We are a few days away from closing the accounts for 2024 (thank goodness). How was your year?
I can’t believe how quickly this year has gone by. Yet sometimes he seemed to be crawling. We’ve been faced with one defining moment after another: the economy, the election, and people buying Tesla Cybertrucks. That doesn’t even include the changes that continue to transform marketing.
But as we begin to craft our witty out-of-office responses, I want to take a moment to look back at where we are this year and what to expect for 2025.
I don’t make predictions or spot trends. Predictions have become worthless given the pace of the 24-hour news cycle, technology, consumer adoption and fluctuations in the marketing technology market. Trend watching is too often driven by self-interest.
What is more important is to identify what we need to pay attention to in 2025. These are not trends. Instead, these are areas where we may need to rethink, reprioritize, budget, or rebudget.
I’ll answer this question in two ways: what I learned in 2024 and what I’m watching for in 2025.
3 courses from 2024
Plan a backup business plan if things fall apart
My company had a great 2023. Then 2024 turned into a repeat of 2020, the year we had to destroy our playbooks due to an unexpected turn of events. This time it was an unexpected slowdown in customers and their spending.
My team could have rushed into tactical changes motivated by fear. Instead, we took a step back and worked together to revamp our strategy to adapt to the changing landscape.
This is where the “strategy before tactics“Mindset pays off. It gives you muscle memory, a starting point to start again. You are less likely to make mistakes or derail your business.
Having a trustworthy team helps. I looked to my leadership team, friends, and other leaders in the email space and beyond for confirmation, affirmation, and different perspectives.
If you’re the leader of a team or a company, you don’t have to have all the answers. Resist the urge to figure out which way to go. Instead, reach out to your community. Ask: “How can we work together to find a solution?” »
Not wanting to predict trends for 2025, I will say that we should expect instability in the United States and other countries (more on that later). It’s more important than ever to have a fallback plan if things go wrong. Work with your team before this happens to ward off the tactical zombies.
Dig Deeper: 3 marketing strategies to beat the recession
Move quickly without breaking anything
In addition to the slowdown in email investment, I’ve noticed a marked increase in the number of companies sending image-only emails to my work and personal inboxes.
I have already declaimed about these emails and why they insult your recipients and devalue your email program. Relying on image-only emails indicates a larger problem.
As email marketers, we must act quickly to keep up with the changing economy, technology, and expectations of our businesses and customers. But we’re not necessarily moving smarter. We take shortcuts, and sending emails with only images and no text is one of those shortcuts.
In addition to sending more image-only emails, marketers also suffered from a lack of focus. I hope these trends are a momentary problem and not a fallback that marketers use to solve deeper problems.
One of my usual arguments is that executives need to start investing more in email marketing to see the major gains that email can bring. I hope this will happen in 2025.
Oh, sorry. I’m getting to 2025 and we’re not ready for it yet. Get ready for greatness.
Is everyone happy?
As someone who regularly works with clients on technology migrations, I’ve noticed this year that marketers aren’t moving to new platforms. This shouldn’t come as a surprise given the stagnant spending we’ve seen elsewhere in the marketing sector. But I’m surprised that people seem happy with their marketing technology, regardless of its condition. Here’s why.
The technology market is divided into three parts:
A third are comfortable with their current technology. Another third are at some stage of migration, from assessing needs and writing RFPs to evaluating suppliers and starting the migration process. The last third migrates or settles on their new platforms.
We have not seen this movement this year. This is surprising because most organizations that invest in technology are always looking for new platforms to help them retain customers or operate more efficiently. Change for the sake of it is not productive, but it is part of the company’s transformation plan.
Are people really happy with their technology? Or have they simply pressed “pause” on their technological hunt until 2025?
Speaking of which, let’s look to the future.
Dig Deeper: Why 2025 is the year of martech optimization, not expansion
3 areas to pay attention to in 2025
Ask the questions
As I noted above, 2024 was a year of restraint. We’ve moved past the things that have likely hampered spending, whether it’s interest rates, economic concerns, the U.S. election or consumer spending.
This does not mean that new problems will not arise. I will discuss this shortly. But 2025 will be a year of investment. People will spend their budget not only on platforms, but also on strategy and execution in their quest to knock their goals out of the park. If this sounds like you, start thinking now about where you would like to invest.
Businesses generally don’t stay idle for long because their competitors will let them pass. In addition, CMOs don’t last long in their employment – four years for B2C, four and a half years for B2B. You always have new ideas and new approaches coming from outside, and that breeds change.
“It doesn’t cost anything to ask,” my father always said. This has been one of my mantras throughout my career. Always ask the question. Email technology can now do so much that it’s almost criminal not to consider what might change or incorporate a new strategy, tactic, or partner.
Always ask questions.
Prepare for more AI transformation
Although we are still in its infancy, AI has already evolved rapidly thanks in large part to leading ESPs who have readily adopted agents capable of bridging the gap between data, personas, cohorts and messages relevant. This will help AI take its place in 2025 and beyond.
We will see even greater acceleration from ESP and complementary technologies. Technology is smarter, in part, because marketers are asking it to do things that make their lives easier, faster, and better.
Messaging platforms are rapidly evolving from their fundamental role as a simple channel to send messages in bulk. If you limp to the starting line with the AI, you risk falling behind.
Of course, you can create segments, but they will be rudimentary. Sure, you can report, but your report will also be rudimentary. With today’s higher expectations, this will no longer work.
The marketers I speak with want to use data science that returns results in the blink of an eye, not in a six-month project that requires an entire data team. Agents can proactively obtain this information and present it to you in actionable segments. This is a revolutionary message.
Dig Deeper: AI Transformation: How to Prepare Your Marketing Team
Beware of instability
Marketers hate instability. The last five years, and especially 2024, have been nothing but gyrations from one surprising development, for better or worse, to another. It’s no surprise that marketers have cut back on spending in 2024.
I think the outlook will remain changing in 2025. We must always be ready to react quickly when something unexpected happens and watch the news every night to see what could affect our businesses, our consumers and our brands.
More than ever, we need to be smart about email. But we also need to be brilliant at reading the space – your business’s target market.
Staying connected in 2025 will be key to any marketer’s success. Think ahead and list the items that affect your business. Plan what you could do to counter each of them. Connect it to the rest of your organization. Claim your place at the table. Join conversations instead of just being the person sending the email. Become an active participant.
The instability will not disappear. We just need to deal with it better. Is your technology up to the challenge? If you’ve been hesitant to investigate new platforms, now is a good time to see what’s out there. Remember, asking costs nothing.
Conclusion
As the new year rolls around, I don’t make resolutions. I simply comment, usually sarcastically, on what I want to commit to for the year, such as personal and professional goals. But in 2025, I will commit to becoming a better marketer. I will strive to do better in my own business and in my work with clients.
I will also continue to learn. After 26 years in the business, I get bored when I have to continue talking about things that we should have left aside years ago. But I also discover new questions, topics to study and ways to progress and evolve.
Take a deep breath before we head into 2025. Congratulations! You survived another year. Now you can start all over again. Thank your team for their hard work and dedication with a round of drinks, dinner, or any other tangible display of gratitude. Your thanks will have a way of coming back to you, especially if things get complicated.
For now, enjoy the rest of the year. I’ll see you on the other side!
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