5 Newsletter Trends I’m Watching this Year

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Some days, I’m at ground level, working with clients on their day-to-day email strategy, and others, I’m having conversations at 10,000 feet, trying to figure out what’s out there that my clients and readers need to keep an eye on. 

As 2025 rolls on, one big obvious topic looms: the impact of artificial intelligence on the people making newsletters, the people reading them, and the inboxes themselves.

But there are other issues I’m watching of late that are also worth thinking about. (I’ll save the AI conversation for another day — there’s a lot to say there!) At The Newsletter Conference back in May, I shared five things I’m closely monitoring:

1. The impact of Apple Intelligence
2. Increases in bot clicks
3. Setting up DMARC enforcement
4. Getting your logo in the inbox
5. The European Accessibility Act 

Here’s what you need to know about each of these — and how to take advantage of the opportunities they present.

The impact of Apple Intelligence

Apple’s AI-powered, tabbed inbox rolled out in iOS 18.1 last fall. Gmail has long offered a tabbed inbox to users, where emails can be sorted into different categories. Newsletters that land in a secondary tab, like Promotions, usually see lower open rates than those in the primary inbox. There was some nervous rumbling in the email community when Apple rolled out this feature. Almost exactly half of all emails are opened on an Apple device, per Litmus data. Would Apple’s new inbox cause a decline in open rates for newsletters?

Among my clients, I saw very little difference in open or click rates in the first quarter of 2025, but I wanted to get a bit more data. Three orgs with access to a lot of metrics — Glueletter, Kit, and Omeda — were kind enough to share some actual numbers:

• Glueletter clients saw open rates increase by 35.1% from the fourth quarter of 2024 to the first quarter of 2025, and click-to-open rates rose by 8 percent.
• Newsletters on Kit saw a 0.3% increase in open rates and a 7.7% increase in click-to-open rates.
• Omeda users saw a decline in opens of about 10.2%, and a decline in clicks of about 11.2 percent.

Three different data sources, and three very different results! But they also cater to three different audiences. Glueletter is widely used among newsrooms, Kit is more for the indie newsletter operator, and Omeda’s strength is in B2B media. There’s no clear trendline here, but I’ll continue to monitor these stats throughout the year. I think we’ll be able to more clearly see the impact of the Apple inbox — positive, negative, or neutral — by year’s end.

Increases in bot clicks

Last year, I wrote about the impact of bots on click rates. These are what I’d consider good bots. Security tools deploy them to keep users from clicking spammy links or downloading malicious files. They’re especially prevalent among users with a .gov, .edu, or business email address, since those types of organizations want to ensure no user accidentally puts the security of the entire org at risk.

The good news is that these bots do a great job keeping users safe. But there’s a downside. As I wrote in that April 2024 piece:

In the process of identifying and stopping bad actors, there’s a side effect: Your newsletter might end up seeing an unusual number of clicks. Some bots might stop clicking after a certain number of links pass a security check — which explains why some newsletters see bot-affected link clicks drop off for links lower down in an email. Jennifer Nespola Lantz, vice president of industry relations and deliverability at Kickbox, said she’s seen cases where timestamps show that an email appears to have been opened before it was officially delivered to the inbox.

Even though these bots only click to try to protect user data, many email service providers (ESPs) don’t do anything to filter out those clicks. When a newsletter operator looks at their data, they’re likely to see at least some bot clicks mixed in alongside clicks from real people.

A year ago, Omeda reported that 63% of clicks in their system came from bots. But the problem has only gotten worse. Bad actors use AI tools to create a lot more spam, and that means these bots have gotten more aggressive as a countermeasure. As a result, they’re clicking — a lot more.

How much is a lot? In the first quarter of 2025, Omeda reported that 80% of all clicks came from these bots. In March, the bots were responsible for nearly 89% of all clicks.

Some ESPs do filter out these clicks, but many do not. Third-party analytics tools are available to help you filter out the clicks — I use Glueletter to make sure I understand which clicks come from humans and which from bots.

The bigger issue, as Sean Griffey, co-founder of Industry Dive, said at the conference, is transparency with both your team and outside partners about what’s happening. Make sure they know that bots are likely clicking on your newsletters, and try to track clicks in multiple ways to capture more accurate data. For instance, I usually recommend to teams that they add a UTM — that little bit of code at the end of a URL that shows where a click came from — to all ad units, and tell advertisers which UTMs they should track on their end. The data won’t always match up, but at least you’ve got two different ways — one from your ESP, one from its analytics platform — to measure what happened.

Setting up DMARC enforcement

In 2024, Gmail and Yahoo set up new requirements for the inbox, requiring virtually all newsletter operators — anyone sending 5,000+ emails at a time — to set up three authentication protocols. This year, Microsoft joined them.

Most newsletters had already enabled two of the protocols — one is called SPF, and the other is DKIM — but the third, DMARC, was new to many. As I wrote:

Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance, or DMARC, is an authentication protocol that helps prevent email spoofing. With DMARC, you can tell the inboxes where you send your email from and tell them what to do if they spot someone trying to spam, spoof, or phish a reader using your email address.

At the time, I recommended that all newsletter operators set their DMARC policy to “none,” which means that you comply with the new rules but that the inboxes shouldn’t send any emails from your email address — even if they came from an unverified source — to the spam folder.

The good news was that most senders followed that advice. The bad news is that many didn’t take the follow-up step to change their policy to what’s known as an enforcement state, blocking a bad actor from spoofing their domain.

I was curious to see how newsletters at The Newsletter Conference handled DMARC. I assumed that a 400-person event all about newsletters would be the kind of place that saw high adoption of strict DMARC policies.

I was wrong.

Only 54% of the newsletters at the conference had set their policy to an enforcement state of either “quarantine” or “reject.” The other 46% had left their domains vulnerable to spoofing.

I’ve got a guide here on checking and updating your DMARC policy. I recommend this to any newsletter sending from a custom domain — you should take care of this as soon as possible. (Although if you use a platform like Beehiiv or Substack and send from their email addresses, they handle this for you already.)

Ask a Deliverability Expert: Should I Set Up DMARC?

Getting your logo in the inbox

Apple, Gmail, and Yahoo now allow you to display your logo in the inbox. Gmail and Yahoo will even include a blue checkmark to further establish trust. But oddly, many newsletters still haven’t taken this step, even though doing so may result in an increase in open rate.

Among attendees at the conference, only 16% had set up a BIMI policy to get their logo into Yahoo inboxes, and only 5% had purchased a certificate to get into Gmail inboxes.

But if you’re going to set your DMARC policy to an enforcement level — and you should! — you should also take the next steps to get your logo into the inbox. Here’s what you need to do:

For Apple

• Have DMARC at enforcement.
• Create an Apple Business Connect account. Here’s a step-by-step guide to setting things up. The process typically takes a few days, and there’s no cost to setting up your logo. One note: For now, the logo will only display on iPhones whose language is set to English.

For Gmail

• Have DMARC at enforcement.
• Set up a BIMI record. It’s free, and I’ve included a guide here to help you do so.
• Apply for a Verified Mark Certificate (about $1,600/year) or Common Mark Certificate (about $1,200/year). The VMC is for brands with a trademarked logo, while the CMC is for everyone else. The other difference is that with the VMC, you get a blue checkmark in Gmail inboxes; the CMC does not get you the checkmark. Getting a certificate requires several steps and often takes a few weeks. You do have to renew the certificate every year, but this is a step I’m encouraging larger orgs to take. It’s a positive action that will help your brand stand out in the inbox.

If you don’t want to go through this process, there is a hack that can get your logo into the inbox (minus the checkmark).

For Yahoo

• Have DMARC at enforcement.
• Set up a BIMI record.

In the long run, Yahoo will likely require a VMC or CMC to stay in the inbox, but for now, they’re showing the logo to anyone with a BIMI record — which, as I mentioned earlier, is free.

The European Accessibility Act 

This last one has really flown under the radar, particularly here in the United States. Perhaps you’re familiar with the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR, which protects user privacy in the EU. Think of the European Accessibility Act, or EAA, as GDPR but for accessibility. It goes into effect on June 28, and if you send emails to users in the European Union, you’re required to maintain best practices for accessibility.

The good news is that for most senders, these best practices are ways you’re already compliant, like:

• Making newsletters easy to read.
• Using alt text with images.
• Limiting the use of flashing images.
• Having good color contrast between text and background colors.
• Making all emails mobile-friendly.

This is the kind of stuff we’ve written about for years on Inbox Collective, so none of it should come as a huge surprise to you.

Creating Accessible Emails: A Guide For Marketers and Journalists

One thing many newsletters do not have, though, is an accessibility statement. (Think: a privacy policy, but for accessibility.) The W3C Web Accessibility Initiative has a useful (and free!) resource that can help you craft your accessibility statement, which you can then publish on your website and link to in the footer of your newsletter. If you’re based in the EU — or even if you just have a lot of readers in the EU — this is a common-sense step you should take to comply with the new law.