5 Email Marketing Trends for 2025: Lessons from the Festival of Email in Utrecht

by | Sep 25, 2024 | News and Events

This year’s Martech Festival / Festival of Email event was held September 16-18th, 2024 in Utrecht, The Netherlands. It brought together email industry experts from 18 different countries with 1200 years of collective industry experience in one fantastic venue: The Spoorwegmuseum or Railway Museum.

Centric Squared was invited to give a presentation on Migrating ESPs, a task that can fill even the most seasoned email marketer with anxiety. We talked about how it’s normal to feel overwhelmed with this project, with over 400 ESPs on the market and no one single “unicorn” solution. Our presentation focused on how to understand when it may be time to change ESPs, questions to help evaluate the impact of an ESP change, and we shared the evaluation process we use at our agency to make migrations as smooth as possible. Reach out to us if you have an ESP project you’d like a second opinion on. We’d be happy to see if our experience with dozens of migrations over the years can help.

The event was inspiring – no surprise when you consider the intelligent community and thoughtful planning by the organizers, Andrew Bonar & Nely Bonar.

Here are the 5 high-level takeaways from the event I’d like to share:

1. It’s a Journey

The theme of the conference and a red thread throughout was “Journeys.” We’ve all heard of customer experiences as journeys – Beata Linz (Kis) from Allbirds & BEATA CONSULTING LTD talked about seamless customer journeys and how it takes 7+ touchpoints with a customer before you make a sale. Brands that are doing it well are not only using data to drive seamless experiences, but are prioritizing cross-functional collaboration in their teams. Heather Hurd from Dusk Marketing reminded us that not all touchpoints have to be a sales pitch; there is so much value to be found in crystal clear branding and being authentic and building trust with strong content strategies. Louise Feaheny from SMTP2GO in her workshop session reminded us that in email, customers have to want to be on the journey with us for any of our marketing strategies to work, and we have to earn that trust.

In the B2C vs B2B marketing panel session, Zsuzsanna Blau of Nokia along with Heather Hurd and Anna Levitin of DoorLoop, reminded us that at the end of the day, marketing is human-to-human communication. The value in using content strategically to earn trust is similar in both B2B and B2C, and ultimately finding ways to encourage consumers to invest time with your brand is what pays off. (BTW: Make that content ungated and lean into edu-taining content and short-form video!).

2. Data Is the Roadmap

Data is all around us and being captured at almost every touchpoint. So how do we put it all together to use as a roadmap for winning marketing strategies? From Sandy Kartopawiro of SEINō | Email Analytics‘s workshop on building a reactivation program to Suzanne Garritsen & Tey Tetterfio‘s case study on advanced analytics for G-STAR‘s success, we saw real examples of this in practice. Anna Levitin of DoorLoop presented her strategies for cracking the churn code in SaaS (using data strategically).

And if data is so important to great strategies, what are we doing to safeguard these practices as third-party data is shifting as we speak? In Jasper Van Laethem of The Future Funnel‘s session we learned about the importance of zero-party data, where you can start asking customers about themselves to tailor their experience with your brand. Many may think this is slow to incorporate into your marketing strategy, but the reality is it’s never too late to start and may be just what we need to safeguard our marketing strategies from volatile industry shifts in how data is captured and shared by browsers.

3. Deliverability Is the (Sometimes) Unavoidable Minefield

We heard from many experts on deliverability at the conference too. In their workshop on deliverability, Andrew Bonar of emailexpert, Raymond Dijkxhoorn and Udeme Ukutt shared practical tips on how to implement, how to monitor and track outside of your ESP, and what to do when issues arise. It’s an increasingly complex field and landscape, and honestly left me feeling like it’s that minefield we all have to walk through as email marketers. So if that’s part of the journey, don’t walk through it blindly: Educate yourself, get some expertise on your team in this field if you want to be able to navigate deliverability without calamity.

 

Find these deliverability resources on our blog:

4. AI Is Changing the Game

It’s no surprise that AI was a recurring theme at this event, touched on from so many different angles.

While each deserves its own post, I think as a whole we all walked away with a sense of opportunity – marketing is after all leading the adoption of AI across businesses. We have seen first hand it can change the game entirely; from efficiencies in processes to increasing teams’ capacity to implement increasingly complex marketing strategies. It’s a unique tool in our toolkit, but it’s also still very much used with caution as it is far from fool-proof and requires expertise to use well. I know I personally walked away wanting to develop a Code of Conduct around AI use in our agency as well thanks to Martina Lipp‘s presentation.

 

Find these AI resources on our blog:

5. The Journey Can And Should Be Fun

Email is such a dynamic field, with so many technicalities, so much creativity, so team-oriented and central to overall marketing strategies. It’s no surprise that this event brought together professionals that are both nerdy, highly creative, team-players, and just plain fun. When Adeola Sole of Strategy CRM and host extraordinaire of the event, and I were talking about my own presentation “When and How to Migrate ESPs,” she responded in what can only be described as a Barry Manilow voice: “Oh….yeah……!” We both burst out laughing. I knew then and there I had found my tribe.

Nick Crawford of Twist Consultancy Ltd led a session on segmentation, relevance and balloon animals that was both strategic and just downright memorable. Marketing models don’t have to be boring to work!

Cyrill Gross of Mayoris AG led a hands-on workshop session on how to include fun elements in your emails. The sky’s the limit when it comes to what you can do with email, and incorporating fun elements like quizzes and games can see incredible returns when it comes to engagement. The good news is that it’s within every email marketer’s reach!

This year’s Martech Festival / Festival of Email event reminded me that we can all have a little fun – not only in the industry but in the marketing strategies and customer experiences we design. Because if we’re not having fun, are we maybe missing the plot? It makes the whole journey worthwhile to connect with one another and laugh a little.

So, don’t be shy and have some fun with your marketing. I know I will be bringing these lessons back to my team and hope other email marketers will as well.

About Centric Squared

Centric Squared is a growing email marketing agency driving significant revenue for our clients through Email and SMS Marketing. With a focus on CRM-driven marketing, our team of global marketing experts has supported dozens of email migrations and aims to help our clients drive more revenue from email. Are you looking for a strategic partner to support your CRM-growth or needing help migrating to a new email service provider? We’re committed to transforming businesses with data-driven strategies that enhance customer engagement and foster resilient growth. Let’s talk.