Your 2025 Guide to Email Marketing That Converts

Most customers still prefer to hear from brands via email. Sixty-five per cent of customers say it’s their most preferred way to communicate with businesses. If you’re building a marketing strategy in 2025, it makes sense to include emails.

In this article, we’re going to cover what you need to know to get started with email marketing and ideas to elevate your current practice. We’re also going to share data from trusted sources and research from our 50 Best Practices for Email Marketers guide.

• What is email marketing?
• How to launch your first email marketing campaign
• The six types of emails every marketer should know
• Best practices for high-performing emails
• How to stay compliant with email marketing laws
• How automation and AI are changing email marketing
• How to measure an email marketing campaign’s success
• Intelligent email campaigns, powered by Salesforce
• Start sending emails your customers want to open

Email marketing is a digital marketing practice that uses targeted emails to promote products, build relationships, and increase sales. Marketers create emails with helpful content, offers, and updates to stay top of mind, drive clicks to the website, and ultimately boost conversions.

Since email marketing is so effective and easy to get started with, competition for eyeballs and clicks is at a premium. This competition means that your email marketing strategy needs to be constantly evolving to keep up.

Before we dive into the complexities of email marketing, here are the basic steps any business can take to get started.

1. Set clear goals (leads, sales, retention)
2. Choose an email marketing platform
3. Integrate it with your tools and customer data
4. Decide what types of emails to send (newsletter, sale promotion, product updates)
5. Build a simple workflow that your team can manage

Experts often point to six types of emails most commonly used in email marketing. The exact names and descriptions will vary, but organising these marketing emails into types is helpful in understanding how to build campaigns.

An email newsletter (or an e-newsletter) is an email that is sent to your subscribers regularly to keep them informed about the latest news and updates about your product or brand. Depending on your industry, you can send them on a weekly or monthly basis.

Here’s an example of an email newsletter from Flo & Frankie advertising new products.

Newsletters that show up regularly in subscribers' inboxes are a great way to keep your brand top of mind for customers and prospects alike. Successful newsletters often deliver a mix of content, including material on thought leadership, how-tos, and new product and service announcements.

There are many benefits to newsletters, including:

• Building and strengthening relationships with subscribers
• Increasing brand engagement
• Maintaining customer retention
• Building customer loyalty

Another commonly seen type of marketing email, promotional emails are used to make direct offers to your email list. Offers can range from discounted pricing on specific products to promotional content for a product or service.

Here’s an example of a targeted promotional email offering a discount on tickets to Disneyland for Australian and New Zealand customers.

New product announcements, brand news, white papers, and webinars are all examples of content typically found in promotional emails.

When it comes to driving purchases, email accounted for 19.8% of all transactions , trailing only paid search (19.9%) and organic traffic (21.8%) among digital channels. It’s no wonder promotional emails are so popular — they work!

Relational emails are designed to (surprise, surprise) build relationships with prospects and customers by adding value upfront. That value comes in the form of free content and information, such as subscriber welcomes, blog articles, surveys, social updates, and more.

Here’s an example of a warm and friendly relational email from the clothing brand Kowtow.

The more engaging you can make these relational emails, the stronger connection you will build with your potential or current customers. In fact, newsletters are often categorised as relational emails, though we think them significant enough to warrant a category of their own.

A transactional email is an email that is sent to a prospect following a commercial transaction or specific action performed by that person, such as a follow-up to a subscribe click, a purchase in your online store, or a password reset request.

Here’s an example of a password reset email request from Canva.

Each transactional email requires the recipient to take action and is meant to further the potential or current customer along their journey with the brand. Personalisation is key for these emails as it is a specific action they are following to connect with you.

Lead nurturing emails are targeted communications designed to engage potential customers throughout their buying journey.

Here’s an example of a lead nurturing email we recently sent for our Connections 2025 (CNX25) event.

These drip marketing emails provide relevant content and information based on the recipient's interests and actions, helping build relationships and gradually guiding them toward purchasing.

By delivering value at each stage, lead nurturing emails increase the chances of converting leads into loyal customers.

Confirmation emails are automated messages sent to users to verify the successful completion of an action, such as a purchase, registration, or booking.

Here’s an example of a confirmation email from Xero.

The best emails are clear, relevant, and make it obvious what to do next. No matter what kind of email you’re sending, these 2025 best practices will help you get more out of your email campaigns.

Sixty-five per cent of customers prefer email for brand communication, and many will read on mobile. Use mobile-responsive layouts, short subject lines (under 50 characters), and a standout CTA so your message is easy to read and easy to click on.

A/B test subject lines, CTAs, layouts, and send times. In our latest guide, we explain why it’s worth previewing emails with images turned off, as it helps you check if your message still makes sense when visuals don’t load right away. AI is also helpful for testing, allowing you to compare different subject lines or layouts without the manual work.

Stick to a consistent schedule, but don’t email just for the sake of it, as it can come across as spammy. Also, let inactive users go after 90 days or move them to a list for retargeting ads.

Try not to only focus on open rates as they don’t tell the whole story, and they’re getting less reliable with privacy changes. Focus on the metrics that show real impact, like clicks, conversions, and bounce rates. Then use what you learn to improve the next email.

Always get explicit opt-ins. Include contact info, unsubscribe links, and authentication. Keep your list clean, as inactive or fake emails can hurt your deliverability over time.

AI can handle a lot behind the scenes, things like segmenting your audience, recommending products, and picking the best time to send. You can also set up workflows that trigger emails based on what someone does, like signing up or leaving something in their cart.

Eighty-eight per cent of customers expect personalisation. Tailor messages by behaviour, lifecycle stage, or purchase history to make your emails feel timely and relevant.

Before you hit send, it’s important to understand the regulations in place for email marketing. There are strict laws around how you can email people in Australia and around the world. Here’s what your business needs to know.

You must follow the Spam Act 2003 , which prohibits sending unsolicited commercial emails. This means you need to always get explicit consent before adding someone to your list, include an unsubscribe option, and identify your business clearly. You can learn more here .

Regulations like the GDPR (Europe) and the CAN-SPAM (US) require similar steps. You need to gather consent, display sender details, and offer an easy opt-out.

Even if you aren’t serving a worldwide audience, if anyone can sign up for your email list, you’ll need to make sure your process is compliant with global regulations.

AI and automation have completely changed how marketers use email. Instead of blasting the same message to your whole list, you can now send the right message to the right person at the right time, without doing it all manually.

The motorcycle brand Royal Enfield is a prime example of how bespoke communication and tailored messaging can transform an interested and engaged audience into brand loyalists.

When COVID-19 pushed their customer journey online, threatening to fragment customer experience, Royal Enfield pivoted. They employed Salesforce Data Cloud to connect all customer data – including their purchases, preferences, intent, and behavioural footprint – into a single source of truth.

This allowed them to tailor their customers’ website experiences based on browsing behaviour, implementing real-time personalisation. It resulted in a 52% increase in web traffic, a 32% increase in time spent on the website, and a surge in conversions from bookings ( 2.7x), which offset the company’s Salesforce costs.

Now, emails, SMSes, WhatsApp messages, and push notifications are no longer managed separately, but on one integrated platform. This has reduced costs by 15%, while also ensuring that customers have a seamless, omni-channel engagement experience.

As you can see, AI automation can help you personalise at scale. It can segment your audience, recommend products, clean your database, and even generate subject lines or content based on real data.

- Salesforce’s 50 Best Practices for Email Marketers, p.18.

With the right tools, you can automate welcome flows, drip campaigns, abandoned cart reminders, and more, freeing up your team's time while still keeping your messaging relevant.

With a flexible and customisable email marketing strategy, you can achieve a number of marketing and sales goals, including:

• Building customer relationships
• Boosting brand awareness
• Generating and nurturing leads
• Marketing products and services
• Promoting content and valuable resources

Let’s talk through some metrics you can use to measure the effectiveness of your email marketing campaign.

• Open rate: the percentage of recipients who open your email. Although, as we mentioned above, this is becoming less accurate due to privacy settings that auto-open emails.
• Click-through rate (CTR): The number of people who click a link in your emails.
• Conversion rate: The percentage of people who click through and complete a desired action.
• Unsubscribe rate: The percentage of people who unsubscribe following an email.
• Forwarding rate: How many people share or forward your email to another person?
• List growth rate: At what rate is your email list growing?
• Bounce rates: The percentage of emails not delivered to a recipient’s inbox.

Great email marketing software gives you the power to run email campaigns from start to finish and analyse the results to make the next campaign even better. With the right tool, you can easily handle:

• Writing copy and designing templates for email messages
• Creating dynamic, personalised content to wow your audience
• Acquiring subscribers and managing leads with CRM integration
• Segmenting leads and running personalised drip-and-nurture campaigns
• Tracking analytics and optimising campaigns in real-time

Our built-in AI automation also lets you personalise emails for different target audience segments; now you can even optimise frequency and timings to supercharge conversions.

If you’re looking to build and optimise an email marketing strategy, Salesforce Marketing Cloud can help you achieve that.

In 2025, email marketing is more powerful (and complex) than ever. With rising customer expectations and privacy changes, the best strategies are personalised, automated, and built on trust.

For more proven tactics to increase your email conversions, download the full 50 Best Practices for Email Marketers guide. It’s packed with expert tips to help you optimise performance, boost engagement, and drive sales.

You can also keep learning by watching past sessions or catching upcoming events on Salesforce+.