Is email marketing dead?

Editor's note, 2026

The argument is that email as a channel is alive and that the disappointing results come from the delivery: templates that are not built for mobile, generic subject lines, dated design, and figures nobody looks at. The four things to stop doing read much as they did in 2020.

Six things here need checking before anyone acts on them, and this note names all six, because naming only some would leave the rest looking settled. First, the measurement. Open rate is treated throughout as the number that tells you how well you are doing and the number you optimise against, and the closing section offers open rates of around 60 and 70 percent at two pharma companies as figures to aim for; the first is the author's recollection of a company he worked at, the second is something he says he heard about only the other day, so they are anecdotes and not benchmarks. Before optimising against open rate at all, check with your own sending platform how opens are counted today and what your recipients' mail clients do with the tracking pixel that counts them. Second, consent and profiling. The article says interest data should be collected "in accordance with GDPR" and, at the end, recommends putting multiple-choice questions into the newsletter itself to gather what is needed for better segmentation; it does not set out what the legal basis for that collection would be. The same gap sits under the hyper-personalisation section, which describes tailoring each send to the individual from every metric held about that individual. Anyone acting on either should get the position from their own data protection function first. Third, AMP. Embedding video and forms in an email through AMP is presented as new and available; whether it works for your recipients depends on what your sending platform supports and what their mail clients do with it, so check both before designing a send around it. Fourth, the figures. Every one of them carries a footnote, which is more than most articles in this series manage, but several of those footnotes point to marketing vendors' own blogs and knowledge bases, not to primary research, and all of them are from 2018 to 2020. The article is straight about this in one place, stopping to note that the survey company behind its opening statistics sells email software, and that is the right way to read the rest of them too. Fifth, the section headed "Trends 2020" is dated by its own title, and the advice to search for "email marketing best practice 2020" carries the year with it. Sixth, one word. The article uses bounce rate for a reader who opens a newsletter without interacting with it, which is not the only meaning the word carries in email tooling, where it is also used for sends that were never delivered. Read the definition in your own platform before comparing your number with anything said here.

None of this was written in a world where a generated summary can sit between the recipient and the sender; generative AI arrived in 2023, three years after this piece.

It has to be said, a fair number of companies are not happy with the results they see from their email marketing. Given that the opening of the multichannel marketing series focused on email and KPIs, that article is now followed up with tips for improving them. Email marketing is definitely not dead, and in this article digital strategist Fredrik Holmboe goes through four things you should stop doing immediately and five things you should consider starting.

Time and again for more than a decade, the end of email marketing has been announced. But the idea that email as a channel for reaching your target group is dead could not be further from the truth. At a time when most marketers, not only in the pharmaceutical industry but outside it too, are struggling to break through the noise and reach their target group, 78 percent of those asked in the report "State of email marketing 2020" [1] saw increased engagement on their sends.

The same report says that 99 percent of all consumers check their email every day, that more than 50 percent of everyone living in the United States checks their email more than 10 times a day, and that 73 percent of millennials, people between 24 and 39, prefer marketing material by email.

Let us be a little critical of those numbers and pull them down somewhat. The company behind the survey, Litmus, offers a platform for exactly this kind of email sending and reasonably has a certain weighting in its favour in the group it asks. But even with a critical eye on the numbers, it is still easy to see why collecting consent in order to make email marketing possible has been an important goal for pharmaceutical companies, both globally and locally.

With permission to send marketing material by email to an HCP (healthcare professional), you have a direct communication channel with very large potential in terms of both impact and ROI (Return on Investment).

What is confusing, though, is that in far too many cases the business results do not appear.

How is it possible that good results fail to materialise in a world where opening email is such a large part of people's lives, which raises an important question:

Why is there a gap between the fact that consumers check their email all the time and the fact that they do not act on it in a way that satisfies the sender?

Perhaps the answer is that there is nothing wrong with the marketing channel, but rather with the delivery.

Best practice in email marketing

It is worth always keeping an eye on the marketing channel you are using, signing up for the sends of some of the best email marketing companies in the world and putting those in a folder called "E-mail best practice examples". Every so often you look in that folder for inspiration, something you can supplement with a couple of Google searches for "email marketing best practice 2020".

Because bluntly, it is not we who set the standard for how our doctors and other healthcare staff will experience our sends, it is the best players in the market, and it may be as simple as you not having kept up with how email marketing has developed and how it currently works.

Meet what the target group expects and optimise from the statistics

For email marketing to work well you need to meet what your target group expects, and use statistics to measure and improve your email campaigns in the right way (see the earlier article on KPIs for email marketing).

If you disregard those two fundamental building blocks in digital marketing strategy in general, and email marketing in particular, you will probably miss most of the potential your digital newsletters have. Not because email marketing as a strategy is dead, but because what you have produced and put in place is out of date.

This article is written with the aim of giving an insight into some aspects of email marketing you should consider when you create a digital newsletter, and a little later in the article those will come based on the trends for 2020. But first, here are some things you absolutely have to stop doing.

4 things that break your email marketing

There are some things in email marketing that, incredibly, still happen, and to succeed in 2020 and onwards you should stop doing the following:

Using templates that are not mobile friendly

The world is mobile now. When I check my email in the morning I use my phone, where I generally prefer to read my email. If something catches my interest I may choose to read it later on my computer. But most often I scan through my inbox in the micro pauses that come up during the day. Do you do the same?

Today the user experience is everything in all marketing.

Emails that are not designed and technically adapted for mobile will in all likelihood raise the bounce rate, that is, the reader opening a digital newsletter without interacting with it, exponentially, because of a poor user experience.

Since it is so easy to drop you in favour of the competitor, or drop the competitor in favour of you, based on who gives the better user experience, every one of your sends has to be fully adapted for mobile. Both in design and in technical build.

Always check the preview for different mobile screens and computer screens, and for text only (not HTML), in your email tool before you press "Send".

Using impersonal subject lines

Nobody will ever act on an unopened email, and what is on the subject line can either carry a whole email campaign or sink it. Open rate is the KPI that tells you how well you are doing.

Subject lines that are generic, impersonal and without emotion will be swallowed entirely by all the other email sitting in your recipient's inbox, and with that only add to the noise.

The solution is to personalise subject lines with a name or with specific areas of interest, done with judgement so that it is not overused. To be able to do that, a first name has to have been registered (easy) and information about interests has to have been collected in accordance with GDPR (harder, but far from impossible) and then used through segmentation of the recipient list when you send.

Further solutions can be to use emojis to stand out visually from the crowd. Sometimes it can be as simple as noting the season, the largest congress that has just taken place, or asking a question that is relevant to the recipient, in order to raise the open rate.

Think about what the newsletter's key take-away is and combine that with the above. Experiment with different variants and then keep following how open rate develops in your send statistics, so you can optimise your campaigns.

Sending out newsletters with poor design

There are more aspects to designing a digital newsletter than adapting it for mobile. When studies say it takes 0.1 seconds to form an impression of what a person is like, and even faster, 50 milliseconds (0.05 seconds), to form a view of a website that decides whether the visitor stays or not, good visual design is quite simply incredibly important. [2]

Looking quickly over them, most of the newsletters I open today, from various industries, are really dull. They are rarely personalised or show any sign of segmentation, and it is not unusual for them to have a design that looks 15 to 20 years old. These thoughtless newsletters sink the user experience and the perception of a brand like a stone.

Well aware that in the pharmaceutical industry a template for digital sends often comes from a global or regional head office, is not of a particularly high standard in terms of design, and unfortunately is a template that has to be used, perhaps there is some room for, say, campaign sends that challenge in a positive direction with a modern and fresh feel? And that of course, broadly, stay inside the frame of the visual guide.

In the section "Trends 2020 in email marketing" there are some examples of how you can use new functionality to improve your sends.

Ignoring the statistics

Happily, more and more people are starting to focus on the statistics that digital marketing provides, and consequently on the statistics in email marketing too. Every effort should ideally be evaluated on cost against impact, figures that are then reported upwards in the organisation.

But it is far from everyone who examines their own initiatives by going through the data that exists with the aim of optimising. Lack of time is often the most common reason, which is not hard to understand in today's world, but which is still in a way hard to take in.

Fundamentally we all want to do a really good job and feel pride in our craft as marketers. An analysis of the statistics helps give you the answers you need, and optimisation can follow from them.

Through analysis you can break down the behaviour of your email recipients and show, among other things, how many opened the newsletter, where in the content and how they interacted, which email client they used, which day and time of day most of the sends were opened, and so on.

Analysing and acting on your measurements leads to better results.

Those are the things you absolutely should stop doing. There is quite simply no room for that kind of mistake, that is, not improving from data, in today's competition for the reader's attention. Missing that step essentially only means you become one more of the companies that has not done its homework and so adds to the pressure in the inbox, something very few people appreciate.

When you send email to the people who have deliberately given you permission to communicate directly with them, something that has probably happened because you have done so much that is good in other channels and built up trust there, make the most of it.

It is always the recipient who should be at the centre, and that is important to keep in mind at all times. Send things that are essentially only of value to the recipient, sprinkled with a little of what you want to communicate. Then you get a really good balance that the recipient appreciates. And after that, follow the trends that apply in 2020 and onwards.

Trends 2020 in email marketing

There is a great deal of information about which trends now apply in email marketing and it is not always easy to sift out what is actually relevant. But a summary of some of the things that come up again and again is the following:

Minimalist design

Make it easy for the reader (and for yourself) by sometimes having only one message per send, where the focus sits somewhere between what is of interest to the recipient and what you want to say. One example is the following send from the fictional company My Company:

It is obvious what I am expected to do when I open the newsletter, buy clothes for men. It notes the season and their seasonal products with cheerful colours.

It is also minimalist in the sense that it loads very fast, on mobile too, and is fully adapted for mobile.

What would a corresponding send look like if it were focused on an online presentation by a key opinion leader in a therapy area that is relevant to the recipient?

Hyper-personalisation

In the list of things that should stop, there is the sending of digital newsletters of the "one-size-fits-all" mass mailing kind. The extension of that call in a positive direction is personalisation, with a first name in the subject line as one example. Hyper-personalisation takes this a step further and uses, among other things, AI to tailor sends to the individual, based on every measurement available for that individual.

Searches, choice of interaction and with what content, time spent on a search, product, service or web page, which format is preferred such as text, video or podcast, time of day and day of the week are some examples of data and measurements that can be used.

The digital infrastructure needed for this kind of data collection and adaptation of communication is very extensive and is most often used in e-commerce. That puts hyper-personalisation quite far from the conditions and the focus of the pharmaceutical industry, and I have not heard of any example where it is used. Perhaps you have?

But again, it is companies like Amazon, Spotify, Google and other giants we interact with daily that set the standard. And so everything you send out should hold a high standard, given the conditions you work under, in order to convey solid quality.

Which gives impersonal, unsegmented mass sends another kick.

"Mobile-first"

To continue on the track of "positive extension of an example from the list of things you should stop doing", here comes "mobile first", that is, newsletters that are designed to look good on mobile in the first instance.

It is not only me who opens email on my phone when the chance comes up, 61 percent of all email sends are opened and read on a mobile [3] and as many as 79 percent of mobile users have made a purchase through their phone. [4] With statistics like that it pays to design for mobile first, which can mean a design where the whole window on a smartphone is covered by a single unified graphic element, a little descriptive text and a "button", a call to action, in a contrasting colour whose only purpose is to make the reader act, through colour and wording.

Think about how this could be used by you. Perhaps you should try making the next digital send with an invitation to an event "mobile first". Test it and compare with earlier sends of the same kind.

Video content

There is no doubt that video has grown in popularity in recent years. With cheaper technology the format becomes available to the many, something that has among other things paved the way for a whole generation of YouTubers.

What we appreciate about video is the closeness it gives. We see and can experience a situation almost as if we were there. It becomes authentic and credible.

As I write this at the beginning of May we have just finished a webinar series in life science broadcast live across the whole world, three broadcast times over one day per webinar in order to cover all time zones. The target group was HCPs, and when we were done we could sum up that around 22,000 unique viewers took part in the content, and the feedback from the series is very positive. What was above all raised again and again was the clarity with which the information was conveyed and the value of being able to get answers to questions immediately during the broadcast. Another result from the webinar series is that afterwards viewers sought out the sales reps to get hold of something they had found valuable during the webinar. This was the first time in the company's history that this kind of contact seeking from the customer had happened on such a scale.

A figure from 2018 says that 90 percent of consumers consider video valuable as a basis for a purchasing decision. [5]

With the relatively new technology AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) it is now possible to, among other things, put films into a digital newsletter. This is what a send from the fictional company My Company can look like:

Think about how you can use video embedded in an email send as part of your digital marketing. Perhaps one way is to use a key opinion leader in a short film to drive traffic to an online training, a quiz or a registration page for an event. Another option can be to simply give the reader short feedback in video format from an earlier training you ran, as a teaser ahead of round two of the same training when you are about to run it again.

Brand storytelling

Authenticity, CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility), openness, closeness. All are slogans in an era of brand marketing. We have to some extent tired of over-polished and staged advertising and instead appreciate more down-to-earth communication.

That said, it is probably time to humanise your brand through the power of storytelling so that you can capture your subscribers and engage them. Stories have a much greater ability, according to some data 22 times greater ability, to stick in our memory compared with facts. [6]

Through email marketing you can take those of your subscribers who have shown interest behind the scenes, show them the people behind the company name and at the same time give them something that benefits them in their daily work.

What would that kind of series of sends look like at your company? Would it be in video format?

In closing

This article began by establishing that email marketing is not dead, and that the reason positive, business driving results fail to appear is probably an outdated strategy and implementation.

At a pharmaceutical company I was at previously the open rate on email sends was around 60 percent, and only the other day I heard about another pharmaceutical company where the open rate on sends to doctors was as high as 70 percent. Those are good figures to aim for.

What has died, or rather should have died long ago, is newsletters that suffer from one or several of the mistakes listed at the start of the article, with long blocks of text pasted into an old template with no clear reason for why the send was made or what the reader should act on.

In the same way that a company cannot "afford" to have a website simply in order to have a website, it has to drive business, that same company cannot afford to abuse the trust it has been given by sending out poor digital newsletters with no clearly defined goal.

As mentioned earlier, an email address is a direct communication channel to one of your customers. It is hard to get, very easy to lose, and for as long as you get to borrow it, it is one of your most cost-effective communication channels of all. Look after it carefully.

Finally I want to add an observation of my own about AMP and how you can use AMP in digital newsletters beyond putting in a video. Among other things you can put in multiple choice questions, something that can be used to gather information directly in the newsletter. This is very good for getting in the information you need for better segmentation of your recipient lists, and with that creating the conditions for sends that will certainly improve your statistics on all fronts.

Hoping that the article has given you one or two valuable insights into how to succeed with modern email marketing, I want to wish you a pleasant summer.

Stay well, you and those close to you, and we will meet again in a future issue of Pharma Industry.

All the best,

Fredrik Holmboe

Digital strategist

fredrik@dualia.se

References

https://litmus.com/ebooks/state-of-email
https://cxl.com/blog/first-impressions-matter-the-importance-of-great-visual-design/
https://knowledgebase.constantcontact.com/articles/knowledgebase/5409-average-industry-rates?lang=en_US
https://www.outerboxdesign.com/web-design-articles/mobile-ecommerce-statistics
https://www.renderforest.com/blog/video-marketing-statistics
https://womensleadership.stanford.edu/stories