The real reason so many teams are struggling with email marketing

I was talking to a B2B marketer recently who admitted her email campaigns weren’t pulling their weight.

They took too much time to build, engagement was flat, and — worst of all — they weren’t booking meetings. Meanwhile, her team’s LinkedIn outreach and event follow-ups were filling pipeline much faster.

She’s not alone. Many B2B marketers are seeing the same thing: bloated open rates, falling engagement and little to show for all the effort. Yet, others have the opposite experience. One client’s post-conference email follow-up landed qualified interest from Fortune 500 companies — a huge win.

What’s going on here? Why are some teams crushing it with email while others feel like it’s no longer the ride-or-die channel it used to be?

I’ve had a few people DM me about this lately, so I pulled together some observations on what’s working in 2025 — and what’s holding teams back.

Hot take: Email marketing is not a one-person job

As Matthew Gal pointed out in a recent LinkedIn post, for email marketing to be successful, you need:

• Strategy.
• Flow creation and automation setup.
• Content and copywriting.
• Design.
• List segmentation.
• Deliverability management.
• A/B testing.
• Data analysis.

That’s not even getting into optimization, list hygiene, personalization or all the other quirky data-related tasks like enrichment, de-duping, etc.

The reality is that marketers today are responsible for managing growth across multiple channels — and every channel comes with its own regulations, use cases, challenges and problems. If you slash your marketing team but expect email to pull its weight in addition to LinkedIn, Google, cold outreach, etc., your results will reflect the resources provided.

If email marketing has worked in the past and you want it to continue working, invest accordingly. The teams I see getting results are doing this. Obviously, it’s not the only indicator of success, but it’s a significant one.

Strategy before everything 

Maybe that seems obvious, but I’ve worked with a few companies that treated email marketing strategy like an afterthought — or misused and abused the channel entirely.

Sales and marketing weren’t aligned on the purpose of email or what defined a qualified lead. Marketing teams used HubSpot to blast cold emails when they should have been using Instantly. The list goes on.

And when asked about strategy, the answers were usually a mix of filling pipeline and booking meetings. But these are not strategies, they’re outcomes.

Your strategy is how you plan to achieve those outcomes, which also requires investment.

• Are you mixing outbound and inbound? 
• Are you accounting for your ICP’s states of awareness, levels of market sophistication and email use cases?
• Are you strategically gathering and enriching data? 
• Are you crafting quality messaging, offers and copy?
• Are you optimizing what works — and killing what doesn’t?

Dig deeper: ‘They did it, so we should too’ isn’t an email strategy

KPIs need to connect with business outcomes

Again, this sounds obvious. But I bring it up because many email marketing metrics teams track and optimize are vanity metrics.

• Open rates? There’s much debate on their value, but they tend to be so inflated by ESPs, privacy protocols and bot opens that they’re equivalent to the follower counts on social media — negligible.
• Click-throughs? These have a fair share of bot problems, too. They’re still valuable, though — as long as you filter bot activity.
• Unsubscribes? An excellent metric for determining what’s NOT working and a passive list hygiene tool. Don’t fear these. Unsubscribes are good. If someone unsubscribes, they weren’t going to buy anyway.
• Bounce rates? Still valid. Still worth studying and understanding, because this is tied to your deliverability and reputation.

What really matters now is:

• Business results. Many clients I’ve talked to are less interested in how many clicks their emails get and more interested in WHO is reading them and responding. If your emails aren’t driving the 50% opens and 8% CTRs they used to, but they are getting qualified responses and meetings, then you’re doing something right.
• Replies. Getting valid responses to your emails isn’t just good for deliverability — it’s an excellent opportunity to build a 1:1 relationship with someone. Don’t ignore these.

Engagement metrics are noteworthy for gauging the health of your list and campaign engagement. Still, they’re less important than monitoring who you’re reaching and the business objectives you’re trying to achieve.

Email doesn’t exist in a vacuum

Absolutely, build your list. Give visitors plenty of opportunities to opt in, but don’t be afraid to connect with them on other channels.

Tyler Cook, the founder of HyperMedia Marketing, invites new subscribers to connect with him on LinkedIn in the second or third email of his welcome flow because he knows that emails are just one valuable touch point of many.

Eddie Shleyner frequently shares LinkedIn posts and discusses his email A/B tests on LinkedIn.

The more opportunities you give subscribers to connect with you, the more quickly you’ll build relationships. (This helps with retention, too, by the way.)

Dig deeper: The most underrated B2B channel? Your newsletter

Personalize your emails 

Personalizing doesn’t mean using merge tags in subject lines or body copy. It means prioritizing relevance in every message you send. That means:

Personalizing messages and content

Use the data in your CRM to send specific, hyper-relevant messages to contacts based on their industry, sub-industry, company growth stage, role and seniority, deal stage, etc.

This may seem overwhelming, but more and more AI tools are making this kind of personalization and relevance at scale possible in ways you could only dream of in 2021. Ask me how I know.

Personalizing senders

There are a couple of ways to do this. 

• Set up BIMI so your branding appears in the inbox. 
• Send emails “from” real team members’ email addresses and set up forwarding so replies get sent to the right inboxes. This way, your team members’ faces appear in the inbox next to human names. 

The latter is best for:

• Deliverability (ESPs are less likely to flag [email protected] than [email protected]).
• Humanizing the inbox. 
• Standing out from the deluge of other emails. 

Bonus points if your sender is relevant to the contact’s deal or life stage.

Personalizing send times

Tyler Cook has a great post on the psychology of the inbox. You can lift engagement by sending emails at relevant times, but you must understand how and when your target audience uses email.

Dig deeper: B2B email marketing: 3 strategies for advanced personalization

From flat engagement to real pipeline: Rethinking B2B email

Personalization gets a bad rap, so don’t focus on it as a tactic. Focus on relevance as a strategy and use personalization tactics to send more relevant messages at the correct times.