Ready or not, email is shifting. And teams everywhere are being called to evolve. Whether you're riding the wave or still deciding which board to grab, one thing’s for sure: you’re not in this alone.
At Really Good Emails and Beefree, we’ve been surveying email makers, dissecting team dynamics, and watching workflows bend under pressure. The result? The 2025 Really Good Email Playbook.
This isn’t your typical “enterprise-only” study. We’ve collected honest feedback from inbox heroes at brands big and small. With zero bias, we asked the tough stuff (the kind that makes tools sweat) and got the real story on how you actually work, what frustrates you, and how you perceive your role moving forward. Oh, and we’ve tracked what’s changed since 2018, so you can see exactly how the game has shifted.
We won’t spill all the beans here—download the full Playbook here if you’re hungry for data. Instead, consider this blog your sanity-saving guide to the evolving challenges in emails, with actionable steps to help get your email team future-ready.
Challenge #1: Email is difficult to manage at scale
The 2025 RGE Playbook confirmed what many of us already feel: email creation has become a high-stakes balancing act, and “jack of all trades” roles are officially on the decline. Today’s email landscape favors specialists—strategists, designers, project managers, and developers—each bringing their own superpower to the inbox.
And don’t get us wrong, that is a really good thing! But only if your workflow evolves with it. So, how do you make collaboration work without adding chaos?
It all starts with setting your team up with the right workflows & processes.
Bring everyone together in one place
Even if you don’t have a whole email team, you likely have multiple teams working on email, meaning visibility is everything. And the more complex your emails get, the more cumbersome your process can start to feel.
A shared workspace, whether it’s a project hub or a collaborative design platform, like Beefree, is your secret weapon. This means your strategist can sketch out the story, your designer can finesse the layout, and your stakeholders can jump in with comments, all in the same space. No file handoffs. No version confusion. No “who has the final-final-final version?” emails.
Pro tip: Choose a tool that allows real-time collaboration, clear task ownership, and easy version control.
Set guardrails that empower, not limit
Every email shouldn’t feel like a brand-new project. And not every project needs massive oversight. But if that scares you because of the possibility of designs going rogue, we get it.
Our number one tip is to stop relying on buried PDFs and turn your guidelines into something they can actually use. In Beefree, your brand’s identity lives right inside your workspace. Think saved blocks, reusable templates, pre-loaded color palettes, and custom fonts. So even if someone new jumps in, they’re building on-brand emails from the start.
Solid brand guidelines are your team’s creative guardrails, empowering anyone to move fast without sacrificing consistency.
Challenge #2: There is no one-size-fits-all all for tools
Let’s be real: there’s no magical, all-in-one email tool that solves every challenge your team faces.
According to the 2025 Really Good Email Playbook, 64% of email makers supplement their ESP with at least one other tool. And understandably so! Because no matter how robust your ESP is, there’s always a missing piece. Maybe it’s visual design flexibility? Deliverability insights, or an easy way to integrate AI into your workflows?
But more tools don’t always equal more efficiency. Instead, there are more logins, more copy-pasting, more tabs to juggle, and more chances for things to get lost.
There's also the problem of not everyone can be a Fortune 500 company with money and resources to experiment and test various tools. So, how can you find the right one for you?
Start with the pain, not the features
Too many teams choose tools based on feature lists or flashy demos. But remember that the best tool is the one your team will actually use. Start thinking about your real-life friction:
- Is design getting bottlenecked?
- Is your QA process too manual?
- Are approvals slowing things down?
Pinpoint what’s slowing your team down. Are the tools you have now actually helping you do that?
Choose a tool that plays nice with what you have
You don’t need a giant platform. You need a smart one that combines seamlessly with what you already have. Look for tools that integrate with your ESP, CRM, or project management solutions, so you're not copy-pasting and “hey, just checking in on that asset” your way into burnout.
Pro tip: External builders, like Beefree, with ESP connectors = best of both worlds.
Think long-term ROI, not short-term cost
And no, we’re not saying bankrupt yourself into the highest plan of HubSpot, but maybe look past the free tag and explore a paid tier. Free might be tempting. But if your team spends hours hacking workarounds or redoing assets, that’s real cost, too. A good tool saves time, improves output, and keeps your team sane. That’s worth investing in.
Challenge #3: The future is uncertain
In theory, we all want to “future-proof” our strategy. In reality? We’re just trying to get the next campaign out the door.
Between AI-generated content, stricter privacy regulations, and the increasing need to coordinate across channels, email teams are under pressure from every direction. In the RGE Playbook we keep referencing, we noticed a major sentiment shift: a noticeable drop in long-term planning.
People are focused on the now, asking themselves, “How do I win now?” over “Where will we be in five years?” Planning five years ahead feels impossible when the landscape changes monthly, and your team is already juggling a dozen priorities.
So what does “preparing for the future” actually look like for email teams today?
Spoiler: it’s not about predicting what’s coming next. It’s about building flexible systems that can adapt—whether the next shift is a new platform, policy, or AI breakthrough.
Email design systems for the win
If you’ve been following us for a while, you know we’re ride-or-die for email design systems. It’s a real-world solution for overwhelmed email teams struggling to scale and bored designers working on the same repetitive design.
We like to compare email design systems to lego pieces. Instead of building the same tower from scratch each time, you just snap together the pieces you need, tweak the content, and you’re good to go. This approach:
- Saves time: You’re not starting from zero every time.
- Improves consistency: Your brand stays cohesive, no matter who’s building.
- Reduces errors: Approved blocks eliminate the risk of someone “freestyling” off-brand.
- Speeds up reviews: Stakeholders trust the structure, so they can focus on the message.
Embrace AI
Unfortunately, it's time to accept that AI is not going anywhere. From subject line generators to image editing, accessibility checks, and predictive engagement scores, AI is quietly creeping into every part of the email workflow. And while the idea of robots writing your emails might feel a little “Black Mirror,” the reality is far more practical and less scary.
The future of email isn’t AI instead of people. It’s AI alongside people, boosting the parts of your process that are repetitive, tedious, or time-consuming, so you can focus on what matters: strategy, storytelling, and connection.
The RGE Email Playbook shows that we’re finding new use cases than what we organically believed we’d use AI for. While AI is displacing some of the basic newsletter and subject-line work, copywriters are increasingly shifting into editorial, strategy, and oversight roles, ensuring that copy truly connects, converts, and aligns with brand values (even if it is AI-generated from the beginning).
So, are you ready?
The trends we discussed today paint a picture of an industry in transition. One that’s more strategic, more data-driven, and more technologically complex than ever. The world of email is changing fast. But the goal remains the same: send really good emails, faster, with less chaos and more confidence.
As we’ve seen in the 2025 Really Good Email Playbook—and echoed by hundreds of email makers just like you—the real challenges aren’t about tech for tech’s sake. They’re about being intentional and building scalable systems, using tools that actually work, and create a team environment where adaptability is second nature.
So whether you’re a team of one juggling a growing list or part of a scrappy crew scaling fast, you’ve got this.
👉 Want more? Download the full RGE Playbook for deep data dives and team-tested insights.
👉 Ready to make email creation easier right now? Start your free Beefree trial
Here’s to building emails and teams that are ready for whatever comes next. 🚀
