Is email marketing dead? Unpacking the latest trends in marketing for your SME

With 4.37 billion users worldwide, email persists as a core digital marketing channel. The question is, with the evolution of how businesses communicate with consumers, is email marketing still effective?

Almost every new communication app has claimed it will eliminate email. Slack, the most notorious of these claimants, marketed itself as the “email killer” but since the company was acquired by Salesforce in 2021 their approach has become more integrative and focuses on seamless collaboration as opposed to outright replacement. In other words, it seems Slack couldn’t beat email, so they joined them.

Cutting through the noise in 2025

One of the key trends that stands out from Native VML’s 2025 Tomorrow’s Commerce report is that “optichannel is the new omnichannel”. Omnichannel refers to your brand being visible on every available marketing platform, whereas optichannel is a more focused and strategic selection of channels that prioritises meaningful presence and optimises personalised customer journeys.

Essentially, consumers are running away from the always-on nature of chat, social media, and other sources of digital overload causing mental and emotional exhaustion or tech fatigue, and business leaders agree. In fact, 47% of those surveyed indicated that they have too many channels to manage effectively.

This is what’s driving the ‘Disconnect Economy’ where both individuals and businesses are reducing digital engagement in favour of offline, real-world activities, relationships, and mental wellbeing. Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) have a real opportunity to be on the right side of this trend if they focus on marketing channels that deliver the highest return on investment (ROI). Email marketing continues to dominate in this regard with businesses earning $36 (R662) for every $1 spent on email marketing in 2024. It doesn’t get any more cost effective than that.

Optimising email with AI and data-driven insights

At the end of the day, email remains a formidable channel of marketing because it is owned media – which means it doesn’t answer to an algorithm. However, businesses must evolve their strategies to keep up with changing consumer expectations.

The optichannel approach will allow SMEs to hyper-personalise their email marketing campaigns based on customer engagement. In fact, customers expect brand engagement to reflect their preferences and habits, and AI will be an invaluable tool to automate the right messaging at the appropriate time.

By using AI to create personalised email campaigns, businesses are empowered to analyse huge amounts of customer data to identify preferences, patterns and trends – a task that would historically take hours without AI. By accessing this data, businesses can truly approach customers and suppliers in a unique, personable way that is much more likely to land, and result in a sale or even a bolstered relationship. This level of personalisation AI offers for email marketing campaigns was previously unthinkable with traditional, generic ‘blast’ email approaches – which have been proven to not resonate with customers.

Businesses can adopt the optichannel approach by analysing performance data across different marketing channels, identifying the most effective ones, and continuously refining their strategies based on measurable engagement and conversion rates.

Leveraging consumer data and behavioural insights will be key to crafting highly targeted, personalised marketing campaigns, ensuring businesses connect with customers on the right channels at the right time for maximum impact. Ultimately, email isn’t just surviving – it’s evolving into a more intelligent, engaging, and profitable marketing tool for SMEs in 2025.

Jeremy Lang is the Managing Director at Business Partners Limited.

*** The views expressed here do not necessarily represent those of Independent Media or IOL.

BUSINESS REPORT