Although new and unforeseen developments will undoubtedly shake email marketing in 2025, marketers have already had to contend with a slew of developments in 2024 that will become more of a force in the year ahead.

Let's look at some of those developments.

Yahoo and Google Deliverability Requirements

In an industry that's largely defined by its lack of standards, Yahoo and Google jointly announced several email deliverability requirements for brands, which went into effect in the spring and summer this year. They include:

1. Fully authenticating, including publishing a DMARC record with at least a policy of none (p=none)—" a relaxed mode that triggers no action on the receiver's side"
2. Using list-unsubscribe headers, which allow native unsubscribe links next to a sender's name in the inbox
3. Processing unsubscribes within 2 days
4. Keeping spam complaint rates low, with a goal of less than 0.1%, but absolutely no more than 0.3% for any sustained period of time, according to Google's Email Sender Guidelines

For most senders, those requirements weren't difficult to meet. However, some email service providers struggled with the technical requirements.

The Ripple Effects in 2025

First, Microsoft appears likely to adopt the same deliverability requirements as Yahoo and Google. That would increase the impact of those standards on B2B marketers.

And second, requiring senders to publish DMARC records with p=none is just a starting point. To maximize the impact of DMARC records, inbox providers will up the requirement to p=quarantine or p=reject. It's possible they might announce this change in 2025, to go into effect in 2026.

The Erosion of Preview Text

Preview text has been a core feature of modern inboxes for nearly two decades. And marketers have become adept at using visible and invisible preheader text to control their preview text so it complements and extends their subject lines.

However, in early 2024, Google started dramatically ramping up a policy it calls Automatic Extraction: It uses AI to apply schema to emails in the Promotions tab that replaces their preview text with images, discount codes, and expiration dates pulled from the email. The process breaks email attribution, in addition to creating mixed performance results for senders.

The launch of AI summaries by Apple furthers the loss of preview text, which is replaced by AI-generated summaries. Like Automatic Extraction, AI summaries are of mixed quality, and some wildly misrepresent the email's content.

Yahoo similarly uses both Automatic Extraction and AI summaries, although it focuses more on delivering that content post-open by pushing more of an email's content below the fold. In its summaries, it also replaces some of the links from the email with affiliate links, breaking email attribution and claiming a share of revenue generated by the email.

The Ripple Effects in 2025

Those two features will affect more of your subscribers in 2025, although the majority of your mobile email readers probably won't be affected by AI summaries until some point in 2026, after many more consumers have purchased new AI-capable phones.

To adapt to AI summaries, marketers will need to shift to writing standalone subject lines that don't rely on preview text to make complete sense.

To fight Automatic Extraction, brands will need to take the time to add schema to their emails themselves, which up to now most brands have decided isn't worth it or isn't in line with the brand image they want to project, since schema (by design) makes your emails look like Gmail's inbox ads.

Marketers should also explore opportunities to use sender name extensions to tell subscribers more about what their message is about.

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