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:
- 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"
- Using list-unsubscribe headers, which allow native unsubscribe links next to a sender's name in the inbox
- Processing unsubscribes within 2 days
- 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.
The Expansion and Fragmentation of BIMI
The Brand Indicators for Message Identification (BIMI) standard allows for fully authenticated senders in good standing to have their organization's logo appear next to their sender name. That's great brand exposure, plus it gives subscribers greater confidence that the email is from your brand.
The big BIMI news in 2024 is that Google now supports Common Mark Certificates (CMCs) in addition to the harder-to-get Verified Mark Certificates (VMCs), and that Apple supports BIMI through its Branded Mail in Apple Business Connect program, which requires neither a VMC nor CMC.
The Ripple Effects in 2025
Coming late in the year, those two changes will lead to a surge in BIMI adoption in the year ahead. Although a major selling point of BIMI has been that it increases open rates by boosting subscriber confidence in the message, it's possible that being a non-adopter of BIMI could decrease your open rates by 2026 because you'll be in the minority at that point. Use 2025 to take advantage of BIMI across the various inbox providers.
Gmail's Hide My Email Clone
In 2021, Apple debuted Hide My Email, a feature that allows users to shield their true email address by creating a relay email account that forwards emails along. In late 2024, it was revealed that Google is close to launching a similar feature.
The Ripple Effects in 2025
Google's new feature, just like Apple's Hide My Email, is designed to appeal to the most privacy-conscious email users. That is a very small portion of consumers, who are also unlikely to opt in for promotional messages in the first place. So, if you have solid permission practices in place and aren't, for instance, opting in everyone who purchases from you, then the impact of relay emails should be negligible.
Apple Mail Tabs
Launching somewhat haphazardly in late 2024, Apple Mail tabs brings the inbox app up to par with all other major inbox providers, which implemented tabbed interfaces years ago. The launch reignited many of the same concerns that marketers had when Gmail debuted tabs more than a decade ago. Then as now, those concerns are overblown.
Thanks to Mail Privacy Protection, the effect of tabs on open rates will be largely invisible, which hopefully will help calm concerns. And as I explained in a recent MarketingProfs article, downstream metrics aren't much affected by Promo tab placement.
The Ripple Effects in 2025
As more Apple Mail users get access to tabs, the biggest danger is that Apple will start treating promotional emails differently, as Google and Yahoo have with the previously mentioned policies of forcing schema on those emails without sender consent. To fully understand the potential impact, we'll have to wait and see what Apple does.
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Over the past few years, inbox providers have been more active than they've ever been. Marketers should expect more changes in 2025—for better or worse.
More Resources on Email Marketing
Email at Scale: How to Increase Campaigns and Manage Complexity
A Two-Step Process for Launching Successful Email-Marketing Campaigns: Find Your Voice, and Segment
