Why email marketing is dead: the myth versus the data

Why email marketing is dead is one of those claims that gets repeated so often it starts to feel true, without anyone actually checking. If you would rather have the real numbers for your own business than a hunch, you can book a free discovery call. Otherwise, here is the myth against the data.

TL;DR: Email marketing is not dead. Mailchimp’s own benchmark data, drawn from billions of sends, puts the average open rate at 35.63% and click rate at 2.62%. Litmus has measured a $36 to $42 return for every $1 spent for years, including a 38:1 figure as far back as 2018. The “dead” claim comes from how loud other channels feel, not from any actual decline in the numbers.

Why do people think email marketing is dead?

The claim usually comes from a feeling rather than a number: an overflowing personal inbox, a newer platform getting louder, or a specific business’s own list going quiet because nobody has emailed it properly in months. None of that is evidence the channel itself has stopped working, it is evidence that inboxes are crowded and that a badly run list performs badly, which was always true and has nothing to do with whether email marketing as a channel still delivers.

There is also a visibility problem working against email specifically. A social platform’s engagement is public: you can see the likes, the comments, the follower count climbing or falling in real time, so its ups and downs feel loud and current. Email’s numbers sit privately in a dashboard nobody outside your own business ever sees, so a channel that is quietly performing exactly as well as it did five years ago produces no public signal of being alive at all. Silence gets mistaken for decline surprisingly often, simply because nothing about a working email program is visible from the outside.

What the actual numbers say

Mailchimp’s own benchmark data, drawn from billions of emails sent through its platform, puts the average open rate across all industries at 35.63% and the average click rate at 2.62%. Those are not numbers a dying channel produces. Litmus, separately, has tracked the return on email marketing for years and states the industry average at $36 to $42 for every $1 spent, a figure that is not new either: Litmus measured a 38:1 return as far back as 2018, back when the channel was already considered mature. We go deeper on why that return has held steady rather than declined in is email marketing still effective, and on how it stacks up against other channels in is email marketing worth it.

Why the “dead” claim keeps coming back anyway

Every few years, a new channel gets loud enough that people start predicting whatever came before it is finished, and email has absorbed this prediction more than once, first from social media, more recently from newer platforms. It survives the prediction every time for the same structural reason: nobody can take your list away from you the way a platform can quietly change an algorithm and cut your reach overnight. A social following is rented attention. An email list is owned outright, and that ownership is precisely what a genuinely dying channel would not be able to offer.

Worth noticing too: the “email is dead” prediction has been made repeatedly for well over a decade at this point, by people predicting it would be replaced by whatever was newest at the time. Every one of those predictions has come and gone while email’s own measured numbers stayed roughly where they have always been. A claim that keeps getting made and keeps failing to come true is not a prediction anymore, it is closer to a tradition, and traditions are not evidence.

The list that feels dead is usually just poorly run

Where the feeling of “nobody opens these anymore” is actually true for a specific business, the cause is almost always neglect rather than the channel failing: a list that has not been emailed in months, a new subscriber who never received a proper welcome, or sends that only ever ask for something and never give anything worth opening an email for. Every one of those is fixable, and none of them is evidence that email marketing itself stopped working. What actually keeps a list feeling alive is what it is used for in the first place, which we break down in what is email marketing used for.

It is worth being honest about the diagnosis before assuming the fix. A list that has genuinely gone cold for a long stretch needs re-engaging carefully, not simply resuming full-volume sending overnight, since inbox providers watch how recipients respond to a sudden return and can penalize a list that reacts badly to it. That is a real, solvable problem with a known process behind it. It is a different problem entirely from the channel having stopped working, and treating the two as the same thing is how a fixable list gets blamed on an imaginary decline in email itself.

So, why email marketing is dead: the honest answer

Why email marketing is dead is a claim that survives on repetition, not on evidence. The measured numbers, a 35.63% open rate, a 2.62% click rate, and a return that has held between $36 and $42 per $1 for the better part of a decade, say the opposite. Where a specific list genuinely feels dead, the fix is almost always how it is being run, not abandoning the channel.

If your own list feels like it stopped working and you want an honest, evidence-based read on why rather than another guess, our email marketing work is exactly what we take off your plate. Book a free discovery call and we will look at what is actually happening in your numbers before recommending anything.