Don’t underestimate email marketing in 2026.

By Randy Greene
Director, CRM Strategy

Leslie O’Neal
Director, CRM Strategy

“What is it that you do again?” my mom asked me. “I was trying to tell my cousin, and I couldn’t remember.”

I took a deep, knowing breath. “I’m in email marketing, Mom.”

Immediately, her eyes glazed over, just like every other time I’d told her about my career. A career I love, by the way.

“Oh, that’s right,” she said with a shrug. “Anyways, did I tell you about your Uncle Terry and his new dog?”

The marketing community sometimes views email in the same way: as low-hanging fruit, a boring and outdated tool. But the truth is that email is—as it’s always been—one of the most innovative and impactful brand channels out there.

Not buying it? Let’s start from the beginning.

Email and the space race.

The year 1971 was filled with world-changing moments: John Lennon released “Imagine,” Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange debuted, Alan Shepard hit the first golf ball on the moon and, most important of all (as if we even need to remind you of this one), the world’s first email was sent. 

The first spam email was sent just a few years later in 1978. 

And even though it was only sent to around 400 people, it reportedly earned $13 million in sales. That’s revenue of $32,500 per recipient.

That moment signaled the beginning of a powerful, complicated relationship between technology, marketers, and the inbox.

Since then, not only has an email been sent from space (that was in 1991!), but the entire email ecosystem has moved steadily toward tighter security, better experiences, and stronger trust.

• Email security protocols like SPF, DKIM, and DMARC made it more difficult for bad actors to impersonate legitimate brands, protecting people from attacks like phishing and spoofing.
• Gmail’s inbox tabs organized the user interface around user intent, creating distinct workspaces for promotions, social media, and more to help people find the brand messages they want at exactly the time they want it. Now these tabs have been adopted by most major inbox providers.
• Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection helped users reclaim their data by changing how brands could collect it. By masking inbox IP addresses, Apple blocked tracking pixels and forced brands to shift away from vanity metrics and toward metrics that measured trust, loyalty, and meaningful engagement.

Brand Takeaway: In email marketing, trust is the baseline. Successful marketers focus on building trust and credibility because anything else gets filtered out.

Trust is earned. Not assumed.

At every step of this evolution, email marketers have adapted to new technologies and innovations because creating a trust-based relationship with subscribers is intrinsic to email marketing.

• Positive Consumer Experience → Positive Brand Relationship → Increased Purchase Behavior

That trust is critical not just for the brands we represent, but also for the email ecosystem as a whole. Better standards and regulations help all of us.  

This is why successful email marketers…

• Embraced verification protocols that gave subscribers confidence.
• Trained audiences to expect us in the promo tab.
• Shifted engagement strategies to honor privacy expectations.

When trust in email grows, trust in brands grows with it.

The new standard: AI and hyperpersonalization.

Headlines today read a little differently than they did in 1971.

Now we carry supercomputers in our pockets, the internet connects us with more than five billion people worldwide, and billionaires casually take trips to space with their celebrity crushes for leisure.

Oh, and have you noticed that AI is taking over everything?

With the rise of generative and predictive AI, we email marketers find ourselves in this same, familiar pattern, but with new and different applications.

• New tech emerges.
• Email inbox providers evolve.
• Marketers adapt.
• People benefit from a smarter email channel.

The technological leap now is that we can achieve personalization at scale. AI lets marketers create and deliver dynamic, individualized experiences that go way beyond basic segmentation.

Impersonal batch-and-blast campaigns are increasingly getting filtered out as unwelcome noise. Hypersegmentation powered by zero- and first-party data is already defining the next era of email marketing.

Consumers already expect content to make use of all the signals contained within an organization’s connected data universe, whether it’s the products they’ve purchased, the items they’ve browsed online, or the types of content they’ve opted into in the app. 

Users not only want emails tailored to their interests and behaviors – they expect it.

But this innovation also opens the floodgates.

More campaigns. More noise. More pressure on brands to be relevant… or be ignored.

The new, shiny acronym: AIO (AI Overviews).

In response to the noise, inbox providers are creating tools to help consumers filter through it all.

Microsoft, Yahoo, and Apple, for example, have begun to use AI to create summaries at the top of emails to help readers understand the email’s key message at a glance.

Sometimes, unfortunately, those summaries are wrong, misleading, or completely misconstrue the purpose of the email.

This means brands need to design and build emails differently. We have to:

• Craft them for both humans and algorithms.
• Emphasize the best personalized details for each subscriber.
• Rebalance branded visuals with machine-readable content.
• Learn how AI scans and interprets content, and make that work for our messaging, not against it.

The underdog that keeps winning.

Email always has been and always will be a leader among digital marketing channels because it delivers results.

In the Litmus 2025 “State of Email” report, they noted that companies that measure ROI in their email programs usually see results from 10:1 to 36:1, topping out at around 50:1 for companies that send email daily using sophisticated segmentation and personalization.

In contrast, marketing via paid social typically yields an ROI of 5:1, meaning that email delivers at least twice as well as paid social, and up to 10x better.

So as the industry continues to change, the next step in the evolution of email marketing is ours to own, and the continuing ROI that comes from it is yours to claim.

The key is to drive it in a way that centers your consumers, their experiences and the trust they have in your brand.

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Looking for help taking your email marketing program to the next level? Let’s talk. Reach out to Pat LaCroix, EVP, Media + Growth, at placroix@missiononemedia.com to find out how MissionOne Media can help.