Email marketing: why it remains the most powerful channel for CMOs
The big misunderstanding about email marketing.
At every marketing conference, you hear the same refrain:
“Email marketing is dead.”
And yet, it’s still the one that generates the most revenue.
In 2025, email marketing remains the channel with the best ROI across the digital mix.
According to the DMA (Data & Marketing Association), every euro invested in email generates an average of €36, far ahead of social networks or paid advertising (“Marketer Email Tracker” on dma.org.uk).
So why do so many marketers keep underusing this channel?
Because they often confuse mass email and intelligent email.
And that’s where everything is decided.
Email marketing isn’t dead: it has simply matured.
Email marketing hasn’t disappeared: it has evolved. It moved from mass broadcasting to targeted communication, from a one-way newsletter to a personalized conversation,
from a standard format to a data-driven experience.
Emailing is a dialogue channel, not a broadcasting channel.
It’s a direct, intimate, controlled medium—
without any algorithm deciding who sees your marketing message.
And in a world saturated with notifications, it remains the only channel truly chosen by the recipient.
One of our B2B clients, an industrial SME in Haute-Savoie, ran a simple test:
Same message, same audience.
The difference? The link of trust.
The effectiveness of email marketing: data doesn’t lie.
A few figures gathered at EMDay, the recognized email marketing event are enough to set the record straight:
- 4.6 billion email users worldwide (Statista),
- 90% of internet users check their inbox every day,
- and email generates three times more conversions than social networks.
The ROI of email marketing isn’t due to chance:
- It’s a low-cost channel (no ad bidding),
- easy to measure (open rate, clicks, conversions),
- and highly automatable.
At Webmecanik, our marketing automation clients often find that by automating their email follow-ups:
- they save up to 40% of time,
- while improving their conversion rate by 20 to 60%.
It’s simple: no other channel combines proximity, effectiveness, and profitability to this extent.
What changes for email marketing: personalization, automation, and AI.
The real revolution isn’t abandoning email, but reinventing it.
Personalize without invading
“Hello [First name]” is no longer enough.
Modern personalization means the right message, at the right time, based on the right behavior.
For example, a SaaS software company can send:
- a welcome email right after sign-up,
- an automated follow-up if the demo hasn’t been viewed,
- then a targeted offer after 7 days of inactivity.
Result: a smooth experience, perceived as useful, not intrusive.
This is where marketing automation comes into play.
Automate to create value
Automating isn’t “sending without thinking.” It’s defining smart marketing scenarios: nurturing, scoring, post-event follow-up, retention… And these scenarios work for you, continuously.
Marketing automation turns an email campaign plan into a growth machine.
A B2B consulting company set up a sequence of 4 automated emails via Webmecanik after each white paper download.
In 3 months, it generated +28% more sales meetings, with zero manual emails.
Artificial Intelligence: the marketer’s co-pilot
AI doesn’t replace email marketing—it strengthens it.
It helps you segment audiences more precisely, generate high-performing email subject lines, adapt content according to the profile, send the message at the moment the user opens their inbox, or make AB testing suggestions.
But the secret is the human + AI combination. AI can predict, suggest, and test.
Humans, meanwhile, understand context, nuance, and the relationship. And that’s what makes all the difference.
GDPR: a competitive and marketing advantage, not a constraint
For a long time, many people saw GDPR as an obstacle. In reality, it’s the complete opposite. It restored trust between brands and recipients.
When someone agrees to receive your emails, it’s a voluntary act. It gives you a privileged space—and you’re expected to deserve it. A GDPR-compliant email campaign is
- a healthy database,
- qualified contacts,
- and a much higher engagement rate.
ℹ️ At Webmecanik, we have always championed responsible, ethical, and sovereign email marketing—hosted in Europe and respectful of privacy.
Because sustainable performance is built first and foremost on trust.
The 5 best email practices that make the difference
So that email becomes your best performance channel, here are the principles we apply every day with our clients:
It’s often the simple actions, repeated with rigor as part of a routine, that make the difference.
Email: the central lever of modern B2B strategy.
In B2B, email remains the channel of choice for decision-makers:
- 78% of CMOs consider email their preferred channel for nurturing (Source: Litmus, 2025).
- 9 out of 10 buyers say they contacted a supplier after receiving a relevant email.
This channel, long perceived as “traditional,” is in fact the one that converts the most. And unlike social networks or sponsored campaigns, it belongs to you. No GAFAM intermediary, no dependence on an algorithm: just you, your contacts, and your message.
That’s why, in the age of generative AI and saturated networks, the most effective CMOs are returning to email as a pillar of their strategy—not to “do mass mailing,” but to build a lasting, measurable relationship.
Email, the marketing channel that never dies.
Email has gone through every digital revolution without ever losing its place. If it remains the most powerful channel, it’s because it rests on three things that technology will never replace: consent, trust, and relevance.
Today, with data, GDPR, AI, and automation, it has never been more modern. The future of marketing won’t be without email—it will be built with smarter, more useful, more empathetic emails.
That’s exactly what we stand for at Webmecanik: ethical, high-performing, sovereign email marketing—serving companies’ sustainable growth.
Stéphane Couleaud, Founder and ambassador of Webmecanik
