2025 is the Year of the Email
If You're Ready for It, It Can Work to Your Advantage
Read time: 6 minutes
tldr: 2025 will sort businesses into email winners and losers. I plan to win - and help you win too.
Hi Timeless Leaders,
Happy New Year! I hope you had a wonderful holiday and are looking at 2025 with optimism and resolve.
I spent most of the break with family and keeping my phone away when with my kids (as twitchy as that made me 🫨 at times).
Presents were exchanged, and we had moments with zero excuses for boredom.
A highlight? On New Year’s Eve, I went ice-skating with my daughter. ⛸️
A great way to slide into the year, and remember to laugh when you fall down.
How about you - how was your break?
I hope you had one. Especially because…
2024 was NOISY
I spent most of last year trying to crack the code on how audiences are built and nurtured in the rapidly changing marketing ecosystem.
A big question I sought to answer: how was email evolving?
(It’s already been four years since Cal Newport’s A World Without Email*, and if anything, there’s only been more email since).
I dove deep on cold outbound lead generation. A long-standing practice, cold outbound has been significantly upended with AI, massive contact databases, offshore agencies, and an arms-race between Google / Microsoft and the outbound industry.
I analyzed the awesome and awful use of marketing email in an election year (by political and commercial interests alike), all trying to cut through the noisiest digital environment we’ve ever seen - and making it all the more noisy as a result.
I assessed how email stood up against and among all the methods of multi-channel engagement - organic social media, earned media, paid ads, phone, SMS, in-person events, etc.
After all that, I found that email ultimately remains the backbone of any effective CRM and growth program… even if it stands bruised and bloody with doubters questioning its staying power.
And then there was Substack
Of course, I also ran this Substack “newsletter”. Substack is a unique social media and blogging platform. Its essential differentiator is that writing lands in subscribers’ inboxes, and writers have direct access to the contact list (so they can leave anytime, supposedly). Increasingly it offers new paths to discovery (Notes) and multi-channel (podcasts, chat, etc).
Substack is still a small presence, but it’s growing in influence & capabilities.
Just a few weeks ago, one of my favorite online-business influencers
even went all in on Substack, hosting his community and “Incubator” on the site.We’re at a point where everyone who is trying to influence at scale must go all in on multi-channel engagement.
But despite the value of mobile numbers, the power of video, the novelty of live interaction, and the reach of social, the thing that ties that all together, the thing that makes Substack special, and the thing that every marketer covets:
is still email.
And that’s why:
2025 is the year of The Email
I see a few things happening this year that are going to prove the importance of email - and that are definitively going to sort folks into email winners and losers.
I myself aim to be part of the winners category (and you can too).
Here’s how the sort will play out:
First, everyone with a business or a mission is already 10x-ing their content production.
Partly because AI is available, cheap, and keeps getting better.
Partly because they know they need to get eyeballs - and the more content out there, the more a single message simply gets buried.
This shifts many more people into creator mode. If it’s not you, you’ll be 1-degree separated from a hundred creators.
As a consumer, you maybe already notice that you only see a fraction of the people and brands that you technically “follow.”
If you’re creating on the social media platforms, you’re going to see it harder and harder to get reach without making it your full time job.
And it’s not just the volume of content. The type of content that get prioritized on the feed is increasingly video (even LinkedIn prioritizes videos that look like TikTok now).
Social media ultimately is entertainment, so unless your content is super entertaining and served up in the prefered format, it will get buried.
Which brings it back to email.
Where are you going to be able to get constant opportunity to keep knocking on your customers’ doors? Where you can do so with almost zero variable cost? Where can you create in a medium where plain text is preferred both by the platforms and the audience?
Email. Email. Email.
But there’s a catch.
Now, everyone can write an email. But who can write a GOOD email?
Even harder, who can CONSISTENTLY write good emails - emails that are valuable, that resonate with the audience, that are sent at the right times, and are sent nearly all the time?
Not a lot of folks.
This is where the sort happens.
Lots more folks are going to crowd in - because the channel is so valuable, and so cheap and so accessible (or so it seems).
And everyone who owns an inbox (you and me) is going to look around and say are you kidding me that the noise of 2024 has ONLY. GOTTEN. WORSE??
But here’s the funny thing.
People still aren’t going to delete their inboxes.
Instead, they’re going to rely on technology to watch what they open and engage with, and use that data to serve up only the emails you want to see.
They’ll either use the built-in algorithmic sorter like Gmail’s primary inbox, or upgrade to something like Superhuman.
What does that mean?
It means the best email writers and campaigners are going to get steady inbox placement. Their readers will love reading their little updates. And email will reassert itself as THE most valuable channel...
IF you know how to use it.
What that means for me
It means I’m not doubling. I’m not tripling.
I’m 100xing my email game.
Don’t worry, I’m NOT going to start emailing you 200-300 times a month.
I will ramp up volume a lot, but only a small portion of that will be on this Substack.
I’ll be building out my list segmentation, automations and workflows, and different newsletters for different purposes.
You may end up on some lists where you hear from me a lot more often. Ideally, if that happens, you are going to love it, but if you don’t, you’ll always be able to unsubscribe.
I’m also going to unlock the power of email for clients (it’s a big part of an engagement I’m working on right now!) Maybe you’ll be next!?
We've been emailing for decades now. It has been an awful experience for far too long.
In 2025, we can turn it around - and make it really work for us and our constituencies.
What do you think? If you like, email me your thoughts. ;)
-Joe
PS. Do you still need to develop an actionable 2025 strategic plan for your team? Want me to build one for you in less than 5 weeks, that’s ready to execute on Day 1, and that addresses your challenges with both business and people growth? I have only four slots left in Q1 before I’m at capacity. Grab 30 minutes with me here and let’s chat!
*In this email links to the Cal Newport book and the Superhuman app are affiliate links; purchases made through there will earn me a tiny commission.
Curious how Everys Cora tool will roll out