A Best Practicing Guide to Email Marketing in 2025

In this ultimate guide to email marketing for business, our email marketing agency will dive into the essential strategies, insights, and email marketing best practices to help you navigate the changing landscape of email marketing in 2025.

Email marketing is an established cornerstone of digital marketing, and despite the rise of newer platforms, it remains a powerful tool with a predicted 4.89 billion email users worldwide by 2027.

For B2B companies, email marketing is still the most effective way to connect with prospects, with 73% of marketers using it to build lasting relationships.

As we explore the strategies that work best for both B2B and B2C, this email marketing guide will ensure you’re equipped with the knowledge to create engaging email campaigns that generate high conversions and resonate with your audience.

TRIED AND TESTED EMAIL MARKETING BEST PRACTICES

In this email marketing best practice guide, our team of experts will guide you through the tried and tested strategies for email marketing success in 2025.

CREATING ENGAGING AND AESTHETIC CONTENT

Attention spans are short, so making an immediate impact with your email marketing is crucial. With 61% of consumers spending eight seconds reading each email (Forbes), standing out is more important than ever.

This is where the design and content of your email campaigns play a vital role in capturing attention. Personalised emails, for example, can increase open rates by 26%. By using strong subject lines, concise wording, clear CTAs, and engaging visuals like graphics and images, businesses can create more meaningful connections with their audience, leading to higher open rates and stronger engagement.

This statistic proves the importance of tailoring both design and messaging to individual preferences and behaviours. When content feels relevant to the audience, it not only grabs their attention but also encourages further engagement with the email.

While AI can be a convenient tool, don’t rely solely on it to write your emails. Consumers respond best to personalised, human-sounding content. Instead, lean into writing tailored messages based on specific audience segments to make a more impactful connection.

Our email marketing guide recommends focusing on content that resonates with individual recipients to achieve better results.

SEGMENTING YOUR AUDIENCE DATA LISTS:

Effective audience segmentation is key to creating more personalised and impactful email marketing campaigns. By updating your existing audience segments to include customer data and preferences, you can tailor content based on specific purchasing behaviours.

This approach, known as hyper-segmentation, helps you organise vast amounts of data to create more niche segments, ensuring that your emails align with the unique wants and needs of each segment.

Recent updates, such as Apple iOS 18’s ‘priority messages’ feature, penalise brands using generic audience segmentation. This new feature uses AI to identify urgent messages, prioritising those deemed important and displaying them at the top of your lock screen. Priority Notifications also summarise key information to highlight the most important parts of alerts. As a result, it’s crucial for brands to refine their audience segmentation, focusing on customer behaviours and interactions with their brand.

Here are some tips to help improve your segmentation strategy:

  • Industry type: Different sectors have different pain points, so tailoring your content to address each sector’s unique needs will be more effective.
  • Role or position within a company: Segment by seniority to tailor messaging for different roles. For example, a Managing Director or CEO will have different decision-making powers to a Personal Assistant.
  • Behavioural data: Use past interactions, like pages viewed on your website, to segment your audience. This can easily be tracked using tools like Google Analytics.
  • Geographical location: Regional trends and needs can be addressed with emails based on geographical location, to help increase relevance and engagement.
  • Customer Journey: Your audience needs to be targeted with different content at each stage of their journey. Segment your audience accordingly, for example, use educational content for the awareness stage and sales-driven messaging for the decision stage.
  • Audience Interests: Collecting first-party data through email surveys helps you understand your audience’s preferences and interests, allowing for more targeted email segmentation. This is a key component of any email marketing best practice guide.

EMBRACE AI-POWERED ANALYTICS AND REPORTING

Analytics and reporting are crucial components of any successful email marketing strategy. Without them, it’s difficult to understand the effectiveness of your campaigns or identify areas for improvement.

Tracking key metrics such as open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates gives you valuable insight into how well your emails are performing. These metrics help you understand what resonates with your audience and what doesn’t, enabling you to fine-tune your approach for better results.

More advanced reporting tools can offer deeper insights into your audience’s behaviour, such as time spent reading emails, geographic location, and device usage. These details allow for more targeted segmentation and personalised content, improving engagement.

In 2025, making use of analytics and reporting will be an essential part of your email marketing strategy, particularly when it comes to automating your campaigns and responding to real-time data. By continually analysing your email performance, you can optimise campaigns and ensure you’re delivering the right message to the right people at the right time.

This is especially important for businesses following an ultimate guide to email marketing for business.

KEEP MOBILE FRIENDLY EMAIL DESIGN FRONT OF MIND

With 55% of emails now being read on mobile devices it’s essential to optimise your email design for mobile viewing.

For businesses, this can lead to higher engagement rates by improving the user experience, ensuring decision-makers can easily access your content anytime, anywhere.

  • Prioritise a mobile-first approach with single-column layouts for better readability on mobile devices.
  • Ensure links and buttons have a minimum target area of 44×44 pixels for easier accessibility on mobile screens.
  • These simple adjustments will improve functionality and encourage higher user engagement on mobile devices.

Want to know how to optimise your blogs for mobile viewing? Read our blog on how to make your emailers mobile responsive, part of our guide to B2B email marketing.

EMERGING TRENDS IN EMAIL MARKETING FOR 2025

  • Increased AI automation
  • More niche audience segments
  • An influx of first-party data

We believe that AI automation will drive a significant rise in audience segmentation, revolutionising the way brands approach email marketing. As AI technology continues to evolve, we can expect a dramatic increase in its use for refining audience segmentation.

In the near future, brands will not only use AI to better understand their audiences but also use it to capture and analyse first-party data more effectively. This data will allow for highly personalised and granular targeting, enabling businesses to send tailored content to the right individuals at the right time.

The ability of AI to process vast amounts of data quickly and accurately will enable marketers to make more informed decisions and optimise campaigns in real-time. It will be fascinating to watch how AI impacts the future of email marketing as it continues to evolve.

Gone are the days of third-party cookies. Our team predicts a significant shift towards first party data, as brands compete to collect more information about their audiences.

However, with stricter data privacy laws and growing concerns over how customer data is handled, businesses must become more transparent in their data collection practices. Adapting to evolving regulations like GDPR is essential for maintaining your brand’s reputation and maintaining strong relationships with your prospects.

HOW EDGE CREATIVE CAN ELEVATE YOUR EMAIL MARKETING

As email marketing continues to evolve with new technologies and shifting consumer behaviours, our team are here to ensure you stay ahead of the curve. With over 20 years of experience, we specialise in personalised, segmented campaigns that drive high response rates and maximise ROI.

We target the right audience with the right message at the right time, creating visually appealing, on-brand emails that stand out in any inbox. Our responsive designs work across all devices, while personalised content encourages engagement and drives sales.

Through A/B testing and optimisation, we refine your campaigns for the best results. Our automation tools ensure timely, relevant content reaches prospects, even when you’re not actively managing campaigns.

Let us support your email marketing efforts and help you achieve meaningful results. Get in touch with us to explore how we can enhance your campaigns and implement the best practices from our email marketing guide.

Why Customer Personas Are Vital for Your Marketing Strategy

In this post, we’ll cover the following:

Knowing your audience and understanding what makes them tick can make all the difference when it comes to attracting high-value visitors, leads, and customers to your business.

In this blog, experts from our marketing agency in Sutton Coldfield will explain the concept of customer personas and delve into the importance of using them to help achieve your business goals.

We will focus on areas including how it differs from marketing segmentation, where it fits in with your marketing strategy and how our digital marketing specialists can help.

HOW DO CUSTOMERS COMPARE TO MARKETING SEGMENTATION?

Customer personas, also known as buyer personas, are fictional but ideal, representations of your customers, built upon using the existing real data you hold about them. These personas can help you gain a deeper understanding of the clients you’re trying to target and how they find, interact, and use your services or products.

Such personas expand on the typical types of market segmentation that include demographic-led data such as gender, age, location, and lifestyle to name a few, to focus on the behaviours associated with these audiences, which could also include their personal motivations and values.

The aim is to identify similar personality traits within these customer personas and use that information to shape your marketing strategy, improve the customer experience and bring your business closer to its marketing goals.

WHY IS IT SO IMPORTANT TO USE CUSTOMER PERSONAS IN YOUR MARKETING STRATEGY?

The more information you have about your customer base, the more value you can add to their experience of your brand.

Within your business teams, every member of staff will benefit from understanding your customers and prospects – from those in the sales and marketing teams to product development and customer support – every communicational touchpoint can have an impact on a sale and will leave an impression (good or bad) on your audience.

This information will then lead to a greater insight into your customer journeys. It enables you to identify and meet customer needs, align your brand close to your customers, improve outbound communications and core messaging, fine-tune your services or products including pricing, and save time and money as the efficiency of your overall business is improved!

Once the above has been fully implemented, you will be better equipped to serve your customers and as a result, they will reward you with brand loyalty and peer-to-peer endorsement that will increase your brand awareness and reputation.

MAKE PEOPLE FALL IN LOVE WITH YOUR PRODUCT

If you’re selling products online, your competition can be high and if you don’t have a set strategy to help you stand out from the crowd, your brand and product will become just like any other out there in the e-commerce landscape.

Using storytelling might be your secret weapon to make your customers fall in love with your product – people remember stories 22 times more than just facts or figures. So, it’s your time to shine and show who you are and how can they identify with you!

Creating a story for your product not only will help you simplify the message, but you can also place it in a real-life situation and show how can the customer benefit from it. This will make it easier for them to understand the purpose and the value of the product.

The story that you tell can make the difference between converting them to buy your product or going to the competition, so make sure you overload it with your brand personality and that you use the right tone of voice!

WHAT TECHNIQUES CAN YOU USE TO ESTABLISH CUSTOMER PERSONAS?

Keyword research is a very effective marketing tool when it comes to gathering data about your clients. It allows your business to discover exactly what customers are searching for concerning your services, products and what advice they are looking for within your industry and location.

For example, you could discover that a popular search term is the name of one of your services alongside the word ‘offer’. This suggests that price and value could be important factors for your audience.

Social media can also be a useful tool for helping to establish personas – most platforms already have built-in analytics that offer a wide range of data about your audience. On top of this, you can see the type of content that is generating the most engagement and then gain an understanding of the user journey and what your customers are looking for.

There are also more traditional methods of communication and market research that can be used to help with customer personas, such as surveys, forums, and one-to-one interviews. If conducted in the right environment and at the right time, the responses can often be very honest and personal providing key beneficial insight into your business.

HOW THE TEAM AT EDGE CREATIVE CAN HELP WITH YOUR MARKETING STRATEGY

As a fully integrated digital marketing agency in Birmingham, we have a team of marketing specialists who understand the importance of establishing customer personas to help grow a business.

We can help develop your marketing strategy, focusing on reaching your target audience through a range of effective techniques, including a free marketing audit, brand review, content marketing, email marketing, paid advertising and conversion rate optimisation.

If you’d like more information about how EDGE Creative can help take your business to the next level, please call us on 0121 355 0892 or email info@edge-creative.com.

Why is Omni-channel Marketing Important for Your Business?

In this post, we’ll cover the following:

In this modern age, marketing is undergoing some major changes. The idea of ‘pull’ and ‘push’ marketing, where businesses either push their products directly to the audience or try and gain loyalty to pull in customers, is adjusting. Today we are moving towards a more personalised way of engaging with consumers, through the vast array of channels and devices on offer.

With the outbreak of coronavirus and the government lockdown, more consumers and businesses are heading online, so making use of online marketing has never been more important. Today’s screen-addicted consumers have pushed marketing and advertising into a whole new digital realm. The effect of this digital surge is what is now known as “omni-channel digital marketing”.

WHAT IS OMNI-CHANNEL MARKETING?

Omni-channel marketing is a core strategy that brands use to engage with customers across multiple channels.

Marketers need to provide a seamless user experience across all channels relevant to the buyer’s journey. Businesses can now interact with their consumers in store, on an online website or app, through print ads and catalogues or through social media platforms.

The Office for National Statistics released their annual report for Internet access in Great Britain in 2019, stating: “among all adults, 84% had used the internet ‘on the go’ in 2019, using a mobile phone, smartphone, laptop, tablet or handheld device”.

A customer’s purchasing journey can now span across many different days, locations, devices and channels. It is therefore crucial that a consumer’s experience remains as coherent as possible, across all networks, in person and behind a screen.

So, if a consumer can engage with a brand at anytime and anywhere, how should your business prepare to accommodate this?

HOW TO IMPLEMENT OMNI-CHANNEL MARKETING

Putting Yourself in Your Consumers’ Shoes

It is helpful to regularly examine the experience you are offering to your customers by re-enacting your customers’ purchasing journey.

Place an order or search for specific information on your channels. Do you provide a seamless experience? Are there any issues or obstacles? By employing a marketing agency like EDGE Creative, we can do this for you. We can help you to achieve this seamless experience you need by examining and expanding on your current marketing strategies through high-quality tools such as Hotjar.

Utilising Data

Data is vital in helping you to understand your business and its developments. Data processing includes increased productivity and profits whilst providing you with reliable, accurate statistics. Investing time and expenses into gathering data will help you to measure your success in terms of the response of real people, over a specific amount of time.

You should also be carrying out conversion rate optimisation (CRO). This practice functions to improve the conversion rate in any advertising, marketing, sales or other business practice that has a goal of getting a person to take an action.

The process of CRO involves understanding how your visitors are using your website, what actions they are taking and what is stopping them from completing your goals.

At EDGE Creative, we have over 15 years’ experience in creating digital campaigns that encourage users to convert. Our expert team are pioneers in using remarketing to boost conversion rates, while raising your business’s reputation, visibility and bottom line.

Defining Your Target Market

A target market is the specific group of people who you want to reach with your marketing message. These are the people who are most likely to purchase your products or services.

Creating a customer persona is a method of segmenting your target audience. These are profiles based on the analysis and research of your existing customers, which help to build more of a detailed picture of how old your customers are, where they live and what their personal motivations might be.

If you have a wide audience demographic, you can create personas for the different products or services you offer. Building these personas mean that you can be sure to target the right person from day one, meaning your business no longer wastes money targeting people on the off chance they slightly fit your audience.

Defining your audience will ensure you are effective in your marketing efforts; it will not stop people from buying your products. Defining your target audience will eventually help you to tailor your future content across all channels. 

As a digital marketing agency, we have over 15 years’ experience in devising customer personas, which makes us experts in helping you to define your audience online.

Listening and Responding to Your Customers

More than ever people are now using multiple devices during a single transaction process. You should be responding to these interactions.

An example of this could be to preserve the items in a customer’s shopping basket across their devices. This way, if a customer logs off their mobile app and switches to desktop, the product will still be in their basket. Sending emails to customers reminding them of the existing items in their basket could also encourage them to confirm their transaction.

EDGE CREATIVE

At EDGE Creative, we have extensive experience in providing a first-class marketing service that creates an impact and retains your audience. We can support you and your business in designing tailored marketing solutions across both traditional and digital platforms. If you are interested in finding out how EDGE Creative can help you, get in touch by calling 0121 355 8092 or email us on info@edge-creative.com.

Why Relevant Content Matters

Content marketing is arguably one of the most crucial elements of digital marketing that enables businesses to attract new customers by providing relevant content that answers their queries.

Over the past three years, 75% of businesses have increased their content marketing budget. Educational content can be expensive to create, but brands must continue to produce information to stay above their competitors in search engine results, and also to build authority and brand loyalty within that sector.

In order to make your content marketing strategy a success, relevancy is vital. Creating blog posts, articles and infographics that appeal to a wide audience is important, but if it doesn’t adhere to their specific wants and needs, you are not making the most out of your content marketing efforts.

In today’s modern world, the average consumer is inundated with content. As a result, they are constantly filtering out the content that is not relevant to them. Relevant content shows potential customers that you are catering to their specific needs at a specific point in their user journey. Everything else is noise and so will usually be ignored.

Content is available everywhere and anywhere on the internet. The saturation of so much freely available online information can become overwhelming and confuse users. By creating content that is relevant and informative, you show potential customers that you have something important to say.

RELEVANT CONTENT IMPROVES YOUR PERFORMANCE IN SERP’S

Once you have clicked on a search engine result, you tend to know fairly soon whether the page contains the content you are looking for.

With so much content freely available at the click of a button, we search quickly for indications as to whether the content is relevant to our search query. If not, we click off the page and start again. This all happens in a matter of seconds, and this high bounce rate will affect your overall performance in search engines.

What is SEO? Learn more in our in-depth blog post.

RELEVANT CONTENT POSITIONS YOU AS AN AUTHORITATIVE FIGURE

Creating relevant content on themes relating to your industry helps to position you as an expert within that field. A user is likely to have around seven touchpoints with your brand before they convert, so ensuring that you are visible at all stages of the user journey helps you to become a trusted authority within that sector. Having that constant visibility through content makes consumers more likely to want to do business with your brand because it becomes familiar and shows them that you do know your stuff.

There are a multitude of different factors that search engines take into consideration, such as your URL and page structure, but content is one of the most important elements to a good SEO strategy. Giving your users what they want ultimately drives more potential customers to your site, and when your content is relevant, search engines will recognise this and boost your rankings, which boosts your traffic and ultimately raises your bottom line.

At EDGE Creative, our content team use intricate methods to create content that is relevant to your audience and ideal customer. Whether you need blog posts, infographics or video marketing, our team of specialists can work together to execute a holistic marketing strategy that works.

If you want to revolutionise your content but aren’t quite sure where to start, request your FREE digital audit today.

How to Make Your Emailers Mobile Responsive

WHY IS IT IMPORTANT TO MAKE YOUR EMAILS MOBILE-RESPONSIVE?

After analysing 6 million email campaigns, Campaign Monitor reported that back in 2013, 41% of emails were opened on mobile devices and only 28% were opened on desktop. Times have moved on since 2013 and mobile now dominates in an even bigger way. In general, users will initially glance over an email on their phone and if they are interested they will use a desktop to look into it further.

Email marketing image

The main issue with making emailers responsive is that there are so many different types of phones available with different screen sizes and capacities. One size does not fit all, which creates problems for marketers. These problems include small fonts, narrow columns and broken layouts.

HERE ARE SEVERAL TIPS TO MAKE SURE YOUR EMAILS ARE RESPONSIVE

  • Always design mobile first – There is a huge difference between the way emails are displayed on desktop and mobile. By designing your emailer for mobile firs, it not only helps you to keep the message simple but also means you will think about whether the content is readable and easy to navigate on a smaller screen.
  • Single column layouts work best – This is because they can stack elegantly rather than being stretched or squished. For best results ensure your layouts are no wider than 500 to 600 pixels. This will mean that if the email does fall apart it will do so more gracefully.
  • Links and buttons – These should have a minimum target area of 44×44 pixels to make sure that it’s clickable on a small screen.
  • Keep your message concise – Place all important elements at the beginning of the email. We are an extremely time-poor society so we don’t want to be scrolling for days to get to the point of the email.
  • Think about your font – Is the text large enough to make it readable on the small screen? Are your conversion points visible and obvious to click?
  • Customer Journey – Very few marketing campaigns stop at the emailer. We are most often asked to click through to another page to finish an action. Therefore, you need to think about how your landing page looks and works as well as your email. We may take the time to view an email on more than one device but when it comes to landing pages we are less likely to and this can increase bounce rates. Unfortunately, we are fairly unforgiving, so if something doesn’t work instantly we have no time for it.
  • Think about imagery – Use images thoughtfully throughout the email as they can stretch and distort when resized. Try to stay away from pictures of people as the crop on images like these matter. If a head is cut off it will ruin the overall effect of your emailer. Instead use images such as patterns, landscapes or repeated squares that are not reliant on being one size. It then doesn’t matter where the image is cropped.
  • Test – The key to success is to test your emailer on different devices before you send it out to check that it doesn’t break and that all the links and click-throughs work. You will then know whether your emailer is responsive.

The Importance of Email Marketing – Best Practices

A form of direct marketing which uses electronic mail as a means of communicating marketing messages.

Now we know one definite fact about marketing – that without it, no one would know or have any impression about your brand, product or service… It’s quite simply essential for business.

The digital age has firmly shaken the world’s hand and taken a seat in the boardroom of marketing considerations. Brands across the globe are innovating their marketing practices to consider consumer behaviour regarding digital technology and online interaction, and email marketing is right up there as a leading marketing practice.

According to the think tank organisation, Pew Research Centre, email is the most popular activity on smartphone and tablets. Modern technology has given rise to the possibility that emails can be opened anywhere and at anytime.

ExactTarget state, 90% of smartphone owner’s access the same email account on mobile and desktop.

According to a Smith-Harmon survey, 76 percent of subscribers have made purchases from an email-marketing message.

69% of email recipients report email as spam based solely on the subject line while 35% of email recipients open email based on the subject line alone.

(Source: Convince and Convert)

Email marketing not only influences online purchases but can also spur offline spending in the physical world.

So what does this mean? Well, there’s a lot to consider so here are our top tips to help you on your way.

 

TOP TIPS FOR EMAIL MARKETING

1) Create 2 or 3 Business Objectives – Keep it Simple

What do you want to tell your recipients, and more importantly, why is it of benefit to them?

2) Focus on Quality Rather Than Quantity

Hitting fewer people who your brand has developed a strong relationship with will result in far better results than hitting random people who don’t know you. However, there are times when purchasing a database can be a viable route but you must ensure the data is current and again quality in terms of your target audience.
Keep this database cleansed and up-to-date!

3) Create a Tailored Message

Ensure you understand what the point of your email piece is, because if you don’t, then your recipients certainly won’t. Refer back to your list of business objectives; understand the needs and desires of your recipients and augment the creativity of the visual and copy to evoke the reaction you desire.

  • Make the subject line stand out
  • Ensure clarity of copy and keep it simple
  • Get to the point of what you’re trying to say
  • Place a strong call to action that’s easy to see and act upon

4) Test and Analyse the Response

Have reporting tools in place to monitor the impact of your email marketing on online activity. Test the emailer before distribution, make sure everything renders appropriately across different email clients.

A few key statistics to check post the email campaign are bounce rates (emails that weren’t delivered), open rates vs time of distribution and click-throughs.

5) Ensure Consistency and Continuity

An email campaign is exceptionally useful in stimulating and maintaining visitor traffic over some time. Understand your business objectives and gauge whether a burst campaign over a short period is best, perhaps for a sales promotion or a drip campaign where you wish to increase brand perception and awareness.

6) Permission is Paramount

To ensure the quality of your subscription list, devise ways in which you can obtain explicit consent to send e-marketing to recipients. Create subscription areas across your online portfolio, provide downloads or helpful documentation that people can gain access to by supplying you with their data.

Permission is crucial to avoiding the possibility that your emails become spam and end up in the bin!

Albion England

Albion England banner image of a horse and saddle
Albion England's online website across a range of phone screens showcasing their saddle store pages

Team Members Involved on this Project

Karen Karen
Lou Lou
Lydia Lydia

Summary

Albion England are an industry-leading Equestrian manufacturer. Started in 1985, the Albion England brand was originally born out of a desire to pioneer a premium range of equestrian accessories.

Delivering high-quality products and blending traditional values and artisan craftsmanship, the company has evolved into a leading brand within their industry. The business has recently evolved its core values to the creation of both accessories for the shooting fraternity and a lifestyle range.

Our relationship with Albion England began when they approached us wanting to increase sales on their newly developed e-commerce website. They sought to merge away from solely using printed marketing by increasing their digital marketing.

The Task

We assisted Albion in maintaining their website to ensure the customer experience was 1st-class. To ensure this was the case to meet their objectives, we added additional functionality to the website to capture users’ details, implemented new forms to assist users and surveys to collect valuable feedback.

Woman holding phone showcasing Albion Englands mobile website design
Albion England's social media image designs
Statistics showing Albion England's growth following their digital marketing strategies
Albion England's social media marketing designs for a range of posts

The Results

To drive traffic to the website, we set up advertisements via social media. From identifying the audience with their geo-interests, we can effectively advertise and remarked products. This allows customers to be on the purchasing journey where they can purchase when it suits them. With the addition of email marketing, we continued the customer journey from setting up automated email funnels to provide discounts and product reminders.

See the Website Live

What we can do for you

Book your free consultation

Are you ready to take your business to the next level? Drive traffic, increase leads and stimulate a positive business impact.

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