, and it’s time for email design to be given the same treatment.
I hope email marketers no longer have to jump through several hoops to understand the performance and ROI of their email program. We’re often looking at analytics from multiple different platforms and plugging the data into a spreadsheet to be able to truly understand email performance. I’m hoping we’ll see better unification and integration of platforms, and with the help of AI, a less painful way for marketers to pull data. Perhaps one day we’ll be able to ask a bot, “On average, how many email touchpoints does it take for someone to become a customer?”
And finally… I hope ESPs stop messing with our email code 🙃 (But I know I’m reaching here!)
