What’s Happening in Email Marketing? -40% in Open Rates!

Email marketing remains an important tool for many companies. It is still one of the most effective ways to establish and maintain contact with customers. Few companies can afford their own mobile app, so for most, contact via email is the only solution.

Does Email Marketing Still Work in the Age of AI?

If we look at the statistics for cold emails, open rates have dropped by 40% over the past 6 months (10’25-03’26). Inboxes are filled with unwanted messages not tailored to the recipient. AI-generated content generates zero (literally: zero) engagement.

You might say, well, that doesn’t concern me. I don’t send unwanted messages. My database consists of subscribers who signed up for the newsletter themselves because we offered a 5% discount on their first purchase. Well, not exactly.

Firstly, an overloaded inbox filled with GPT-generated emails for your subscriber means less attention to other emails. They get lost in the mass of mail and are almost automatically deleted along with other emails.

Secondly, a poor email from a company I subscribed to ends up in the same category as super weak emails generated by AI. Poor means not understanding needs, not responding to interests. In one word – non-personalized.

How to Stand Out in the Flood of Weak AI-Generated Emails?

Personalization and tailored content are key strategies to stand out in a crowded user inbox. However, personalization should be distinguished from personalization. Personalization is not greeting the user with their name. This part can essentially be skipped. Personalization in almost the third decade of the 21st century is individually tailoring the offer for each recipient. Traditional segmentation (demographics, purchase history, RFM) increasingly fails to keep up with rapidly changing customer preferences.

So how to personalize? The key is audience segmentation. Unfortunately, the bad news is that the segmentation we know from marketing automation systems is no longer sufficient. Customer preferences in an e-commerce store change faster than the segmentation capabilities within the tool itself, and certainly faster than the ability to tailor content to those segments.

Marketing departments equipped with marketing automation tools cannot keep up with the strategy of “reach faster with individually tailored content.” Building and managing several segments plus maintaining communication is already a big challenge. Slicing the audience list into nano-segments is a gargantuan task, requiring a gargantuan team and a gargantuan budget. And thus, marketing automation tools end up as tools for sending emails with a few gimmicks that no one uses.

To succeed in email marketing, one must now prioritize personalization (to the level of nano-personalization), constantly refining tactics so that email campaigns resonate with customers and deliver results.

What the Hack is External Personalization Layer in E-mail Marketing?

At first glance, this may seem difficult to implement. Theoretically, one would need to set up webhooks/streaming events, set up a recommendation API, implement some solution for handling dynamic blocks and feature flags. A simpler solution is to set up an external personalization layer (microservice) that receives signals and decides which modules to insert — facilitating iterations independently of the MA tool’s UI.

An external personalization layer is an independent service outside the marketing automation (MA) tool that:

• collects user signals in real-time,
• calculates personalization attributes and decisions (propensity, recommendations, module selection),
• returns the result in the form of instructions (e.g., which content blocks to insert) for the sending system or email template API.

The advantage of this solution is separating personalization logic from the MA interface, allowing for faster iterations and deployments. Such a tool is also a central place for predictive models, rules, and fallbacks. It allows for versioning of rules (and not only rules) and A/B tests independently of MA.

How to Implement Nano-Segmentation in Email Marketing?

In Europe, the provider of microservice solutions for marketing automation systems is the Polish company Quarticon. In their solution, they went even further – the system returns results not in the form of instructions that need to be integrated with the marketing automation system, but in the form of ready-made product blocks (images), which are very easy to embed in the email content (as it is in the case with images). This way, maximum simplicity of implementation was achieved.

How does Quarticon’s microservice for nano-personalization of emails generally work? You want to have a product block with 6 products tailored for each user – you add the code of 6 images (and links) to your email and send it. You don’t do any segmentation, no product selection. You want to send a spring offer in a month – you change “Winter Offer” to “Spring Offer” in the email and send it. You don’t touch the image part at all, you don’t define products.

Behind this solution is the entire decision-making layer – ML models, event storage, feature calculation, content mapping (not just products), or experiment management. All of this is delivered “in a package.” Without complicated infrastructure, you can achieve a level of offer personalization in emails that the biggest players haven’t achieved with their systems!

Summary

The future of email marketing in a highly competitive landscape relies on personalized content (and even nano-personalized) to stand out in crowded inboxes. In e-commerce, this is crucial and easily measurable – it increases open rates, click-through rates, conversions. It also applies to other industries – publishing (paid content), media, classifieds services, VOD services. Data and analytics are key in optimizing email marketing strategies, but they are not there to be pored over. Data from a month ago in e-commerce is already history. Everything happens here and now, in real-time.

If you want to learn more about the microservice for email marketing from Quarticon mentioned in the article, we provide a link to the page explaining how such an external personalization layer in email marketing works.

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