Why I stopped doing email teardowns

Many of my seriously talented and skilled email marketing friends are publicly sharing their not-so-flattering thoughts on email they see in the wild.

Not me.

Back in the day, I used to publish those “teardowns” with elaborate videos, dissecting each component and section, and sharing what I’d do differently if I were the marketer in charge.

But I stopped doing that over a year ago, and for 5 main reasons:

1. You don’t know what’s happening behind the scenes. 

An email could look full of mistakes for someone like me, who’s reviewing dozens of emails for clients every single week, but for that brand’s audience, that “diabolical” email might work like a charm. 

I can disagree with the tactics a brand chooses to use, or how much text vs. images they use, but at the end of the day, I don’t know their audience as well as they do, and don’t have access to their backend and results. So criticizing an email that might have been successful for a brand is not how I want to use my time and energy.

2. Many of the marketers who send email marketing are not email specialists. And they’re getting ALL the fire.

Those marketers are usually generalists, simply trying to stay afloat and do their best with an insane amount of workload and pressure, while using the limited resources they have. “Sending X emails a week”, in many cases, is yet another task they need to tick off. It’s not their fault that email marketing is not a priority for their leadership, and, considering the limitations above, mistakes will happen. 

In a sense, criticizing those emails is like holding up a mirror to that person who just tried to do their best, rather than holding up that mirror to the people in charge. 

And as someone who ends up working with those team members and shows them how to think differently about email marketing and do better, I'd rather my first impression be useful than critical.

To the in-house marketers reading this: I know you're doing your absolute best with limited resources and less support than you deserve, and I see you.

3. The business leaders I work with (or those in my audience) are already overwhelmed by… everything. 

Adding 'here's what you/your colleague/your competitor did wrong' to their feed or inbox might get a glance, but it doesn't make them reach out.

The phrase “You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar” comes to mind here. From my experience, good-doing and impact business leaders engage more meaningfully with marketing shared through a positive lens than through a callout.

4. Results I achieved for my clients > how emails of other random brands look 

At the risk of losing impressions and engagement (and I do), I much rather show how my thinking affected my clients' results than show how it could've theoretically changed things for a brand I have no connection to.

It's so much easier to get engagement with the “look how [insert a negative adjective here] this email is” type of posts than with the ones I post. Social media loves negativity, and I’m not into feeding the algorithms. Nuance and context go to die there. But showing my own clients' results, even at the cost of initial reach, is closer to the kind of work I want my name attached to.

And personally, I find it way more interesting, too.

5. Being negative is the easiest thing to do. 

Sometimes, in moments of frustration, I also share emails that I get, mostly from cold emailers (which is not how I support my clients, if you ever had a doubt). I usually end up regretting sharing those, btw, even though the validation in the comments is a nice ego boost.

Sure, negativity brings traction and makes the algorithm happy. But there’s enough negativity all around us, and I sure don’t want to wave this flag myself (especially considering that, in the grand scheme of things, email marketing is so unbelievably not that important).

My version of “choose your hard” is sharing what works as much as possible. A part of that is hosting my roundtables every month for CEOs and CMOs to inspire one another, and I’m very mindful of how I use the “airtime” my subscribers and followers give me. 

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Look, I’m not sharing this to point any fingers at my colleagues.

I learn so much from them and look up to so many of them. Heck, I even learn from their “teardowns” myself. 

That approach is hopefully working for them and fills up their pipelines, but only they can attest to that. Just like my first point, Idk what’s happening behind the scenes of their business.

All I’m saying is that this is the lane I chose, and this is what’s working for my audience. If nothing else, I hope this piece will help you reflect on how you show up online and whether that serves you as both a human and a person in business.

If this resonated, my newsletter has more of this kind of unfiltered thinking on email marketing, along with invites to my monthly roundtables for CEOs and CMOs at good-doing companies. Subscribe here.