# Email Marketing Best Practices in 2025: What Works Now

> Email remains one of the highest-ROI marketing channels. Here is what the current evidence shows about what drives open rates, click rates and conversions.

*Section: Marketing — By Harper Quinn (Marketing & Growth Editor) — Published November 18, 2025 — 1 min read*

Canonical URL: https://dailyjunction.org/marketing/email-marketing-best-practices-2025
Tags: email marketing, digital marketing, newsletter, open rates, conversion

## Key takeaways

- Email delivers around £36 for every £1 spent — consistently among the highest marketing ROI
- Subject line personalisation and segmentation consistently improve open rates
- Mobile accounts for over 60% of email opens — mobile-first design is not optional
- Unsubscribe rates spike when email frequency outpaces perceived value

## Why email marketing still works

Despite repeated predictions of its death, email marketing continues to deliver among the highest returns on investment of any digital marketing channel — industry benchmarks typically cite around £36 return per £1 spent. The reasons: email is a channel where the recipient has opted in (unlike social advertising), messages go directly to an inbox without an algorithm deciding who sees them, and email allows richer content and personalisation than most channels.

## The open rate game

Average email open rates vary significantly by industry but hover around 20-30% for most B2C sectors. The factors with the most consistent impact on open rate: sender name recognition (people open emails from people and brands they trust), subject line quality (A/B testing subject lines is standard practice), segmentation (relevant emails to smaller, better-defined audiences outperform bulk sends) and timing (varies by audience — testing is essential).

## Mobile-first design

Over 60% of emails are now opened on mobile devices. Emails designed for desktop and viewed on mobile are frequently unreadable — small text, broken layouts, images that take too long to load on mobile data. Mobile-first design means: single-column layouts, large tap targets, short preheader text, and images that work both on fast connections and when images are blocked.

## What damages results

The most common causes of deteriorating email performance: sending too frequently (value must exceed the interruption cost for each email), declining list hygiene (sending to unvalidated or disengaged subscribers harms deliverability), click-bait subject lines (which drive opens but reduce trust and future open rates), and failure to segment (sending the same content to everyone on the list)

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## Sources

- [Marketing Week](https://www.marketingweek.com)
- [Campaign](https://www.campaignlive.co.uk)

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Daily Junction — https://dailyjunction.org/marketing/email-marketing-best-practices-2025