Episode 26: Email Marketing Myths Debunked: Why It’s Still a Powerhouse
In this episode, Tim and Robbie debunk common email marketing myths, discuss the power of personalization, and explain how to avoid overused promotional tactics. Learn how to maintain a high-quality email list, leverage automation effectively, and turn your email marketing into a powerful tool for driving engagement and revenue.
“Email marketing is like the cockroach of marketing channels—you can’t kill it. It’s not going away anytime soon.”
Objectives
In this episode, you will be able to:
Personalize your emails for better audience engagement and higher conversion rates.
Understand how to maintain a clean, high-performing email list and avoid deliverability issues.
Explore creative strategies beyond promotional emails to add real value to your audience.
Discover how automation, when done right, can make your emails more personal and impactful.
Transcript
Tim (00:00):
Coming of silence.
Robbie (00:01):
Coming of silence. Hello darkness my…
Tim (00:05):
20 minutes to phone call.
Robbie (00:07):
Feeling nervous.
Tim (00:09):
Pressure’s on nothing.
[Intro]
Robbie (00:21):
Hello everybody. This is Tim and Robbie with the Content Community Commerce podcast. We talk about topics, the convergence of content, community, and commerce. Today we’re gonna be talking about something that you guys all probably think you maybe understand a little bit differently, or maybe it’s just burned in the back of your brain or makes you wanna throw up when you hear it.
Tim (00:42):
We’re gonna look at some of the misconceptions of email marketing. And before jumping on here, we were kind of brainstorming through because, like with any marketing, there are misconceptions around it, but there are some things that are kind of big and out there. And this is your chance, Robbie, to clear the air a little bit. Okay?
Robbie (01:05)
And as I say early in every one of the semesters of my classes, welcome to my world.
Tim (01:10):
So I’m gonna fire off the misconceptions to you. I gotta give you your time to address how you feel about it. Okay?
Robbie (01:18):
Um, so that’s how this is gonna work? You’re just gonna throw ’em out, and I’m gonna dunk on ’em. Yeah. And we’re gonna do our best. You need to throw ’em fast.
Tim (01:24):
All right. So email marketing’s dead. Do I need to say anymore?
Robbie (01:30):
Like this is the one that drives me up the wall. Yeah. The first article written about email marketing being dead was written in 1989. That was a year after I was born, and we’re still using it today. It’s kind of like, I always joke that email marketing is like the cockroach of marketing channels. The cockroach can live for like up to a week without a head. You can’t kill it. It’s not going away anytime soon. We need it in so many different ways to function as a human and to function as a citizen of society. It’s a really vital component of a lot of things we do. But at the end of the day, email is a medium for communicating information and like earning and maintaining attention. So, it’s not going away.
Tim (02:16):
It’s a long, slow death.
Robbie (02:22):
It’s gonna be a long, slow demise. But yeah, it’s not going away anytime soon. So again, just kinda like everybody, but bad emails are dying. And that’s one part that’s, I think, really unique. Every time people send a crappy email, it’s like they’re positioning themselves as a less-than-awesome business. So, I don’t know how to say it, but again, the more investment you make in time and effort to make your emails personal, unique, and ensure they resonate with that audience, the better they’re gonna be received on the other side and the more impact they’re gonna make. And if you don’t, people are gonna tune them out. People are gonna unsubscribe. That’s easier and easier every day. So make sure you can have some level of personalization and some level of insight into your audience so you’re not just like throwing something out into the ether.
Tim (03:15):
Yeah. Well that kinda leads into the next one where a lot of people would just be like, it’s just a bunch of promo emails. That’s all it is. It’s just people puffing promos.
Robbie (03:23):
So email, if your inbox looks like a used car lot, that may be on you. But no, but for real though, it’s something where like, that’s typically what a lot of marketers think of when they think of email marketing. And I can always tell when a business is just starting off with email. You can always tell what’s happening because their emails follow a consistent sequence of promo emails. Basically, it’s like: week one, 10% off; week two, 15% off; week three, 20% off; week four, radio silence ’cause we don’t know what to do. It’s a really bad strategy. It’s like, hey, let’s get out of that promo mindset. How do we add value behind the transaction?
Tim (04:01):
There’s a company that my father-in-law shops from. He basically says you need to be a chump if you pay full price at this place. Every day they’re sending a discount that’s higher than the day before. It’s just repetitive. Like this cycle of high discount, high discount, high discount. They just don’t know what to do with it.
Robbie (04:32):
It’s just like, if you don’t have any, it’s like the businesses that only share social content on holidays, like, “Oh yeah, happy Halloween.” That’s really easy to just share social content ’cause you don’t have to think about it. But suddenly, like this is really a time where you can think, “Hey, how do I add value beyond the transaction?” And how do I get out of that place of just bad strategy?
Tim (04:55):
So I need to be creative, is what you’re telling me?
Robbie (04:57):
Yes, you need to be creative. And again, what value does your product add? Grab some of your reviews and rope those into a communication around, “Hey, this is positioning-wise why this is successful, who’s successful with this product.” Or like the best-case scenario, we like to use a lot of content marketing. I know you feel how you feel about content marketing. That’s why we always say email plus SEO is like a one plus one plus four relationship.
Tim (05:09):
It feels very warm and fuzzy right now.
Robbie (05:13):
Yeah. So again, if you don’t know what to do, find yourself an SEO friend who can help you understand what type of content to build and then distribute that to your list. Because, hey, there’s gonna be a certain amount of search volume around it. It’s probably gonna be decent content, and your audience is probably gonna be excited or engaged by it.
Tim (05:32):
Hopefully, if you’ve done it right. Okay, so this next misconception is widespread: size matters. You need a big list.
Robbie (05:42):
Bigger isn’t always better. The size of the list is a vanity metric. In most cases, the majority of purchasers come from a small minority of their list. That 80/20 rule really applies here, where the majority of your revenue and profit comes from a small portion of your audience. The same thing is true for email. You don’t need that giant list. And in most cases, that list is probably hurting you. If you’re not pruning and cutting off your list, you’re not taking care of it. Yeah. It’s kind of like a farming mentality: you want to plant your seeds, plant your crops, let them grow, nurture them to where they’re thriving and successful. You need to make sure you’re pruning them along the way and cutting people off who aren’t valuable because they’re hurting your deliverability.
Tim (06:52):
And you talk so much about list hygiene before, where it’s like you’re just hurting yourself by sending it to the wrong people.
Robbie (06:58):
Yeah. And in some cases, it’s really bad ’cause like, you don’t know. If you haven’t emailed somebody in two years, they may have changed jobs. That email may have been dead for two years now. And now Gmail’s saying, “Hey, this person’s emailing this group, and this hasn’t been a real email in two years.” You seem spammy. It’s gonna be really negative for your business if you just keep growing that list as a vanity metric. Really make sure you’re maintaining and nurturing that list as much as you can. Granted, you do need some type of acquisition to keep growing that list because you can’t continue to squeeze water out of a rock. But you really need to make sure you’re cutting that list.
Tim (07:44):
Pruning that list. Like pruning a bonsai tree. It’s like you need more things to make it grow. Some fertilizer.
Robbie (07:49):
Yeah, fertilize that list. Grow it. Yes. But don’t become so dependent or focused on list size because like, the person who’s way too obsessed with list size—there are better things and more important things in everybody’s life.
Tim (08:03):
Yeah. Uh, so next one: automation makes email impersonal.
Tim (08:10):
Okay, I want you to manually handwrite every one of these emails and send them out.
Robbie (08:24):
*Dearest lovely reader, thank you for purchasing my widgets. This was wonderful for me. I hope it’s wonderful for you.* Yes, I was making a Bridgerton reference. I don’t play, I’m sorry I couldn’t help it. Watch Bridgerton. Why not? But email automations are impersonal, they say. This is where you should be the most personal in your email communications because you can be. You don’t get an automated email message unless you do something that triggers it. Basically, if you exhibit some behavior, that’s what triggers that email automation. If I’m a business doing this well, I wanna understand who that person is. If they’re an existing customer, a returning customer, what they’ve purchased in the past. If I can collect any first-party data, I generally collect that really early on in my customer journey so I can understand. Hey, if they’re purchasing from a specific category or making that purchase for a specific reason, I want to know where they’re at, so I can communicate exactly what they need and why it’s gonna be valuable to them. And when you can get really granular and really nuanced, that’s when those are powerful and impactful. And that’s what makes the automation side really cool. That’s the part we think is the most fun. Even when you can get, like, not pseudo-creepy but pretty wild with how much you can earn the right to ask for—there’s a lot of good first-party data. And if you’re a good steward of that data and not freaking out your audience, you can do a lot of cool things. Like we talked about: What’s your horse’s name and birthday? And we’ll use that in email automations all the time because, hey, Skittles’ birthday is coming up. We can use that in an email subject line. And that blows minds.
Tim (10:22):
Skittles wants you to have these new riding boots. He’s pushing you hard on this. You should totally buy them. Skittles says it would feel great on his back if you bought these new expensive breeches. He likes the feel of this new saddle. Please buy it for him. No, it’s brilliant. It works out. It’s automation, but it’s personalized to a segment of the list. It’s like you’re understanding a group of people, and you’re doing it so that while it’s automated, it still hasn’t lost that personalization. It’s not like you’re carpet bombing the entire list with the same thing over and over.
Robbie (10:56):
Yeah, and so that’s where you could make those really simple and easy for yourself. But again, the level of effort and care you put into it is what you’re gonna get out of it. Like, yes, you can’t do that for every single audience or segment, but pick your best audiences or most profitable segments and focus on making that experience great. Then you can expand from there. But understanding how that person is gonna interact with the email, how they’re gonna receive it, and what’s gonna make it stand out or be unique for them is really powerful and impactful.
Tim (11:31):
And that sounds like so much work. Because another misconception is it all needs to be beautiful. Every email should look like it’s being created by an A+ designer. It needs to be completely branded and spectacular.
Robbie (11:46):
It needs to look like the Sistine Chapel shining down in someone’s inbox. Okay, so this is a legitimate thing, though. A lot of people think that email from a business should be this beautifully branded, visually spectacular piece. And a lot of it should be, I think. You should spend time and attention on the design of your emails. That’s important, but it’s not the only important component. For any client we work with, we like to have a balance of beautifully designed emails. Granted, we put a lot of time and attention into that. Like, if I said, “Send bad emails. Make your emails look a little more ghetto and rougher around the edges,” Jesse, our creative director, would cut me down—and rightly so. But right now, we want a balance. So you want beautifully designed, engaging, easy-to-interact-with HTML emails. You also want to balance that with plain text emails and hybrid, what we call hybrid template emails. It’s basically an HTML email that looks like a plain text email but still has the bells and whistles of an HTML email.
Robbie (12:59):
We’re starting to see a few more of those too. It works really well because it gives a nice personal interaction. If you’re using a brand, a business’s or brand’s avatar, and who that person is, and who you may be sending that from, that’s always really helpful. When you can balance beautifully designed content with human interaction, they complement and supplement each other really well. Not everything needs to be well-designed. And for some groups we work with, we’re like, “Let’s make this a little rough around the edges. Let’s take some really rough user-generated content and rope it into an email.” A little bit of knowing your audience—like it performs really well.
Tim (13:40):
Yeah, knowing your audience. Like, if you’re selling Hermès or something like that, you don’t wanna be rough around the edges. There’s a lot of brand standards you have to follow. But for other groups, they like something a little simpler and to the point. And like I said, user-generated stuff pulled in. But landing the plane, there are a ton of misconceptions. But the last one is—and I hear you say this often—email prints money. Is it really a printing machine? Is email really the new *Catch Me If You Can*?
Robbie (14:13):
Okay, this is definitely a misconception. Email typically, for a lot of businesses, is their most profitable marketing channel because, again, you’re often communicating with your existing customers. This should be profitable. You should be making a good amount of money because you can use it to get customers to purchase more than once, which is really helpful. We’re not vending machines, guys. But email marketing, when it’s not done well, can be messed up. If you’re screwing up your deliverability, if you’re not hitting people’s inboxes, or you’re getting dinged by people unsubscribing because you’re spamming or annoying, every time you do that, you’re losing revenue potential. So it doesn’t automatically print money. But when you’re doing it well, and when you’re being intentional and smart about it, it’s typically gonna drive good, positive revenue to your business. So, it’s not gonna be for everyone. Not everyone’s gonna knock this out of the park, but it’s important.
Robbie (15:20):
I mean, it’s about doing the small things well. Getting your infrastructure set up, having your DMARC certification dialed in, making sure your deliverability is in a good spot, and maintaining good list hygiene. Like, those things are kind of table stakes now. And then making sure that you’re sending good, valuable, and engaging emails so you don’t burn out your list. So when they are ready to purchase, you’re their top-of-mind preference.
Tim (15:49):
I love it, man. That’s awesome. If I were to try and put a bow on things, I think it’s safe to say email’s not dead. Some of the things we’ve talked about, like the hygiene of your list, are really important. Understanding how to speak to your audience. There’s a time to be pretty and a time not to be. And ultimately, if you can do those things well and understand them, email is gonna make you money.
Robbie (16:16):
All of those things are important. And again, understanding that email’s not going away. Get comfortable with it. It will change, but email as a marketer is the most effective.
Tim (16:40):
That’s not how email feels about you.
Robbie (16:42):
Yeah, I know! Hopefully, email loves me a little bit more. But seriously, when I moved from social to email, I felt like I was cheating. I’m like, this is so much easier because I’m not battling an algorithm. It’s three steps closer to the cash register. For the attention and the media it commands, email is where so much value can be had. And that’s where we can do some really cool things as marketers.
Tim (16:57):
I love it, man. Thanks for sharing that!
Robbie (17:03):
Next time, you’re gonna be in the hot seat.
Tim (17:06):
I’m gonna be in the hot seat. You’re gonna call out all the negatives in SEO. All the black hat SEO.
[Outro]
