Every couple of years someone declares email dead. They are always wrong, but for interesting reasons, usually because they're measuring the wrong thing. Here's the short version of what changed and what to do about it.
What changed
1. Apple Mail Privacy Protection pre-fetches images, which means 'open rate' is now an amateur signal. Clicks and replies are the metric.
2. Inbox filtering got smarter. Gmail and Outlook quietly route 'Promotions'-flagged emails to places users never check. Inbox placement, not delivery, is the real measurement.
3. Templates got a deliverability tax. Image-heavy HTML emails land in Promotions at 2–3× the rate of plaintext.
What to do about it
Write the four-line email. Line 1: who it's from and why it's showing up. Line 2: the one thing that's valuable about it. Line 3: the single action to take. Line 4: the reply bait, a question that invites a reply, which is the strongest deliverability signal there is.
Templates are a deliverability tax dressed up as brand polish. Pay it only when it earns its keep.
The 500/10,000 rule
500 engaged subscribers who reply to you outperform 10,000 subscribers who don't, on every metric that matters, revenue per send, inbox placement, and list-health decay. Stop optimising for list size. Optimise for list density.
Questions we get on this topic.
Should I still use a template at all?
For transactional and receipt emails, yes. For marketing emails to a warm list, plaintext or minimal HTML wins almost every time.
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