Biggest 2025 experiment results

Every month for a full year, I invite a small group of business leaders, marketers, and founders for one simple purpose: talk honestly about what’s really happening in their email marketing.

At the end of each session, I always asked the same question:

“What is the key takeaway you're leaving this discussion with?"

And month after month, the same patterns show up: 

• Business leaders know email is still an afterthought, even though they know it could be doing way more for them.

• People measure opens and clicks instead of actual business impact.

• Leaders think email is easy because hey, we all use it every day - but when their occasional newsletter and a few promo emails don't bring in sales (all thrown together last-minute, no strategy behind them), they decide 'email doesn't work for us.'

• Email gets ignored when business is humming along, then gets desperately overused the second there's a revenue gap.

• And the one that pains me most - businesses that have never experienced what strategic email can actually do, so it stays at the bottom of their priority list because they don't know what they're missing.

So  here’s what strategic, ethical email success typically looks like for my clients:

• Your lead-to-conversion time drops because people know, like, and trust you faster - which means you and your team spend way less time doing hardcore selling on calls.

• Your virtual rooms and in-person events fill with people you've actually wanted to speak with for longer than you're willing to admit.

• Your email list grows with highly qualified subscribers who become your clients, your loudest advocates (doing marketing for you, for free, in rooms you're not even in), or both.

• You constantly learn what challenges your audience is facing, which means your entire marketing gets better at attracting the right people.

• You step off the content creation hamster wheel and build actual distribution systems instead - with email as the backbone of your marketing.

Look, at the end of the day, running these monthly roundtable discussions confirmed something I've known for a long time: businesses that invest in email marketing before the shit hits the fan are the ones who see it work. 

Because they know it's not optional.

If you've attended one or more of those in 2025: thank you for your presence, your honest thoughts, and your precious time. I don't take it for granted.

And if you haven't been able to join any roundtables this year yet, the good news is, these will continue every month in 2026.

Because I can see how validating and comforting they are to those who join them, and the ripple effects they create in the "business for good" world.

They turned "I'm subscribed to someone's halfway-across-the-world email list" into "I can finally have a safe space to talk about a topic I'm struggling with with like-minded people".

And they have already inspired many of my fellow marketers and business owners to go out and talk to people - no pressure, no sales pitches, just sharing experiences with and learning from one another.

So here's to a full year of the best business experiment I've ever run, and here's to one more year of exciting roundtables.

Looking to join a roundtable discussion in 2026? Join my newsletter - it’s the only way to get an invite!