Email Marketing Strategies: What Really Works in 2025?

• Email marketing delivers an average ROI of $36 for every $1 spent.
• 65% of consumers say they are more likely to buy from brands that reflect diversity in their marketing.
• Personalized emails with cultural relevance see up to 29% higher open rates.
• Audio-enhanced emails improve engagement among visually impaired users and auditory learners.
• Segmented campaigns based on interests and identities can lead to 20%+ higher conversion rates.

Email marketing is far from obsolete—in fact, it’s thriving, with an average return on investment of $36 for every $1 spent. But what’s really moving the needle in 2025? More brands are discovering that aligning their email marketing strategy with marketing principles that include everyone is key to increasing conversions, loyalty, and engagement. Let’s examine how leading brands incorporate inclusivity in their emails, and how you can do the same.

What Inclusive Marketing Means for Your Emails

Marketing that includes everyone is not just a passing fad—it’s a change in how businesses communicate. When it comes to email marketing, it means intentionally creating and sending messages that affirm, show, and bring in people of different backgrounds, abilities, beliefs, and identities. This way of thinking acknowledges that your audience is not all the same, and so, your content should show and address their different experiences.

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What Makes an Email Inclusive?

• Accessibility: Emails must be readable and usable by all, including people who use screen readers, keyboard navigation, or other input methods. Features such as descriptive alt text, correct heading structures, high-contrast color schemes, and even audio versions help make your message available to wider audiences.
• Cultural Relevance: Acknowledging worldwide holidays such as Diwali, Hispanic Heritage Month, or Juneteenth is a great way to show awareness. But it’s not just about what’s on the calendar—it’s about truly connecting those moments to your brand and product offerings.
• Representation: Images and written content should show the wide range of people. This includes featuring different ages, races, gender identities, body types, and lifestyles—making diversity normal instead of making it seem unusual.
• Inclusive Language: This is about the language spoken (English, Spanish, Mandarin, etc.) but also the tone, wording, and pronoun use. It also includes using person-first language when talking about disability or other identity-based differences.

A marketing strategy for email that includes everyone not only supports groups that are often left out—it makes things better for everyone through being real and relevant.

Sprinkles Cupcakes: Celebrating Culture Through Email

Sprinkles Cupcakes gives a strong example of marketing that includes everyone in action by incorporating cultural recognition into its main email marketing strategy. Instead of only focusing on typical Western holiday content—like Valentine’s Day or Christmas—the brand goes further to include celebratory times for many different communities.

For example, cupcakes with a Lunar New Year theme are paired with emails that explain why the holiday is important, what it symbolizes, and its story. Similarly, during Hanukkah, Sprinkles introduces products inspired by traditional Jewish desserts, adding in content that is educational and respectful without going too far culturally.

This way of doing things makes emails that connect with emotions. For people from those cultures, it shows they are recognized and respected. For people not from those cultures, it encourages involvement and understanding, building brand connection and cultural interest.

Action Step

Check your content calendar now. Are you only recognizing holidays mainly celebrated in Western countries? Work together with people from groups that are not always represented to help create campaigns around holidays like Diwali, Eid al-Fitr, Black History Month, or Indigenous Peoples’ Day. Make certain your product offering, language, and images match the celebration in a meaningful way.

Royal Caribbean: Tailoring Language for a Global Audience

Royal Caribbean has had success by doing more than just simple language translation and instead putting resources into cultural and linguistic tailoring. For example, when aiming for Latinx audiences, the cruise line does not just send English content translated into Spanish. It recreates each message to fit the specific desires, emotions, and values of that group of people.

Why is this important? Because 72.4% of consumers are more likely to buy products in their first language, and 56.2% say getting information in their own language is more important than price (CSA Research, 2020).

Royal Caribbean’s Spanish email strategy has original images, phrases that connect culturally, and even mentions of region-specific destinations that are especially important to Latinx consumers. This builds trust, shows care, and makes the email content feel less like a transaction and more like a relationship.

Action Step

Use audience data from your CRM to find out where your subscribers are in the world and what languages they speak. Choose professional localization services to make completely new experiences for those readers—not just copies in different words. For worldwide audiences, it’s personalization that matters, not only translation.

Cécred: Visual Representation That Speaks Volumes

Images are very convincing—especially in email marketing where the time to get someone’s attention is very short. Cécred, Beyoncé’s haircare brand, uses this visual effect in a planned way to confirm inclusivity.

Their email campaigns use main images and product GIFs that feature people showing different hair types, skin tones, ages, and body types. Instead of focusing their brand on only one type of customer, Cécred clearly tells stories through representation: “Our products are for all of you.”

This has real-world effects. Consumers are 2.6 times more likely to see an ad as relevant when it shows someone who looks like them. Moreover, 38% are more likely to trust brands that show diversity in their marketing materials (Google/Magid 2021).

Action Step

Take a look at your current media collection. Does what is shown in your images show your customer base—as it actually is, not as you think it is? When planning your next campaign, give priority to images showing different people using your product in real-life situations. Representation should not just be symbolic—it should be real.

Tarzan Kay: Making Email More Accessible

Email accessibility is often not thought about, but it decides if your content is seen, heard, and understood by all possible subscribers. Tarzan Kay, a well-known copywriter and email expert, makes her emails accessible by recording and adding audio versions of her newsletters.

Importantly, she uses her own voice—not AI text-to-speech. This adds personal connection, warmth, and trust to her content, making her emails seem like a personal talk instead of a general message.

This way of doing things does not just reach people with visual impairments. It also better serves people who learn by listening, busy professionals who would rather listen than read, people with neurological differences who find text overwhelming, and readers for whom English is not their first language.

Action Step

Add an audio part to your most recent or best-performing email. You can use tools like Podcastle or Descript to record and edit your voice. Include a link that can be clicked right at the top with words that encourage action such as “🎧 Prefer to listen? Click here to hear this email.”

Mindstream: Smart Segmentation for Diverse Interests

Mindstream, a digital newsletter focusing on AI and digital innovation, has grown a worldwide audience of over 200,000 readers. Their secret? Very specific segmentation not just by demographics, but by interests, professions, and even pop culture connections.

They use email marketing strategy tools to tag and segment audiences using data about their psychology—like interests in climate justice, fandoms (such as Taylor Swift), professional roles, and content types. A subscriber who is a design student in Dubai might get a very different email than an expert in climate policy in Vancouver.

This type of personalization makes things very relevant, which in turn increases engagement. According to Campaign Monitor, marketers who use segmented campaigns see as much as a 760% increase in revenue.

Action Step

Reconsider your segmentation to be more than just job title or location. Run a quick survey asking subscribers what they are passionate about or what kind of content they prefer (how-tos, industry news, pop culture). Tag these interests in your email platform and use them to improve future campaigns.

Tools and Templates to Support Your Strategy

Creating emails that include everyone is easier when you use the right tools

• Litmus or Email on Acid: Check your emails for accessibility and how they work with screen readers.
• HubSpot or Mailchimp: Use segmentation tools that allow sorting audiences by language choices, location, and behavior.
• Canva with Inclusive Stock Libraries: Create images with image collections that highlight real diversity.
• Voice Recording & Embedding Tools: Try platforms like Buzzsprout, Anchor, or Vocaroo to add voice parts.

You don’t have to do it by hand. Use software made to support these strategies on a large scale.

How Inclusion Impacts Metrics

Let’s talk about return on investment. Here’s how using inclusive storytelling and design in your email marketing strategy leads to real results

• Open Rates: Subject lines that include relevant holidays or address specific audience interests show up to 20–29% higher open performance.
• CTR Improvement: Visual changes—especially images that include everyone—result in click-through rate increases of 18% or more in A/B testing.
• Loyalty Metrics: Keeping customers and customer lifetime value increase a lot when subscribers feel your brand understands and respects them.
• Lower Unsubscribes: Content that includes everyone connects better, leading to more consistent reader engagement.

Measuring What Matters

To improve and prove your work is worthwhile, track important numbers

• Click-through rates on campaigns with images that include everyone vs. general ones
• Engagement by language preference to check how well localization works
• Interaction rates on emails with audio links compared to emails that are only text
• A/B test subject lines that are holiday-themed and inclusive vs. standard promotional headlines

Use these insights to keep improving and growing your marketing reach that includes everyone.

Looking Ahead: The Future of Inclusive Email Marketing

In 2025 and later, expect consumer expectations to become even higher. Personalization driven by AI will continue to change—but no machine can copy truly human understanding and cultural insight.

The most successful brands will combine AI improvement with marketing that includes everyone led by humans. That means making sure every email speaks authentically to someone with specific needs, backgrounds, and hopes.

Brands that accept this future will get the full power of email—not as a tool to send messages to many people, but as a way to make meaningful connections.

Citations

• Litmus. (2021). The ROI of email marketing remains unmatched: $36 for every $1 spent. Retrieved from https://www.litmus.com/blog/email-marketing-roi
• Gharib, M. (2023). Interview insights from the Mindstream newsletter writer — emphasizing inclusive content strategy based on global subscribers’ diverse needs.
• Inclusion & Marketing Podcast. (2023). Discussed strategies for reaching a diverse audience via email and avoiding pitfalls of performative inclusion.