Four Ways to Boost Email Marketing ROI in 2025

*Sigh.* New year, same pressure. Generate more leads, more pipelines, and more revenue for our businesses — and do it all while controlling the budget. 

As the senior director of marketing for venture-backed cybersecurity company Red Sift, I’ve evaluated return on investment (ROI) across channels to decide where to place our bets for the new year.  And one channel consistently stands out: email. 

And it’s not just us. A study by McKinsey shows that email marketing outperforms other platforms, such as social media. But getting the most out of an email marketing program can’t depend on just hope. Or even just on the copy, the subject line, and the preview text.

An excellent email program means keeping your campaigns safe for your recipients. From managing reputation to stopping abuse and meeting the latest industry requirements, getting the strongest return out of email is complicated but achievable. 

This article will guide you through email marketing rules and four ways to improve your ROI as we head into the new year.

To-dos for email marketing

If you are new to email marketing or don’t have a dedicated email expert at your company, you may not be aware of all of the global regulations that dictate how emails can be sent. The most famous are the Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act (CAN-SPAM) in the US and the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in the European Union (EU), although countries all around the world have established requirements specifically for email marketing.

While each one is different, the rules are generally: 

1. Obtain consent before sending: Only email people who have explicitly opted in to receive marketing communications, ensuring you have their permission to contact them. Use double opt-in for new subscribers to ensure that email addresses are valid and that recipients genuinely want to be on your list.
2. Provide an easy way to opt out: Include a visible unsubscribe option in every marketing email, making it simple for recipients to withdraw their consent at any time.
3. Accurately represent your identity: Use a clear "from" name and a valid reply address so recipients know exactly who the email is from.
4. Respect data privacy: Handle personal data responsibly, clearly explaining how you’ll use personal information and how you will store it securely in compliance with data protection laws.
5. Keep your list clean: If an email bounces more than once, you should stop sending to that address.
6. Remember to tidy up: Sometimes, subscribers drop from our radar. Make sure to consider re-engagement campaigns and remove contacts who show no engagement.

If you follow these guidelines, you will be in an excellent position to drive a strong ROI from email marketing. If not, you could expect the following challenges: 

• Unsubscribes: Strong ROI from email marketing requires a solid list. Every time a user unsubscribes, you lose a potential target for your message.
• Spam reports: When a user receives unsolicited emails, they are likely to mark them as spam. This can lower your sender reputation and affect deliverability.
• Lower sender score: Frequent spam complaints and high unsubscribe rates can hurt your sender score, reducing the likelihood of your emails reaching recipients’ inboxes.
• Email blacklisting: Major email providers (e.g., Gmail, Yahoo) may blacklist your domain or IP address, preventing future emails from reaching users’ inboxes.
• Regulatory complaints: Regulatory bodies (e.g., FTC in the U.S. for CAN-SPAM, Canadian CRTC for CASL, or EU data protection authorities under GDPR) may issue significant fines for non-compliance, especially in cases of repeat offenses.
  
  

Steps to maximizing ROI in email marketing

As marketers, we are always on the lookout for that magic tool to enable a strong ROI. Accounting for the previously discussed regulations and guidance can help your emails cut through the noise while avoiding any potential spam or undeliverable message errors, giving your marketing that much-needed boost. 

But where do you start? To assist you in your journey, below is a handy step-by-step guide on how to implement effective checks and methods at every stage of your email marketing strategy.

Step 1: Check your sender reputation

There are a lot of free tools available that can help you easily see your current sender score. Using these checkers, you can send an email from your email marketing tool (Hubspot, Pardot, customer.io) and quickly see your overall sender score. You can also check if your sender IP address or sender domain has been blacklisted.

If your results come back clear, you are on the right track to strong deliverability before you even begin to craft the perfect email. We know that there is nothing worse than investing time into creating the optimum message only for it to hit a spam wall.

Step 2: Make sure no one is pretending to be you

At one point or another, most of us have seen emails that look something like this:

Source: Red Sift

The cybersecurity term for someone sending an email from your exact domain to deliver malicious mail — like fraudulent invoices, requests for gift cards, or asking for login information — is business email compromise (BEC). These schemes are often costly, with the last FBI report indicating BEC costs organizations in the US $2.9 billion per year. 

But email marketers face another cost. Someone could pretend to be you and send malicious emails. These could seem as real as legitimate emails. To prevent this, I’d opt for the easiest (and only) way to see who is sending fraudulent mail on your behalf: implement a security protocol called domain-based message authentication, reporting, and conformance (DMARC). 

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DMARC gives you visibility into any attempts to send fake emails pretending to be from your domain and can make sure mails from fraudulent senders are not delivered. 

With DMARC, you can improve trust with email providers, making it more likely your legitimate emails reach recipients’ inboxes while fraudulent ones do not. Likewise, by further being proactive, you can maintain a legitimate and trustworthy relationship with your customers and avoid costly reputational damage.

Step 3: Comply with Google and Yahoo's requirements for bulk senders

In 2024, the world of email marketing got a bit more complicated thanks to new requirements from Google and Yahoo. Other major providers are likely to follow, too. These requirements aim to keep spam levels down, and marketers have to meet some specific requirements if they have ever sent close to 5,000 emails in a day. 

Here are the requirements, some of which we’ve already covered:

1. Include an unsubscribe link in every marketing email
2. Have a valid DMARC record in place
3. Use a secure connection, called transport layer security (TLS), to send your emails, which helps protect sensitive information from being intercepted. Most email marketing tools do this by default, but check your provider’s docs to be sure.
4. Make sure your sending IP address is set up to show that it’s genuinely from your organization. 
5. Add extra security checks, called SPF and DKIM, to your email setup to show that your messages are really from your organization. This helps prevent them from being marked as spam.

Isn’t SPF for sunscreen? And what is DKIM?

Sender Policy Framework (SPF) and DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) are email authentication tools that help verify your emails. 

With SPF, you specify which sending sources can send email on your behalf, reducing the risk of unauthorized messages getting through. 

DKIM adds a unique digital signature to your emails, which is used to confirm the email's content (like the body text, attachments, and headers) hasn’t been changed or tampered with after it was sent. 

Together, these two protocols improve your sender reputation and increase the likelihood that your emails land in inboxes, not spam folders. By establishing trust with email providers, SPF and DKIM directly support higher deliverability and engagement rates, which can go a long way in improving email marketing ROI.

Step 4: Implement BIMI

Brand indicators for message identification (BIMI) allow organizations to display their logo next to their emails. Research on BIMI has shown that it can increase brand recall by 44% and open rates by 39% — an excellent example of why BIMI is essential for ROI.

Source: Red Sift

The trick with BIMI is that an organization must have the protocols we have touched on already — DMARC, DKIM, and SPF. The good news is that as of late 2024, Gmail does not require a trademarked image to use as the logo in the inbox. All you need is a logo that has been consistently used for the last year, and you can begin to display it alongside your emails.

A continuous project

Once you have tacked the above-mentioned steps, it is easy to think that everything is as it should be, and you can go back to focusing on the fun stuff, like which emoji to use with your next subject line. But, seasoned email marketers will tell you that maximizing email deliverability and open rates to drive email ROI is a continuous project. 

While some of the items we have discussed here help make that easier (looking at you, DMARC), keeping tabs on your inbox placement, IP and domain reputations, and sources delivering on your behalf requires regular check-ins. 

The good news is consistent oversight across these areas allows you to catch potential issues early, optimize your campaigns, and build lasting trust with both customers and email providers.

Learn more about email marketing by connecting with Rebecca Warren on LinkedIn.   

Edited by Supanna Das