Every so often someone declares email marketing dead, usually right before a business quietly generates a huge chunk of its revenue from a well timed email campaign. The channel isn’t dying. What’s actually happening is that inboxes have gotten more crowded and customer expectations have gone up, which means the businesses doing email marketing poorly are seeing worse results, while the ones doing it well are seeing it perform better than almost anything else in their marketing mix.
Why So Many Email Campaigns Underperform
The most common mistake is treating email like a broadcast channel instead of a relationship. Sending the same generic newsletter to an entire list, regardless of what someone actually bought, clicked, or showed interest in, tends to produce mediocre open rates and even worse click through rates. Customers have gotten used to a certain level of relevance, and an email that feels like it could have been sent to anyone tends to get ignored or unsubscribed from pretty quickly.
This is a big part of why more Montreal businesses are working with an email marketing agency montreal companies rely on to build out proper segmentation and automation, rather than continuing to send one-size-fits-all campaigns to their entire list.
Segmentation Changes Everything
Splitting a list based on purchase history, engagement level, or where someone is in the customer journey sounds like a small technical detail, but it tends to be the single biggest factor separating high performing email programs from mediocre ones. A new subscriber who just joined the list should probably see a different sequence of emails than someone who’s been a repeat customer for two years. Sending both groups the identical campaign usually means underserving one of them, if not both.
Automation Does the Heavy Lifting Once It’s Set Up Right
Welcome sequences, abandoned cart reminders, post-purchase follow ups, and re-engagement campaigns for inactive subscribers can all run automatically once they’re properly built out. The upfront work of setting these up takes some real effort and strategy, but once they’re running, they tend to keep generating results with very little ongoing manual effort, which makes them some of the highest return activities a business can invest in.
Deliverability Is a Bigger Deal Than People Realize
None of this matters if emails aren’t actually landing in the inbox. Deliverability issues, whether from poor list hygiene, spammy subject lines, or technical setup problems with domain authentication, can quietly tank a campaign’s performance without it being obvious why. This is one of those behind-the-scenes technical details that’s easy to overlook but has a real impact on whether an otherwise well written email ever actually gets seen.
The Real Opportunity Most Businesses Are Missing
A lot of businesses treat their email list as an afterthought compared to social media or paid ads, even though email consistently tends to deliver strong returns relative to what it costs to run. The businesses getting real value out of this channel are usually the ones treating it with the same strategic attention they’d give to any other major marketing effort, rather than sending occasional generic updates and hoping something sticks.