Email has been declared dead roughly once a year for two decades. It keeps outperforming the channels that were supposed to replace it, and the reason is structural rather than sentimental: you own the list.
To achieve the returns email is capable of, though, you need more than a newsletter. You need segmentation, automation, and a genuine reason for someone to open the message. This article covers why the channel still works, what separates the campaigns that earn from the ones that get ignored, and what the law requires in the Netherlands.
Why the economics still favor email
Three things explain the persistent return.
You own the audience. Social platforms rent you access to your followers and adjust the rent whenever it suits them. Reach that was free five years ago now costs money. An email list is an asset that moves with you between providers.
The audience already chose you. A subscriber raised their hand. That is a fundamentally warmer starting point than an advertisement interrupting someone who was doing something else.
The marginal cost is close to zero. Sending to five thousand people costs roughly the same as sending to five hundred. Every improvement in relevance drops almost entirely to the bottom line.
The difference between a newsletter and an email program
Most businesses send the same message to everyone and call it email marketing. That is a newsletter, and it produces newsletter results.
An email program treats the list as what it is: people at different stages with different needs. The mechanics that make the difference are segmentation, automation, and personalization that goes beyond a first name.
Segmentation
You do not need dozens of segments. Four or five will change your results:
- Subscribers who have never bought
- Customers who bought once
- Repeat customers
- Customers who have gone quiet
- People who engage with every email but never convert
Each of these needs a different message. Sending a loyalty offer to someone who has never purchased is noise; sending a first-time discount to a loyal customer is money left on the table.
Automation
Automated sequences consistently outperform broadcast campaigns because they arrive when the recipient is already thinking about you. The four worth building first:
- Welcome sequence. Two or three emails after signup, while interest is at its peak. This is usually the highest-performing sequence a business owns.
- Abandoned cart or abandoned enquiry. A short, helpful nudge. For service businesses, the equivalent is following up on a quote that went quiet.
- Post-purchase. Delivery confirmation, care instructions, a review request timed sensibly after the product has actually arrived.
- Win-back. A message to customers who have not bought in a defined period, acknowledging the gap rather than pretending it does not exist.
Relevance beats personalization tokens
Putting someone’s first name in the subject line stopped being impressive years ago. Real personalization means the content differs based on what you know: what they browsed, what they bought, what stage they are at, what language they read.
Deliverability, the part nobody wants to think about
An email that lands in the spam folder converts at zero regardless of how well it is written. Deliverability is a technical discipline and it has tightened considerably.
- Authenticate your domain. SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records are now effectively mandatory. Gmail and Yahoo enforce them for bulk senders.
- Send from your own domain. Not a free address. This matters for both deliverability and credibility.
- Clean the list. Repeatedly emailing addresses that never open damages your sender reputation for everyone else.
- Make unsubscribing easy. A visible unsubscribe link protects you, because the alternative is people clicking “report spam”, which is far more damaging.
- Never buy a list. Beyond being unlawful in the EU, purchased lists destroy sender reputation quickly and often permanently.
What Dutch and EU law requires
Email marketing in the Netherlands sits under both the GDPR and the Telecommunicatiewet, and the rules are stricter than many businesses assume.
Consent must be explicit and separate. An unticked box, specific to marketing email. Adding someone to your list because they requested a quote or bought a product is not permitted on that basis alone.
The soft opt-in is narrow. You may email existing customers about similar products without separate consent, provided they were given the chance to refuse at the point of collection and in every message. It does not extend to unrelated offers or to people who merely enquired.
Keep proof. Record when and how each subscriber consented. If a complaint arrives, the burden of proof is yours.
Every message needs a real sender identity and a working one-click unsubscribe that takes effect promptly.
The metrics that actually matter
Open rate has become unreliable, because privacy features on Apple devices pre-load images and register opens that never happened. Treat it as a rough directional signal, not a measurement.
Focus instead on click rate, conversion rate per campaign, revenue per subscriber, list growth net of unsubscribes, and spam complaint rate. Revenue per subscriber is the number that tells you whether the program is working as a business activity rather than a communications exercise.
Frequently asked questions
How often should we send?
Consistency matters more than frequency. Monthly, sent reliably with something worth reading, beats weekly for three months and then silence. Start at a cadence you can genuinely sustain and increase only when the content justifies it.
Our list is small. Is it worth the effort?
Often more worth it, not less. A list of three hundred engaged customers who know you can outperform three thousand indifferent addresses. Small lists also let you segment meaningfully with very little effort.
Which platform should we use?
For most small and medium businesses the platform is not the constraint; the content and the segmentation are. Choose something that handles automation and segments without a specialist, integrates with your website and shop, and stores data within the EU. We help clients select and configure the right one rather than defaulting to whatever is most popular.
Can AI write our emails?
It can accelerate drafting and it is genuinely useful for producing variants to test. It is poor at knowing which customer needs which message, which is where the actual return comes from. Use it for production, not for strategy.
Where to start
If you are starting from nothing, do these in order: get consent collection right, build a welcome sequence, segment into buyers and non-buyers, and only then worry about a regular newsletter. Most of the return arrives in those first three steps.
We set up and run email programs as part of our digital marketing service, including the technical deliverability work and consent handling that determines whether any of it reaches an inbox. Talk to us if you want to know what your current list is actually worth.
