If your email didn't generate a sale, did it fail? The answer might surprise you.

Most people think they do, but they don’t really understand how email marketing works (not you, dear reader, not you!).

We have bro marketers to thank for for getting us to this point and maintaining it so damn well.

See, the general consensus online about email marketing is that every email you send out is supposed to generate sales. If it didn’t do so, that email wasn’t effective. 

And if a few emails didn’t convert, it means that your entire email marketing operations are worthless - so you might as well hire someone to rehaul it or ditch this channel altogether. 

In some cases, yes, that can be true. 

But when you look at your data in context and with nuance, those umbrella claims are misleading and infuriating.

2 very recent cases in point:

1. One of my B2B retainer clients has been frustrated with the direct conversions they get from their newsletters. And if you look at it through their lens, I get it. 

   
   

   The way they think of email conversions is: A subscriber reads an email -> clicks to get to a website page -> books a sales call. And that doesn’t happen as often as they wish.

   
   

   But if you look at the contextual data, it tells a whole different story: 

   
   

   Before they hired me as their email consultant earlier this year, they were getting around 20 inbound leads a month and were stuck on that number for a while. From the second month we’ve been working together, and ever since, their monthly leads more than tripled.

Email is a strategic touchpoint in the non-linear decision-making purchasing process. This is a prime example of how adding good email strategy to your marketing mix is invaluable, even if you can’t attribute 100% of the sales directly and specifically to this channel.

2. One of my newsletters a month ago (about why I choose not to use Substack) got 46.8% opens, 0.5% click throughs, 5 unsubscribes, and 0 sales. Did it fail? If you consider my business bank account balance right after I sent it, then yes. 

   
   

   But this email’s goal wasn’t to sell anything. It was to nurture. And in that aspect, it was a major success for three reasons:

• It got multiple replies, which are one of the hardest, if not the hardest email engagement to get. Getting replies means that you’ve nurtured relationships well enough so that people from the other side of the world would take 2 or 3 minutes out of their busy days, choose to do a lot of mental heavy lifting, and write a reply. Replies = your subscribers feel emotionally safe to converse with you through a medium that isn’t as intuitive or as geared toward engagement as social media, and that’s no small feat.

• It was an opportunity to make sure that values-aligned folks are, in fact, on my list, and they know what Ethical Emails stands for. And those who aren’t aligned are welcome to unsubscribe. Not because I want to create an echo chamber around me or my business, but because there are morals lines and boundaries that I won’t accept crossing.  

• Speaking of values alignment, one of those replies was from Russell, from Good Gosh Media. We’ve known each other for several months and had chats on different platforms. But that newsletter resonated with him so deeply that he asked me to form a strategic partnership with his business. That partnership alone can translate into (at least) multiple 5 figures in revenue every year. 

The beautiful thing about email marketing is that it can provide you with loads of quality data that can teach you a ton about your audience, and how to improve the mutually-benefical relationships with your subscribers.

But how you organize that data, understand it, and the context it “sits in” is even more important (and then, what you do with it - but that’s a topic for a different time).

There’s a lot more to the “$42 for every $1” ROI promise of this channel than this statement in isolation.

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This blog post was originally shared as a newsletter with my email subscribers.

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