A love letter to email marketing

Recently, I started getting an avalanche of promotional emails from a brand I never signed up for - a B Corp-certified digital marketing agency, no less! 

When a colleague of mine, who also got added to their list, reached out to said agency, their response was, “If you don’t want to receive our emails anymore, you can just unsubscribe”.

Forgive my French, but this is f*cking unacceptable. 

The right thing to do was not to add us to the list in the first place. And the right response would’ve been apologizing and taking responsibility for this wrongdoing.

The fact that this is a tactic that supposedly good marketers use only goes to show what kind of lawless shitshow the email space still is.

(Luckily for that agency and their clients, they don’t offer email marketing as a service. If they had been, I may not have been as courteous about not naming them publicly.)

People detest email marketing because of these “best practices” - practices that were never designed with either people or planet in mind. Practices that prioritize quick wins over connection and mutual growth over time. Practices that deem this channel to be largely ineffective for most companies that use them nowadays.

Folks, we’re clearlyin the very early innings of this channel.

So I’m writing a love letter to email marketing, because there’s never been a better time to give a damn.

The bar is still so unbelievably low, it’s practically underground 

I can’t tell you how many times a week I sign up for good companies’ email lists and excitedly rush to see what would land in my inbox, just to be met with either a deafening silence or a slew of painfully generic welcome emails that make me regret my very existence.

So many companies are still sending “us us us”-focused emails rather than using this channel for what it was originally designed to do: build relationships and communicate with other people who showed interest in what you have to offer.

As recipients, we’ve gotten used to emails being anything but interesting or valuable, which makes us averse to sending marketing emails ourselves for the fear of annoying our subscribers.

How things still are could easily make me fall into full-blown existential despair, but instead, I choose to see it as a massive opportunity for companies that dare to do things differently. Better.

If you're sending more than a monthly email that your team put together at the last minute, you're ahead of most brands. 

If you've got basic segmentation and a couple of automations running, you're practically in the top 10%.

The bar is so low that just having intentionality about this channel makes you stand out. 

But the real opportunity isn't being ahead of average. Most brands still aren't close to what's actually possible with email.

A few times a year, every year, brands are brutally reminded why they can’t ignore this channel anymore: social media changes their algorithms and tanks reach, profiles get shut down with no prior warnings or anyone to talk to, and let’s not forget the occasional glitches that make entire platforms unusable.

When that happens, many brands suddenly remember that they have an email list. Their panicked emails, however… result in nothing much.

It turns out that ignoring your subscribers is not a good backup plan. But most brands will keep doing it anyway - which means the opportunity for everyone else keeps getting bigger.

If you’re here, you’re early

I know how it feels right now - budgets are tight, sales cycles are longer, and you're trying to build relationships and show that business can be a force for good. 

The bar is so low that standing out in the inbox and making a serious impact with this small and misunderstood marketing channel is within reach.

In a world full of AI-generated strategies and newsletters, be the one who breaks the pattern and treats humans as they’d like to be treated. 

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This blog was heavily inspired by a piece written by Eli Weiss, a retention and customer experience consultant. Eli is someone I look up to and learn a ton from. He talks about retention every week in his brilliant newsletter, “All Things CX & Retention”.

Ready to close the gap between where your email program is now and what's possible? This is how we can work together.