We just got an email, we just got an email, we just got an email! It is a marketing message.
Is email marketing becoming obsolete?
Join us as we uncover the harsh truth about email engagement in today’s digital world!
From spam filters to inbox blindness, it’s clear that we need to adapt!
This is part 4 of my 5 part series!
The Marketing Gateway is a weekly podcast hosted by Sean in St. Louis (Sean J. Jordan, President of https://www.researchplan.com/) and featuring guests from the St. Louis area and beyond.
Every week, Sean shares insights about the world of marketing and speaks to people who are working in various marketing roles – creative agencies, brand managers, MarCom professionals, PR pros, business owners, academics, entrepreneurs, researchers and more!
The goal of The Marketing Gateway is simple – we want to build a connection between all of our marketing mentors in the Midwest and learn from one another! And the best way to learn is to listen.
And the next best way is to share!
For more episodes:
https://www.youtube.com/@TheMarketingGateway
Copyright 2025, The Research & Planning Group, Inc.
TRANSCRIPT:
Hey, I’m Sean in St. Louis, and this is the Marketing Gateway.
We’re out of the office for a couple of weeks, and so we’ll close out 2025 with some short episodes about the lessons we’ve learned from marketing this year and also the things we need to consider about 2026.
Email is one of those tools that we’ve all gotten so used to using that it rarely occurs to us that 25 to 30 years ago, it wasn’t a big part of marketing outreach strategies. In fact, people still thought it was a pretty big deal to get email from a company or brand in the late 1990s and early 2000s!
It had to be sandwiched in between chain letters and joke forwards and naughty links to pornography and pleas from Nigerian princes needing their money unlocked by a kind and generous stranger and the always-welcome Darwin Awards, of course, but email was still something people paid attention to with regularly.
Email also had a lot of advantages over other methods of contact. It was pretty much free. It was often personalized to a specific individual. You could send out emails in large batches as easily as you could send out a single message. And, of course, it provided sheer numbers – with a list of hundreds or thousands or even millions of emails, even a very low-response campaign could generate something for a marketer who just needed to stir up some activity.
In my industry, email was also a big deal because it provided a newer, cheaper, faster way to send out surveys – a practice a lot of people scoffed at and said was silly and insisted would never replace the tried and true snail mail survey. It’s funny to think about in hindsight; 25 years ago, people still thought email was a fad, I guess.
But email wasn’t a fad, and it was very quickly becoming a nuisance due to the large amounts of unregulated commercial email people were receiving. Just as their dinners were being interrupted by obnoxious telemarketers calling about switching long-distance providers or starting a new credit card or considering a new cable provider, their computing time was being polluted by so many unwanted emails that the name SPAM, once used to describe a salty canned meat, was now far more commonly used to describe all the digital junk mail people were receiving.
And we can thank Usenet and its love of Monty Python for coining that whole term, by the way, and we can also give a fist bump to to Hormel, the owner of the brand and trademark, who had to fight for years to keep their product viable in the marketplace and who never once tried a rebrand or a pivot for a brand that’d been going strong around the world since 1937. Even when the United States passed the Controlling the Assault off Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act of 2003, also deliciously known as the CAN-SPAM Act, Hormel hung in there.
And of course the CAN-SPAM Act did very little to actually regulate commercial email beyond forcing the good actors to enact better practices and allowing the bad actors to continue to do whatever they wanted. But it did ultimately help establish best practices for commercial email such as ensuring that people only received mass email they’d opted in to, that they could easily identify the sender and, most importantly, just as easily unsubscribe.
But let’s fast forward 22 years to our current era, where email has been with us for an entire generation of marketers and we really take for granted that people might want to provide us with an email address. In many CRM and marketing database structures, the email address is even used as a unique identifier for each individual row! Never mind that a lot of people have more than one of them or that they’ll even change email addresses with regularity.
It’s a useful shortcut to reaching an individual, and it’s relied on with regularity for blasting out promotions, updates, business notices and, of course, surveys.
Email is also still a powerful tool for lead generation because people are accustomed to reading it regularly on their mobile devices and also on their desktop computers. If you can craft a subject line that can catch their attention, you can get them to open a message that a certain percentage of people will read and click through to engage with your call to action. It’s all a trading game that’s generally looked at through a lens of A/B testing – keep trying with different approaches until you find one that works and then ride it until it’s no longer useful.
But if I had to put my finger on something that isn’t working in 2025, it’s email marketing. We’ve been struggling with it in survey research – it’s just not getting the click-throughs it used to, even if we offer to pay incentives for surveys.
And I’m hearing the same from a lot of people in the marketing field, particularly in B2B marketing, many of whom are struggling to get any sort of traction at all with email.
So, what’s happened? Believe it or not, I couldn’t find much data, and a lot of the people talking about email marketing are the ones selling a solution for it, so you can only take their perspective with a grain of salt. But there are a few things that changed over the last year or two.
First there’s the frequency of email. People get so much of it that they’re too overwhelmed to look at it. This is especially true in the corporate world, where frequent internal emails can make external messages hard to see at all.
This then ties in to the general visibility of email. A lot of email platforms – and of course the most popular in the United States are Gmail, Outlook and Apple Mail with Yahoo mail somewhere far behind – are filtering messages out of the user’s priority inbox and into other places where people might not see them. Gmail and Yahoo use automated tabs. Outlook has its clutter folder and iCloud Mail has its VIP and junk folders. And every one of those platforms is also vigilantly scanning for spam.
All of these platforms are using algorithms to sort commercial email at scale, and even if you’re playing by the rules, user behavior helps to shape where those messages might show up. Your domain name may start getting filtered, and you may not even realize what’s happening behind the scenes. Email campaign manager programs like MailChimp or Constant Contact work to stay ahead of the digital arms race here, but they’re also easily filtered by users who are tired of seeing commercial email.
And then there’s the fact that most people don’t read email on their computers anymore – they’re using their phones or perhaps their smartwatches and swiping away or ignoring things that don’t seem relevant when they hit their notifications. If the subject line isn’t important enough to grab their attention, the email may never be read, especially if it’s not something the receiver is actively interested in seeing.
On the B2B side, I can also personally attest, as many other marketers out there can, that even personalized messages to individuals, which once worked very well to at least get some sort of response, aren’t working as well as they used to. When I ask people if they’ve seen my messages, they often haven’t, but it’s not clear why, because the messages did hit their inbox. What’s more, I’ve been guilty of the same. 2025 has been such a weird and chaotic year that we have to factor inattention into the mix, and I suspect that’s a big part of the problem here.
So, what’s to be done?
First of all, we need to start thinking about email differently. That much is clear. If we’re sending out mass emails to people using traditional methods, they’re just not going to see it. I’ve found individuals respond much better to opt-in content tools like Substack that reach a fraction of my email list, but which deliver far higher quality responses as my receivers engage with my content.
Email needs to be used in a conversational way, not for cold calls. And that means we need to find other ways to get people to open that email conversation with us.
Text messages also may be a better way to reach people directly. At least, for now. I think as soon as they start being overused, we’re going to see the same exact issues we have with email, so I wouldn’t rely on them too much. They’re also not great for B2B marketing because people tend not to list their cell phone numbers on their profiles or signature lines.
But you know what? I invite my clients to text me, and many of them do. It’s far more convenient and top of mind than email, and they like the personalization of it. So it can be an effective channel when it’s driven by the customer.
Second, we need to stop trying to automate email in bland, generic one size fits all approaches. Email needs to be personalized to feel sincere, and those who take the time to write personal messages that regard individuals are valued customers or prospects tend to receive far better response than those who send out mass campaigns hoping for a return rate at scale.
For B2C, this is tricky, but it’s doable. Major brands have been customizing email messages for years using algorithmic approaches, and it just involves using segmentation and target marketing to ensure customers see the sorts of content they’re interested in.
One suggestion I saw for B2B was to utilize AI tools to scrape LinkedIn and social media for information about each individual and to build a quick message that mentions some of the things that person has done recently and talked about online. This simply speeds up the process of looking for reasons to reach out to people who may be interested in a service. The key is to use the AI output as a research tool to help you to quickly learn about their interests and needs and not to automate a lead-generation email from it; keeping things personal still seems to be the best practice.
Then let’s talk about the call to action. Email, like any other form of marketing, needs a clear call to action to be effective. So when an email tries to be all things to all people, it’s going to be a mess. It’s even worse when you factor in mobile devices, which are not optimized for complex messages.
Clickthroughs are a reliable call to action, so start with that. In B2C, you usually want to get people to click through to a landing page. In B2B, clicking to make an appointment or take a quick survey is often a reliable call to action.
Next, ask yourself why anyone would want to do that. Would you want to do that? I know I often wouldn’t, but there are times where I would. Study those opportunities and try to understand what might drive people to engage with your email rather than to simply swipe it aside and forget about it.
Finally, recognize that timing is everything, and email often needs to be scheduled to suit eyeballs.
For survey emails, we get the best responses at specific times of day and days of the week because those are the times when people are more likely to be reading email. This gets even more complicated when we factor in time zones. But if I’m sending an email survey invite out at, say, 8AM on a Tuesday, I may be read a lot more than if I sent it out at 8AM on a Monday when tasks have piled up or 4PM on a Friday when everyone’s checked out.
And for B2B, I often send out messages when I expect someone might be at their desk, especially if I see them posting on LinkedIn or other social media. That’s a great time to reach them.
Even with all these tips, I’m still not confident email is a viable strategy going forward. I truly believe inattention is a big threat to the effectiveness of any sort of marketing that requires people to read things and respond, and unless you have their attention already, you’re going to be less and less likely to break through.
So next week, I’ll talk about marketing strategies that can replace email marketing in 2026. And I look forward to sharing them!
I’m Sean in St. Louis, and this has been The Marketing Gateway. See ya next time!
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