I’ve been saying email marketing isn’t dead since 2015. I still stand by that. My position hasn’t changed but the evidence has.
Why won’t the “email is dead” narrative go away? Because we’ve all seen carefully built campaigns disappear into the void. But the problem isn’t email. It’s where and how most people use it.
If email was truly dead, it wouldn’t rank consistently as the top revenue driver for B2B marketers. Yet more than 59% rate it their most effective channel — higher than paid search, SEO, and organic social.
That’s because email does something no other channel can: it puts a relevant, personalized message in front of someone who actively chose to hear from you, on their terms, on their timeline.
The key phrase is “chose to hear from you.” Email marketing doesn’t work everywhere. But in the three situations below, it works exceptionally well.
Staying visible to the 95% who aren’t buying yet
I’ve written before about why the 95% of buyers who aren’t yet in-market deserve as much attention as the 5% who are. Most B2B marketing focuses almost exclusively on that ready-to-buy 5% with ads, outbound sequences, conversion campaigns all aimed at the slice of the market that wants to act right now. Which means the moment that 95% does enter a buying cycle, you’re starting from scratch with them.
A consistent email presence changes that equation. Not a newsletter full of product updates but genuinely useful content that earns a read: market insights, perspectives on problems your buyers face, or ideas they can actually use. Done well, this kind of email keeps you on the radar of buyers who aren’t ready yet, so when they are, you’re already part of the conversation.
Building relationships, not just lists for your email marketing
Staying visible is one thing. Actually building a relationship is another and email is one of the few channels that can do the latter at scale. I covered the three distinct email relationships worth building in an earlier post: the Trusted Advisor, the Helpful Colleague, and the Patient Partner. You need to build trust over months of consistent, useful contact, not a single campaign. The companies that get called first when a buyer enters a purchase cycle are the ones they already feel like they know.
Driving activation and expansion with users you already have
This one is underused by a lot of B2B marketers, particularly at companies with product-led growth models, free trials, or tiered pricing.
Email is remarkably effective at moving users through the early stages of product adoption — the critical window where people either find their footing and stick around, or drift away before they’ve seen the value. A well-constructed onboarding sequence that guides new users toward their first meaningful result can dramatically reduce early churn.
The same logic applies further up the curve. Behaviour-triggered emails, for example, when a user hits a usage limit or goes quiet for a week, create natural moments to deepen engagement or introduce a conversation about upgrading. It’s not pushy. It’s about being timely and relevant, which is exactly when email performs at its best.
The common thread for email marketing
The pattern across all three is the same. Email marketing works when it’s relevant, timely, and wanted. It struggles when it’s none of those things, which is why cold email, for all its popularity, delivers average reply rates of around 3.4% and why 71% of decision-makers say irrelevance is the main reason they ignore it.
The channel isn’t broken. Most of the time, the context is or the email itself could be improved.
If you want to go deeper on the other half of the equation and find out what actually makes people open, read, and act on the emails you send, you’ll want to check out our new series, Email Autopsy.
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