We’ve all heard it. Email marketing is dead, apparently. Someone trots this line out every January, usually while promoting whatever channel happens to be fashionable that quarter. Too many emails, nobody reads them, the whole medium has had its day. Or so the argument goes.
Except it keeps working. In the DMA’s 2026 Marketer Email Tracker, marketers estimated a return of £40.96 for every £1 spent on email, up from £38.33 in 2021, although the DMA notes that this is a decline once inflation is taken into account. The figure comes from a survey of 250 marketers, so it reflects their own estimates, and it cannot be compared like for like with paid search or social media. Email can be a valuable channel for both acquiring and retaining customers when the list, message and measurement are sound.
At AIWIZ, we build email marketing strategies for businesses across Manchester, Leeds and the wider UK. We’re not interested in churning out newsletters that nobody asked for. We build systems that actually bring money in. Below, we look at the evidence and practical choices that matter for UK email programmes in 2026, and where the common pitfalls still are.
Email marketing in 2026: what the data actually shows
The Radicati Group’s December 2024 forecast puts email users worldwide at about 4.73 billion in 2026 and 4.85 billion in 2027. Big numbers, but reach on its own is a vanity metric. What matters more is how the economics change when email is run properly.
The stat that sticks with us: in Omnisend’s 2026 report, automated emails made up 2% of sends but earned 30% of email revenue (2025 data from 150,000 brands). Klaviyo’s 2026 benchmarks, based on more than 183,000 Klaviyo customers, put flows at nearly 41% of email revenue from 5.3% of sends. Whichever you prefer, the ratio is absurd. A small fraction of your output does close to a third or more of the heavy lifting.
In Omnisend’s 2026 report, open rates rose for the fifth year running, to an average of 30.7% for its ecommerce brands’ campaigns in 2025, even as click rates fell. MailerLite’s benchmark across all industries sits higher, at 43.46%, the median for 3.6 million campaigns sent by its customers from December 2024 to November 2025; for ecommerce it is 32.67%. All these figures deserve a pinch of salt, though. Apple accounted for 76.56% of the more than 1.5 billion email opens Litmus tracked in September 2026, a total that includes opens affected by Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection (MPP). MPP downloads an email’s remote content in the background “regardless of whether you engage with the email”. That inflates open rates across the board. Nobody knows by exactly how much, but Omeda saw total open rates rise nearly 18 points, from 22.6% to 40.5%, in the six months after MPP arrived (2021 to 2022 data). Open rates are losing ground as a measure of success: in the DMA’s 2026 Marketer Email Tracker, 23% of marketers named opens as a key metric for judging whether email meets its objective, down from 31% in 2021. Click-through rates, conversion rates and revenue per email tell you far more about what’s actually happening.
How much more do automated emails earn per send?
The case for email automation isn’t theoretical. It’s mathematical.
Omnisend’s 2026 report shows automated emails earned US$2.87 per send in 2025, compared with US$0.18 for scheduled campaigns. That’s a 16x difference in revenue per message. Automated emails arrive at the moment they’re most relevant. A welcome email lands seconds after sign-up, when attention is at its peak. A cart recovery message appears while the purchase intent is still fresh. A re-engagement sequence fires before a lapsed customer forgets you entirely.
Timing, not volume, is what separates email programmes that generate real revenue from those that simply generate noise.
There are five essential email automations that every programme should have running. The welcome series comes first, both in priority and in the customer journey. It sets the tone, builds some trust, and nudges towards that initial purchase. Cart recovery is where the money is most visible. Omnisend puts the open rate for its users’ abandoned cart emails at 35.75% in 2025, and the revenue these emails claw back is often surprising. After someone buys, a post-purchase sequence keeps the relationship warm through review requests, cross-sells and repeat order prompts. Then there’s re-engagement, which targets subscribers who’ve gone quiet before they disappear for good. Finally, a nurture sequence does the slower work of moving prospects from ‘mildly interested’ to ‘ready to buy’ over a series of touchpoints.
If your business has none of these running, start with the welcome series. It’s the quickest to get live, and in Omnisend’s 2026 report welcome and abandoned cart emails together drove 76% of the orders that came from automations (2025 data).
Email list segmentation: why targeted campaigns are worth testing
We still see businesses sending the same email to every contact on their list. It’s baffling, frankly. It doesn’t work. Your subscribers aren’t one homogenous group and they don’t respond well to being treated like one.
A 760% revenue increase from segmented campaigns is widely quoted, but its origin is unclear: Campaign Monitor’s segmentation guide credits it to the DMA with no year or study, and a Campaign Monitor blog post calls it “our research”. The direction holds up in better-documented data. In Mailchimp’s segmentation study of about 11,000 campaigns (updated 1 February 2017), segmented sends got 14.31% more opens and 100.95% more clicks than the same senders’ unsegmented campaigns. Sales showed a wider gap: Mailchimp’s analysis of campaigns from the second half of 2016 found that ecommerce segments outperformed campaigns with no segments by “almost 3 times as many sales per subscriber”.
You don’t need a PhD in data science to segment well, either. The data is usually already there, sitting in your CRM or email platform, unused. Look at what people click on and browse. Look at whether they’ve bought before, and how recently. Work out who’s genuinely engaged and who’s just sitting on the list doing nothing. Those three groupings give you a useful starting point for testing against a blanket send.
Someone who placed an order last Tuesday has completely different needs from a subscriber who signed up six months ago and never opened a thing. Send them both the same generic campaign and you’re practically asking one of them to hit unsubscribe.
AI and email personalisation: what’s working in 2026
AI tools can now draft copy, suggest subject lines and choose send times. How much they add depends on your list, so judge them by the results of your own tests.
For personalisation, compare revenue from a test group with a comparable control group before you roll it out more widely. Subject lines are an easy place to start: use AI to draft alternatives and test them against your existing copy. Phrasee’s subject line guide recommends varied language and multivariate testing. Send-time optimisation is the other candidate. Some tools predict when each subscriber is likely to engage, and in a case study with one customer, Seventh Sense reported 20.4% more opens across three split tests of identical content. You don’t have to rewrite the email, although setup and monitoring still take work.
Klaviyo, Mailchimp and HubSpot all now build AI into their email tools, from copywriting to send-time prediction. But the technology alone doesn’t produce results. The advantage comes from how well it’s integrated into a broader email marketing strategy: clean data in, sensible segmentation, proper testing, human oversight on brand voice. A dodgy list with poor segmentation isn’t going to be rescued by a better subject line tool, no matter how sophisticated it is.
What separates a good email programme from a mediocre one
After years of building and auditing email programmes for clients, the patterns are predictable. The ones pulling strong numbers from email aren’t doing anything exotic. Clean lists, for a start, built on proper permissions rather than scraped contacts or purchased databases. Welcome journeys that run over several emails rather than a single ‘cheers for subscribing’ message. Automation flows that fire based on what a customer has actually done, not just a calendar schedule. Ongoing testing is a constant as well, and not only on subject lines. The best programmes test send times, content layout and calls to action with equal rigour. Mobile-first design is standard. Revenue tracking is non-negotiable.
What you won’t find in these programmes is volume for its own sake. Sending more emails to an unsegmented list isn’t a strategy. It’s a deliverability risk.
Email deliverability, UK GDPR and the mistakes that kill performance
Most underperforming email programmes fail for predictable reasons.
The first is treating automation as a one-off project. Flows need regular review. Content goes stale. Offers change. Customer expectations shift. An abandoned cart sequence built eighteen months ago and never touched since is almost certainly underperforming.
The second is ignoring email deliverability. SPF, DKIM and DMARC authentication stopped being a recommendation a while ago. Gmail and Yahoo have required all three from bulk senders since February 2024, and Outlook.com has required them from domains sending more than 5,000 emails a day to Outlook.com addresses since 5 May 2025. Get this wrong and your emails can land in spam or junk, or be rejected outright. It doesn’t matter how good the copy is if nobody sees it.
UK businesses also need to remember that UK GDPR and the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations (PECR) still apply. Under the ICO’s email marketing guidance, marketing emails to individuals, including sole traders, need consent unless a soft opt-in applies, and emails to company addresses can go without consent, as long as you don’t hide your identity and you give a valid opt-out address. UK GDPR still applies to a named business contact’s details, though. The ICO’s business-to-business guidance says you need a lawful basis for using them and must tell the person you plan to send them marketing. Where PECR doesn’t require consent, that basis is often legitimate interests, and the ICO’s legitimate interests guidance says you must consider whether people would reasonably expect you to use their details that way. Anyone whose details you use for direct marketing also has an absolute right to object. Since 5 February 2026, the Data (Use and Access) Act 2025 has let the ICO fine breaches of PECR’s email marketing rules up to £17.5 million or 4% of worldwide annual turnover, whichever is higher.
The third is poor revenue attribution. If you can’t trace an email send back to an actual sale, you’re flying blind. Too many businesses end up chasing open rates as their primary metric, which tells you almost nothing useful. It’s the marketing equivalent of counting footfall past a shop window and calling it sales data.
The fourth is treating email as its own separate thing. It performs far better when it’s wired into the rest of your marketing: feeding off paid campaign data, reinforcing your content, complementing what you’re doing on social. Run it in a silo and you’ll always underperform.
Building an email marketing strategy for UK businesses in 2026
Email marketing isn’t outdated. It’s underused. The channel itself is in good shape, with better tooling and more sophisticated automation available to businesses of every size.
The opportunity for UK businesses isn’t in sending more. It’s in building email systems that deliver the right message to the right person at the right moment, automatically. The businesses doing this well aren’t working harder on email. They’re working more precisely.
At AIWIZ, we design and manage email marketing strategies built around performance, automation and measurable growth. If your list is ticking along without really producing, we should probably talk.
Frequently asked questions
What ROI can UK businesses expect from email marketing?
Marketers in the DMA’s 2026 Marketer Email Tracker estimated a return of £40.96 for every £1 spent on email, up from £38.33 in 2021. That is a survey benchmark from 250 marketers, so set your own: revenue attributed to email against its full cost, including platform, design and staff time.
Which email automations matter most?
Five: a welcome series, an abandoned cart sequence, a post-purchase flow, something to re-engage lapsed subscribers, and a nurture sequence for leads who aren’t ready to buy yet. In our experience, few businesses run all of them. Between them, these five flows are responsible for an outsized share of email revenue. In Omnisend’s 2026 report, automated emails earned 30% of email revenue from 2% of sends (2025 data), and Klaviyo’s benchmarks put flows at nearly 41% from 5.3% of sends.
Is the 760% segmentation revenue figure real?
Not as a documented figure. Campaign Monitor’s segmentation guide credits it to the DMA with no year or study, and a Campaign Monitor blog post calls it “our research”. Better-documented data does show segmentation paying off: in Mailchimp’s segmentation study (updated 1 February 2017), segmented campaigns got 14.31% more opens and roughly twice the clicks of the same senders’ unsegmented campaigns. In our experience, even basic segmentation based on purchase history or engagement level makes a noticeable difference to revenue. You don’t need to go overboard with micro-segments. Three or four well-chosen groupings will do more than most businesses expect.
What difference does AI make to email performance?
It depends on your audience and how well the tools are set up. AI can help with subject line testing and send-time optimisation. Phrasee’s subject line guide recommends testing varied language, and Seventh Sense reported 20.4% more opens across three split tests for one customer, but neither is an uplift you can count on. Test one change at a time against a comparable control group, and judge it on clicks, conversions and revenue as well as opens.
Why do some email campaigns never reach the inbox?
Usually a technical fault, in our experience, such as missing or broken SPF, DKIM or DMARC authentication. Gmail and Yahoo have required bulk senders to set up all three since February 2024, and Outlook.com has required the same from domains sending more than 5,000 emails a day to Outlook.com addresses since 5 May 2025. Miss any of those and your emails can land in spam or junk, or be rejected outright. In the UK, the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations (PECR) also require consent for marketing emails to individuals unless a soft opt-in applies, and UK GDPR governs the personal data behind your list.