You're Ignoring Your Best Channel
The one thing you need to know in AI today | AI Ready CMO
We’re wrapping up 2025, and over the next few days, we’ll be sharing key insights from our year-end report: AI in Marketing 2025 Annual Report.
The report will be available for all subscribers to download in full for free from the 22nd of December.
While marketing teams obsessed over which AI chatbot to implement, email quietly remained the highest-ROI channel in the stack. Automated emails dramatically outperformed manual campaigns. Welcome sequences and abandoned cart flows converted at rates manual campaigns couldn’t touch.
AI-driven personalization lifted revenue and engagement substantially. Companies treating personalization as infrastructure rather than nice-to-have saw meaningfully higher revenue per recipient. Segmented campaigns crushed generic blasts by multiples, not percentages.
But there’s a problem most teams haven’t acknowledged yet.
The Deliverability Crisis Nobody’s Talking About
A significant portion of B2B emails never reached intended inboxes in 2025. Gmail enforced a maximum spam complaint rate of 0.3%, with one-click unsubscribe becoming mandatory. Inbox placement rates declined across major providers throughout the year.
Mailbox providers deployed AI-based filtering evaluating emails in context. Gmail’s algorithms analyzed user behavior—repeatedly ignoring messages automatically deprioritized future emails. Cold email deliverability standards became dramatically more stringent.
You can generate a thousand perfectly personalized emails with AI. If a meaningful percentage never reaches the inbox and another chunk lands in spam, your conversion math collapses before the recipient ever sees your subject line.
The channel printing money requires operational excellence most marketing teams don’t have. You’re optimizing open rates while your deliverability infrastructure crumbles underneath you.
Why Personalization Stopped Being Optional
The majority of consumers now only engage with personalized messaging. Nearly half of marketers planned to include automation in email programs by year-end. Companies using advanced personalization infrastructure generated substantially more revenue than those treating it as optional.
By 2026, email success depends on systematic personalization capabilities: AI-powered segmentation, dynamic content generation, predictive analytics, automated A/B testing, and lifecycle automation.
Most marketing teams treat personalization as adding a first name to the subject line. That’s not personalization. That’s mail merge with better technology.
Real personalization means different product recommendations based on browse history, different messaging cadence based on engagement patterns, different content blocks based on lifecycle stage, different send times based on individual open behavior.
In markets where billions of people use email and hundreds of billions of messages send daily, differentiation comes from demonstrable relevance at individual recipient level. Generic blasts don’t cut through anymore, no matter how well-written your AI-generated copy is.
The Infrastructure Gap
Here’s what separates teams getting massive revenue lifts from segmentation versus teams celebrating modest open rates:
Unified customer data - You can’t personalize without knowing who someone is across touchpoints. Most teams have fragmented data in five systems with no single customer view.
Behavioral triggering - Welcome sequences and cart abandonment are table stakes. Advanced teams trigger based on product views, content downloads, support tickets, pricing page visits, competitor research signals.
Dynamic content blocks - Every recipient gets a unique email composition based on their profile and behavior. This requires content libraries, templating systems, and rendering logic most teams don’t have.
Predictive send time optimization - AI determines when each individual is most likely to engage. Not “Tuesday at 10am for everyone.” Tuesday at 10am for this person, Wednesday at 2pm for that person.
Lifecycle orchestration - Automated sequences that adapt based on engagement. Opens trigger one path. Ignores trigger another. Clicks trigger a third. Most teams send linear sequences regardless of response.
Building this infrastructure takes months. Most marketing teams spend two weeks implementing an AI writing assistant and wonder why their email performance stays flat.
What Actually Wins in 2026
The strategic separation in 2026 won’t be between organizations using email versus not using email. Every organization uses email.
The separation will be between teams treating personalization as systematic infrastructure versus teams treating it as creative flourish.
You can use ChatGPT to write better subject lines. That’s a marginal improvement. You can build personalization infrastructure that delivers step-function increases in revenue from segmentation and automation. That’s systematic advantage.
Email remains the highest-ROI channel in your stack. But the operational requirements changed faster than most teams adapted. Deliverability standards tightened while personalization expectations surged. The combination means generic campaigns fail twice—once at delivery, once at engagement.
The teams entering 2026 with pristine data infrastructure, behavioral triggering, dynamic content systems, and lifecycle orchestration will keep printing money. The teams still celebrating “we implemented AI email subject line optimization” will keep wondering why their ROI numbers don’t match the case studies.
Your channel is profitable. Your infrastructure probably isn’t ready for what 2026 demands.
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We’re publishing our complete AI in Marketing 2025 Report on December 22nd.10 chapters analyzing what actually happened this year—including why most marketing automation initiatives failed and what the 6% who succeeded actually built differently.
Stay tuned. You’ll want to see what you missed.
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Apollo
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Blaze
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