Nine in ten companies are still running email campaigns the same way they did a decade ago, according to new research from Portuguese marketing platform E-goi. Published April 20, E-goi's findings put a sharp number on a problem that email marketers have long suspected: the "spray-and-pray" model, blasting the same message to an entire database and hoping for results, is still the default for the vast majority of brands.
The timing matters because the email landscape has changed fundamentally since 2016. The tactics that once seemed acceptable now carry a real cost to deliverability, sender reputation, and revenue.
The Bot Problem Is Eating Your ROI
E-goi CEO Miguel Gonçalves frames the issue as a direct ROI question: if email marketing returned $44 for every $1 spent in 2016, what does that return look like today when up to 50% of a contact list may be made up of bots?
That question lands harder when you look at what the market currently reports. Email marketing still delivers an average return of $36 to $42 per dollar spent in 2026, outperforming paid search ($2), social advertising ($2.80), and display ads ($1.35). But that figure assumes you are reaching actual humans. With bot traffic accounting for over 42% of web activity in recent studies, failing to filter for human behavior will destroy your engagement metrics.
The practical consequence is that open rates, click rates, and engagement data become fiction when bots inflate them. Click-through rates and revenue per recipient have replaced open rates as the primary indicators of success, largely due to privacy updates that have made open tracking unreliable. Brands still optimizing for open rates in 2026 are navigating with a broken compass.
The average email list degrades by 22% every year, and removing inactive subscribers who have not clicked in 90 days can improve deliverability by roughly 15% almost overnight. Most companies running spray-and-pray campaigns are not doing this.
What "Communicating Like It's 2016" Actually Costs
The structural problem goes beyond list hygiene. One in five commercial emails fails to reach the inbox because of poor domain health. Sending volume without authentication infrastructure is no longer a minor oversight; it is a direct cause of inbox invisibility.
The 45-percentage-point inbox placement gap between authenticated and unauthenticated senders represents the single largest deliverability lever available to most organizations. If you have not implemented SPF, DKIM, and DMARC, you are losing nearly half your email traffic before it reaches the inbox.
E-goi's Head of Innovation and Research, Daniel Alves, put it plainly in the report. With nearly half of all web traffic generated by bots and spam filters growing more aggressive, brands that do not update their sending infrastructure face digital invisibility. As Alves stated, "communicating in 2026 is not about who shouts loudest, but about who is most relevant in the context of each customer."
Automation Is the Gap Between Surviving and Scaling
The data on automation makes a compelling case for moving away from broadcast-style campaigns. Automated emails accounted for just 2% of email sends in recent Omnisend data but drove 30% of revenue, earning 16 times more per send than scheduled campaigns.
AI adoption in email marketing has passed the 60% mark among marketers, and campaigns powered by AI are driving roughly 41% higher revenue than traditional approaches. The gap between teams using behavioral triggers and personalization and those still batch-blasting their full list is widening every quarter.
AI-generated subject lines outperform human-written ones by 26% in open rates, and dynamic send-time optimization adds another 14% lift when combined with AI subject lines. These are not marginal gains. For a list of 100,000 subscribers, the compounding effect is significant.
E-goi's Free Webinar on April 30
To help brands address the gap, E-goi announced a free webinar titled "Still Doing Email Marketing Like It's 2016? See What Changes in 2026," which will cover the mechanics determining inbox success or failure. The session targets marketing professionals, e-commerce managers, and business decision-makers looking to update their sending infrastructure.
The webinar takes place on Thursday, April 30 at 3 PM Lisbon time, and all registered attendees will receive both the live access link and a recording for later viewing.
For growth teams measuring email ROI against a 2016 benchmark, the core message from E-goi's research is direct: the channel still works at a high level, but only for senders who have updated how they work the channel. Bot-filtered lists, authentication protocols, behavioral automation, and individual send-time precision are not advanced tactics anymore. They are the baseline for inbox access in 2026.
