Current State of Batch Email

Email continues to be one of the most essential and cost-effective channels in a marketer’s toolkit. For years, brands have relied on batch email to promote products and nurture customer relationships. It’s a proven driver of engagement, but recent performance trends tell a different story.

Opens, clicks, and conversions have declined steadily year over year. And while many marketers have tried to compensate by increasing send volume, that strategy has failed to reverse the downward trend. Batch email still matters, but the current approach isn’t working. It’s time for a change.

To compensate, many brands have doubled down on triggered emails. These campaigns are valuable and often deliver strong performance, but they only reach a small fraction of the customer base on an annual basis. As a result, their impact—while meaningful—is limited.

Typical Batch Campaigns

The structure of batch email campaigns has remained largely unchanged over the years. Most brands still build campaigns around a rigid marketing calendar, aligning messages with seasonal collections, product drops, or key merchandising moments. Broad audience segments are created using the data that’s available, but the resulting experience is often one-size-fits-all: everyone in a segment receives the same message, usually at the same time.

Behind the scenes, this approach demands enormous effort from many stakeholders. CRM teams coordinate with merchandisers on the calendar. Designers pour time into creating pixel-perfect assets. And email marketers painstakingly QA each email to ensure every detail has been triple checked. All of that energy goes into a single deployment, only to have ~20% of recipients open the email, and far fewer click or convert. Then it all resets the next day.

The result? A high-stakes game of “send and hope,” where performance data arrives too late to inform the next round. Valuable creative and operational effort is essentially discarded with each cycle—costing teams time, money, and momentum. The inefficiency isn’t just conceptual; it’s real, measurable, and draining.

The Data Tell a Different Story

At Movable Ink, we use Da Vinci to analyze massive volumes of engagement data—and it often tells a surprising story. One of the clearest insights is this: the segments brands assign to customers frequently don’t match their actual interests or behaviors.

Take, for example, a customer labeled as “interested in ski apparel” based on past purchases. When that same customer is shown a range of content, they might engage more with tennis gear, CrossFit apparel, or hiking products. The truth is, what a person wants in a given moment often defies prediction.

And when that customer’s interests shift from skiing to tennis, the static segment they’ve been assigned to can’t keep up. That misalignment leads to missed opportunities and irrelevant experiences. Traditional segmentation simply wasn’t built to handle this kind of fluidity at scale, and that creates a major challenge for modern marketers.

The Customer File Enigma

For many consumers, purchase needs are constantly shifting. Some items, like toothpaste or laundry detergent, follow predictable routines. But others? Not so much.

Consider a father in a busy family, for example. One week he needs to replace a broken door lock. Next, it’s buying baseball pants for the kids. Then it’s picking up items for an upcoming family gathering. Granted, it’s unlikely he would purchase these items from the same store, but the point is that these needs don’t always follow predictable patterns, and they’re often not represented in past shopping behavior. Now, multiply that kind of variability across millions of customers. 

Without recent intent signals, even the most data-rich customer file starts to feel like a black box—hard to decode, harder to act on.

So how does a brand prepare for this uncertainty?

To engage modern consumers effectively, brands must acknowledge that there are competing forces within their email files. These likely include: 

• Consumer Demand Uncertainty: Buying behavior is often driven by emotional, social, and external factors, making it hard to predict when, why, or how someone will convert.
• Behavioral Volatility: Individual preferences shift frequently, making it hard to generalize or forecast intent.
• The Messy Middle: Between awareness and purchase lies a nonlinear, often invisible journey full of distractions and detours.

These forces make traditional batch campaigns feel increasingly out of sync with how people actually shop and engage today.

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Da Vinci: Built for the Modern Customer Journey

That’s where Movable Ink’s Da Vinci comes in. It was purpose-built to help brands succeed in a world defined by unpredictability and behavioral complexity.

Da Vinci combines the customer data you already have with a deep understanding of your creative assets. Then, using AI, it determines the most relevant content to serve each individual—at the exact right moment. And it doesn’t stop there. Da Vinci also optimizes subject lines, timing, frequency, and messaging strategy—all while aligning to specific business goals.

The impact? Brands using Da Vinci typically see a 20% increase in clicks, conversions, and revenue per send compared to traditional batch campaigns.

Continuous Improvement, Built In

One of Da Vinci’s most powerful advantages is its ability to learn and evolve continuously. With every send, it refines its understanding of each customer. If a certain message doesn’t resonate, Da Vinci automatically pivots. When something works, it builds on that success.

This dynamic feedback loop functions much like modern advertising technology—constantly testing, optimizing, and adapting in real time. It’s a fundamentally different approach from traditional batch email, and a far more effective one.

Evolving Beyond the Batch

Today’s customers are complex, unpredictable, and easily distracted. Yet most email programs are still built on static segments, rigid calendars, and assumptions rooted in the past. These traditional methods don’t reflect real-time behavior, and the result is diminishing returns and missed opportunities.

The solution isn’t more email, it’s smarter email.

Movable Ink’s Da Vinci represents a new era in customer engagement. By fusing customer data, content intelligence, and real-time decisioning, Da Vinci empowers marketers to deliver messages that feel timely, personal, and relevant without guesswork.

The result is more than improved performance. It’s a stronger relationship between brands and their customers, one that’s built on understanding, adaptability, and trust.