Email Is Not Dead (You're Just Doing It Wrong)

You’re listening to Growing Brands with Melia Moore. Episode Three. Email marketing has been declared dead at least a dozen times in the last ten years. And every single time, it keeps quietly outperforming almost everything else you’re spending money on. I don’t think that’s a coincidence. Okay, so. Let me tell you what I actually think is going on there.

There’s a thing that happens to founders, and it happens early, and it costs you for years. You launch a brand. You collect some email addresses, because everyone tells you to build a list. And then you send a newsletter maybe once a month, when you remember, usually because you have a sale on. It does almost nothing. Three opens, one click, no sales.

And you conclude, reasonably, that email doesn’t work. So you go pour your time into the channel that feels alive, which is social, because at least over there something is happening. Here’s the part nobody tells you. You didn’t run email and watch it fail. You ran a broken version of email and watched the broken version fail. Those are not the same experiment.

And the difference between them is most of the money you’ve left on the table for the last two years. Let me show you what I mean. I want to start with the data, because I’m not going to defend email on sentiment. I don’t care that it feels old or that it’s the channel your mom uses. I care about what it returns. Across pretty much every credible study on this, email marketing returns somewhere between thirty and forty dollars for every dollar you put into it.

Now, I want you to be a little skeptical of that number, because I am. Those figures get quoted by companies that sell email software, and they have a reason to make it look good. So let’s not take the exact figure as gospel. But here’s the thing. Even if the real number for your brand is a third of the headline, even if it’s ten dollars back on the dollar, that still beats almost every other channel you have access to. Paid social isn’t returning ten to one for a small brand.

It’s usually returning somewhere between break-even and a small profit, on a good month, when nothing in the ad account is on fire. So the question isn’t whether email is the highest-returning channel for most small brands. The data is fairly boring on that point. It usually is. The question is why almost nobody acts like it. And that’s the part that actually interests me.

Because the reason is psychological before it’s tactical. Email doesn’t perform for an audience. When you post on social, other people see it. Your peers, your competitors, your friends. It feels like marketing. When you send an email, it goes into an inbox, privately, and nobody claps.

There’s no public number ticking up. So even when email is making the sale, it doesn’t feel like progress, because progress, for a lot of founders, has quietly come to mean visibility. And email is invisible by design. That’s not a weakness. That’s the whole reason it converts. You are landing in a place the customer actually checks, next to messages from people they know, instead of competing for attention in a feed engineered to keep them from ever leaving.

But it doesn’t feed the part of you that wants to feel like something is happening. So you neglect it. I’ve watched founders do this with their own numbers in front of them. The email channel is quietly the most profitable line in the whole business, and they spend ninety percent of their energy on the channel that’s barely washing its own face. Because one of them feels like marketing and the other one just makes money. To be fair, there’s a real reason founders abandoned email beyond just the feelings.

For a stretch there, social genuinely was easier. Organic reach on the platforms used to be real. You could post and actually get seen without paying. So for a few years, chasing social over email was a defensible bet. The problem is that the conditions changed and the habit didn’t. Organic reach collapsed.

The platforms figured out they could charge you for the audience you thought you owned. And email sat there the whole time doing the same boring thirty-to-one it had always done. The bet made sense once. It doesn’t anymore. But the muscle memory is still running. And I want to name one more thing, because it’s the quiet one underneath all of it.

A lot of founders think email feels desperate. There’s this idea floating around that landing in someone’s inbox is intrusive, that you’re bothering people, that the polite thing is to wait until you really have something to say. I understand the instinct. I don’t think the data supports it. The person on your list gave you their address. They asked to be there.

Treating that permission like it’s a fragile thing you should barely use isn’t respect. It’s just you projecting your own discomfort onto a customer who actually wanted to hear from you. The brands that grow are the ones that show up regularly, usefully, and without apologizing for existing. The brands that don’t are the ones who send four emails a year and call it being considerate. Your customer is not sitting at home hoping you’ll leave them alone. They forgot you exist.

That’s the real problem with most small-brand email. Not too much. Too little, too rarely, and only ever when you want something. Okay, so before I tell you what good looks like, I want to sit on what bad actually costs, because I don’t think founders feel it. When email underperforms, you don’t lose a dramatic, visible amount of money. You lose a slow, invisible amount.

A sale here that would have closed with a reminder. A repeat purchase there that would have happened with a nudge. None of it shows up as a line item that says “lost to email neglect.” It just shows up as a business that’s working harder than it should to stand still. And that’s exactly why it’s so easy to ignore. The bleeding is quiet, and quiet bleeding is the most dangerous kind, because nothing ever forces you to deal with it.

A channel that fails loudly gets fixed. A channel that just quietly underperforms gets tolerated for years. Alright. So let’s talk about what doing email badly actually looks like, because I want to be specific. Vague diagnosis is useless. The first failure is the one I already described.

You treat email as a broadcast channel you use occasionally when you want something. You only show up in the inbox when you have a sale. Which trains your list, very efficiently, to only open you when they want a discount. You’ve taught your most valuable audience that you are a coupon, and then you’re surprised when they behave like one. The second failure is no segmentation. You send the same email to everyone.

The person who bought from you three times last month gets the identical message as the person who signed up eleven months ago and has never purchased anything. Those are completely different people in completely different relationships with you. Sending them the same thing isn’t simpler. It’s just lazy, and they can feel it. The third failure, and this is the big one, is no automation. This is the difference that matters most, so stay with me.

Most founders think about email as campaigns. Sitting down, writing a newsletter, hitting send. That’s the manual part, and it’s the part that feels like work, so it’s the part everyone focuses on. But the campaigns are not where the money is. The money is in the automations. The emails that send themselves, to the right person, at the right moment, forever, without you touching them again.

You build them once and they run while you sleep. That’s not a nice-to-have. That’s the actual asset. So let me tell you the three automations every brand needs in place before you send a single campaign. If you do nothing else from this episode, do these three. The first is a welcome sequence.

When someone joins your list, they are never more interested in you than they are in that exact moment. They just raised their hand. And most brands respond to that by sending them nothing for two weeks, and then a newsletter about a sale. A welcome sequence catches that person at peak interest and actually tells them who you are, what you make, and why it’s worth their attention. It is consistently one of the highest-converting things a small brand can build, and it’s the one people skip most. The second is an abandoned cart, or more broadly, an abandoned checkout sequence.

Someone wanted your product enough to put it in the cart and start checking out, and then life happened. The phone rang, the kid woke up, the page timed out. These are not cold prospects you’re chasing. These are people who already decided, and then got interrupted. A simple sequence that reminds them, with no gimmick, just a nudge, recovers a meaningful chunk of sales you would have otherwise lost completely. You already did the hard part of getting them to want it.

The third is a post-purchase sequence. This is the one almost nobody builds, and it’s the one I’d argue matters most over time. Somebody just bought from you. That is the single best moment in your entire relationship with a customer, and most brands fill it with a shipping confirmation and then silence. A post-purchase sequence makes them feel good about the decision they just made, helps them actually use the thing, and quietly sets up the second purchase. And the second purchase is where the profit in your business actually lives.

Welcome, abandoned checkout, post-purchase. Three automations. You build them once. They run forever. That’s email working the way it’s supposed to. And notice what’s true about all three.

None of them require you to be clever, or witty, or to have a brand voice you’ve agonized over. They require you to show up at the obvious moment with the obvious useful thing. That’s it. Email rewards being reliable far more than it rewards being brilliant, which is good news, because reliable is something you can actually build. You can’t will yourself into being a genius copywriter by Friday. But you can absolutely set up three automations that fire at the right moment every single time.

One of those is a personality trait. The other one is a checklist. And the channel that pays the most happens to reward the checklist. Now, I want to connect this to the thing it’s really about, because email isn’t a channel in isolation. Email is the mechanism underneath retention. We’re going to do a whole episode on retention later, but here’s the short version.

The cheapest customer you will ever sell to is the one who already bought from you. You don’t have to pay an ad platform to reach them again. You don’t have to win an auction. You just have to land in an inbox they already let you into. That’s what email is. It is the only channel where you genuinely own the connection.

You don’t rent it from a platform that can change the rules, throttle your reach, or raise the price on you next quarter. Your social following is borrowed. Your email list is yours. And in a world where every borrowed audience keeps getting more expensive to reach, the channel you actually own quietly becomes the most valuable thing you have. So here’s what I think is the honest reframe on all of this. Email isn’t dead, and it isn’t even really underrated at this point, because everyone says they know it matters.

The problem is subtler than that. Founders know email is valuable in the abstract, and they treat it like it’s worthless in practice. They’ll nod along when I say it returns thirty to one, and then go spend the afternoon on a video that’ll reach four hundred people and sell nothing. The gap isn’t belief. The gap is behavior. I’ve been sitting with this one for a while, and here’s where I’ve landed.

The brands that win at email aren’t the ones with the cleverest subject lines. They’re the ones who decided, boringly, to show up consistently in a place the customer actually checks, and to let the machine do the parts that don’t need a human. That’s it. It’s not exciting. It just works. So before the next episode, here’s what I’d ask you to do.

Go look at whether those three automations exist in your account right now. Not your newsletter. The welcome, the abandoned checkout, the post-purchase. If even one of them is missing, you’ve found money you’ve been leaving on the table this whole time, and it’s money you can go collect this week. You already have the list. You’re just not using it.

Next time, we’re going to talk about the channel trap. Because most founders aren’t actually losing because they picked the wrong platform. They’re losing because they picked all of them. They’re on Instagram, and Tik Tok, and Pinterest, and LinkedIn, and email, and doing every single one at about thirty percent. And I’m going to show you why being everywhere is a strategy for nobody, and how to figure out the one channel actually worth going deep on. If this was useful, follow the show so the next one finds you.

And if you know a founder who swears email doesn’t work for them, I’d gently bet they’ve never built those three automations. Send them this one. I’m Melia Moore. This was Growing Brands. I’ll see you next time.