Every so often a client asks me whether email marketing is still worth the investment or whether it is a relic from the 2000s, something like handing out flyers on the street. I get the doubt: between social media, search engines and now AI answers, email sounds like technology from another era. But the numbers tell a different story. Litmus, one of the companies that has studied this channel most closely, estimates email's return at around 36 dollars for every dollar invested. No other digital channel comes close with any consistency. So the short answer is yes, it is worth it. The long answer is this article.
What is email marketing?
Email marketing is the use of email to communicate directly and recurrently with people who gave you permission to write to them. That last part matters more than the rest of the definition: without permission, what you are doing has another name, and it is spam.
In practice it covers everything from a consultancy's monthly newsletter to the automated sequence a store sends you after you abandon your cart. The common thread is that the message lands in a personal inbox, at the moment you chose, with the content you chose. That combination of direct reach and control is rare in today's digital marketing.
Why does such an old channel still work?
Think about the channels where a typical company invests today. Organic reach on social media depends on an algorithm that changes without notice. Traffic from Google depends on rankings that move with every update, and now also on whether AI decides to summarize your content without anyone visiting you. Paid ads work exactly until the day you stop paying.
Your email list plays by different rules. If you have 5,000 subscribers and Google changes its algorithm tomorrow, you still have 5,000 subscribers. Nobody can take that audience away from you, because the agreement is between you and each person who subscribed. In my positioning work I have seen the same pattern for years: the sites that best withstand traffic turbulence are the ones that converted part of their visits into subscribers. Organic content attracts new people, email retains them, and each channel does the part of the job it is best at.
There is a second, simpler reason: the inbox is still a space people check every day, with relatively high attention. A social post competes against an infinite scroll. An email competes against other emails, and if your subject line is better than the bank's and the airline's, you won.
How do you build a list without buying databases?
First, what not to do: buy databases. Besides starting a relationship with a stranger by writing to them without permission, purchased lists are full of inactive addresses and spam traps. A few weeks of sending to a bought list and Gmail's filters will flag you as a suspicious sender, even for the people who actually wanted to hear from you. That is damage that takes months to undo.
Building a list legitimately is slower and works better. The basic pieces:
A real reason to subscribe
"Subscribe to our newsletter" gives nobody a reason to hand over their email. A real incentive is something the person wants: a downloadable guide that solves a specific problem, a template, a welcome discount, or a concrete promise of what you will send and how often ("one email a month with the most important developments in X, no filler"). The more specific the promise, the better it filters for people who are actually interested.
Forms where people are already paying attention
At the end of your highest-traffic articles, on your homepage, in your personal email signature. If your organic content already attracts visits, every article is a doorway into the list. A form with two fields (name and email) converts better than one with seven.
Subscription confirmation
The famous double opt-in: the person subscribes and receives an email asking them to confirm. You lose some subscribers along the way, and that is exactly what you want: a smaller list of people who confirmed twice that they want to read you is worth more than a big list of lukewarm addresses. A clean list also improves your sender reputation, which is what gets your emails into the primary inbox instead of promotions or spam.
What types of emails can you send?
Most strategies combine three types, and it helps to keep them straight because they are written and measured differently.
The newsletter is the recurring email, same day, same promise. It builds habit and long-term relationships. It is the format where brand voice shows the most, and the one readers appreciate most when it is done well (and the one that generates unsubscribes fastest when it is pure filler).
Automations are sequences triggered by an action: someone subscribes and receives a welcome series, someone downloads the guide and receives three related emails, someone abandons their cart and receives a reminder. You set them up once and they work on their own. For a small team, they are the best effort-to-result ratio in the entire channel.
Transactional emails are purchase confirmations, password resets and shipping notices. Do not think of them as marketing, but take care of them: they have the highest open rates of any email you send, and a well-written confirmation email leaves a better impression than three newsletters.
How do you write emails people open and read?
The subject line decides the open, so it deserves more time than most people give it. The subject lines that work best look like the ones in a personal email: concrete, short, no shouting caps, no emoji chains. "What I learned auditing 40 corporate blogs" beats "🚀 DON'T MISS our amazing July newsletter 🚀" any day of the week.
Inside the email, the rule that helps most is one goal per email. If the email wants you to read an article, download a guide and answer a survey all at once, most likely none of the three will happen. One message and one button per email is a good starting rule.
On design: simpler than you think. Emails that look like a letter (text, a link or two, maybe one image) tend to perform as well as or better than heavily designed templates, and they also weigh less and read well on any screen. Almost every tool ships responsive layouts by default, so your job is the writing.
Which metrics actually matter?
There is a well-known trap here. The channel's most famous metric, the open rate, became unreliable when Apple launched Mail Privacy Protection in 2021: the system opens emails on your behalf to protect your privacy, which inflates opens from everyone reading on an iPhone or Mac Mail. It is still useful for comparing your own emails against each other, but do not treat it as your star metric or compare it against old benchmarks.
The metrics that hold up: click rate (how many people clicked the link in your email), conversion (how many took the action you wanted: buying, booking, downloading) and unsubscribe rate. An example with made-up numbers to illustrate: if you send an email to 2,000 subscribers, 60 click and 6 book a meeting, your 3% click rate and 0.3% conversion tell you far more about the business than any open rate.
And one metric that works in reverse: spam complaints. Gmail requires bulk senders to keep them under 0.3%. Above that threshold, your emails start going straight to everyone's spam folder, including your best subscribers'.
What are SPF, DKIM and DMARC?
If you send emails from your own domain, there is a technical part you cannot skip. SPF, DKIM and DMARC are three records configured in your domain's DNS that work, together, like your emails' ID card: they prove to Gmail and friends that the email claiming to come from your company actually comes from your company, and not from someone impersonating you.
This stopped being optional in 2024, when Gmail and Yahoo began requiring full authentication from bulk senders. Without these records in place, your emails may simply not arrive, however well written they are. The good news: your email marketing tool (any of the well-known ones) has a step-by-step guide for setting them up, it is an afternoon's errand and you do it once. If you are not sure whether your domain has them, free tools like MXToolbox will tell you in a minute.
Wrapping up
Email marketing is one of the few marketing investments that compounds: every subscriber you gain this month is still there next month, and a list built patiently over a year is worth more than almost any one-off campaign.
If you want to start tomorrow, the order I would recommend to any company is this: check that your domain has SPF, DKIM and DMARC configured, define a specific subscription promise (what you send, how often, for whom), place the form on your three highest-traffic pages and send the first email even if your list has 20 people. The 10,000-subscriber lists you see elsewhere started exactly like that.