Report as spam.
We’ve talked about email marketing a little bit before, but is there a way that it could actually work in the age of spam filters and limited attention? Let’s talk about it!
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https://www.benchmarkone.com/
https://dripify.com/why-email-campaigns-fail/
Why Email Marketing Doesn’t Work: Addressing Common Pitfalls and Strategies for Success
The Marketing Gateway is a weekly podcast hosted by Sean in St. Louis (Sean J. Jordan, President of https://www.researchplan.com/) and featuring guests from the St. Louis area and beyond.
Every week, Sean shares insights about the world of marketing and speaks to people who are working in various marketing roles – creative agencies, brand managers, MarCom professionals, PR pros, business owners, academics, entrepreneurs, researchers and more!
The goal of The Marketing Gateway is simple – we want to build a connection between all of our marketing mentors in the Midwest and learn from one another! And the best way to learn is to listen.
And the next best way is to share!
For more episodes: https://www.themarketinggateway.com
Copyright 2025, The Research & Planning Group, Inc.
TRANSCRIPT:
Here’s an interesting question for you – how often do you actually read email you’re not interested in?
For me, in my role as a research consultant, the answer is “more than I’d like” because I have to check and make sure potential clients or people we’re trying to interview aren’t sending me messages. But that sure doesn’t stop people from trying to get my attention.
Just today, I got a message from someone who wants to sell me an IT solution despite the fact that, yeah, I don’t work in IT.
I got another one from a guy who wants me to join a book club for executives. He didn’t tell me what they’re reading. Maybe it’s his book?
Yet another came in asking me if I could direct them to my purchasing agent for custodial supplies. Like many professional service businesses, we’re in an office building that takes care of that for us.
And I got another from someone who wants to offer me a business loan for hundreds of thousands of dollars without even looking at my books or understanding how my business works!
Seems legit, right?
Oh, and I don’t even want to get into how many I get all day, every day about AI solutions that have nothing to do with my business. You guys know I know you’re just selling a frontend making API calls to Claude and ChatGPT, right?
One aggressive emailer told me if I didn’t like their pitch, to write them back and tell them to “pound sand.” I did write them back and told them that approach was a loser and I didn’t care what they were selling – it was a bad look for their brand.
I also have another emailer who sent me a message every day, getting more and more hostile that I wasn’t reading or responding to their messages. The solution they were offering had absolutely nothing to do with my business, but you can bet if I did have a need, their brand would be the last I’d consider.
I’m bombarded with messages like this every day. Most don’t even make it to my inbox – my email client’s filters send a lot of these messages to the Promotions, Update or Social media tabs, and even more wind up in spam.
But email is cheap. It’s easily automated. It can be done by software and it’s ultimately a trading game – you cast your nets wide enough with a lot of it and eventually, something will come your way. At least, that’s the hope.
But I find it doesn’t work too well, and even when I react out and contact clients whom I’ve known for years, I’m finding more and more that their own onslaught of junk mail is making it harder and harder for us to connect until they remember that they wanted to talk to me and search for the last message I sent them.
So let’s talk about why email marketing is so broken, and what, if anything, we can do to fix it!
I’m Sean in St. Louis, and this is the Marketing Gateway.
So if you go into a search engine and search for why email marketing doesn’t work anymore, you’re going to find a ton of articles that tell you some variation on this theme:
“Email marketing does work, you’re just doing it wrong.”
That sounds like good advice on the surface, but you know what? People say the same things about postal mail marketing or trade show marketing or telemarketing or even buying ads on social media or in magazines or local newspapers.
And the reality is that for some brands and some businesses, these strategies still work.
But for most of us, they’re a big waste of time and money because there’s a fundamental disconnect between what solutions we’re hoping to offer and where people who might consider buying from us are looking for what we’re selling.
But email marketing is different from every other type of external marketing out there because it really doesn’t cost us anything. Sure, there are laws and regulations against spam and ways to get yourself in trouble if you’re too aggressive with email marketing, but that tends to be when you’re mass-mailing millions of people with absolute junk.
If you’re only mailing a few hundred or thousand people at a time, and if you have a reasonable expectation that they might want to do business with you, you’re probably not going to violate those laws, particularly if you make it easy for people to unsubscribe or otherwise let you know they want no further contact. And if you’re sending those messages one at a time and personalizing them, you’re even less likely to get yourself in trouble.
But is it costly or even difficult to send email? Not remotely. Actually, the hardest part is finding out the email address you need to send an unsolicited email to, and creating a good email list is difficult because a lot of people don’t publish their email addresses and don’t want to receive email from unsolicited parties. One of the best and most reliable ways to get email addresses is to meet people and collect business cards, because then you have a personal connection to them you can reference.
But meeting people is hard to do at scale, so the common shortcuts emailers use are list brokers and AI tools, but these both come with a lot of caveats I won’t get into today.
And even if you purchase a list or create one of your own, beware, because a 2023 study from the firm ZeroBounce found that only 57% of emails contained in a list of more than six billion email addresses were actually valid. 20% were invalid and 17% were catch-all accounts that didn’t go to a specific person. Fortunately, very few – just 1.32% – were for do-not-mail addresses. But the study also found that 23% of email list entries decay every year as people change jobs, change personal email addresses or otherwise become unreachable at the listed address.
So right away, we come to the actual first problem with email marketing – list hygiene is essential for email marketing to work. And to ensure your list stays current, you have to do something that a lot of email marketers are also loathe to do.
You have to periodically ask people to respond to your messages to let you know if they still want to be on the list.
Because if you don’t, what tends to happen instead is that they’ll just send you to spam or change accounts and you’ll never know if they’re still seeing your messages until you start getting bounce notices.
Many email management platforms do include mechanisms to report back open, read and engagement rates, and those are vital statistics for any email marketing effort. But they also don’t always provide the right information you need to know to understand if people are reading your messages because they’re interested or because they’re trying to figure out how to unsubscribe and simply found it too difficult or annoying to do so.
This brings us to the second problem with email marketing – without a positive engagement mechanism, you can’t really tell how people are interacting with your message.
If you’re sending out requests for meetings and have a calendar tool or intake form that allows you to see people have booked in response to your message, that’s a positive engagement, and it’s very measurable!
But if you’re simply telling people about your offering and directing them to an attached brochure or a simple URL with no tracking built in, you can only really measure the success of your campaign by looking at general spikes in traffic on your website or call center or in sales volume.
Even with a positive engagement mechanism included, email marketing still tends to get really lousy engagement rates, especially if the email is sent out cold with no expectation on the part of the receiver that they’ll be hearing from you.
The main reason people don’t read email from an unfamiliar source – and I’ve seen this referenced in several studies, but of course have also experienced it myself! – is that they never get past the subject line. But we also need to caveat here that a badly-written subject line that sounds like spam may never even make it to their inbox because junk mail filters often look at subject lines when they determine what is and isn’t going to be classified as spam.
There’s lots of advice out there on how to write a great subject line. The problem is that subject lines are a bit of an arms race for attention – what works today probably won’t work so well tomorrow once everyone starts doing it. And so the best practice in email marketing is often to be clear, concise and evoke curiosity. You can try personalization by mentioning the person’s name, but so many spam tools have gotten good at that it’s honestly not as effective as it once was.
I’ll be honest – I’m pretty bad at writing grabby subject lines, especially when I want people to do something like take a survey or sign up for my podcast, so I often do use AI tools for this purpose to help me find some more effective way of reaching people. It’s one of the few cases where you’ll hear me say an AI tool is probably going to do a better job writing something than an actual human being. And since I can use an AI tool to keep generating new ideas until I find something that does inspire my own creative spark, it saves me from getting exhausted trying to figure one out for myself.
I used DuckDuckGo’s Duck.ai prompt tool to ask GPT-5 mini to give me some subject lines for inviting people to be on The Marketing Gateway. Here are a few it came up with:
- Be My Guest on The Marketing Gateway — Share Your Story with Marketers
- Get Featured on The Marketing Gateway — Tell Your Breakthrough Moment
- Be a Spotlight Guest on The Marketing Gateway — Promote Your Next Big Idea
- Join The Marketing Gateway Podcast — Showcase Your Marketing Wins
- Pitch Your Story to The Marketing Gateway — Guest Spots Open Now
- Be Heard on The Marketing Gateway — Book a Guest Spot Today
I could try a few of those and see if they work. Honestly, they’re far better than anything I came up with.
Another common practice in larger email campaigns is A/B testing where you split your list in half, create two alternatives named A and B to test, then compare test group A against test group B and adopt the method that gets a better response for future mailings. This method is particularly useful for testing subject lines because they’re typically the most easily-adjusted aspect of an email marketing campaign and they’re also quite influential on whether or not people open up the message.
Once you get a good subject line, a clean list and a good engagement mechanism in place, you still need to ensure that the email itself is worth reading. And here’s where a lot of people make a big mistake leading to our fourth issue with email marketing – the content in the message isn’t useful, often because it’s not well-matched to the person receiving it.
So remember what I was saying at the top of the show? I get email all day, every day from people who don’t know me or my business and who waste my time – and theirs! – with pointless pitches for things I don’t want or need. If they’re lucky, I swipe the notification away and move on. If I’m annoyed, I tend to filter their future messages to my junk mail folder.
And guess what? I’ve had actual clients do that to me! A very painful lesson I learned earlier in my career is that if I send out newsletters or survey invitations or other mass emails from my actual email address, I may get blocked by the person reading or their spam filters or IT protocols and then they’ll never see anything from me ever again. One client who was actually working with me on a large project suddenly couldn’t receive emails from me because of this and I had to correspond with them via my personal email instead. Whoops!
I know better now. But the problem was that I didn’t cater my content to my mailing list – I mass-mailed a bunch of people thoughtlessly in a “cast the nets wide!” strategy and I basically looked to the people and systems receiving my emails like a spammer.
What I should have done was segment my list to only send those messages to the people who actually were likely to want to receive them. And again, this means doing something that a lot of people with big email lists are loathe to do – actually asking the people on your list if they’d like to receive your newsletter or survey invites or announcements or anything else.
If they opt in, chances are good you won’t go to spam because they’ll look for your content and make sure they can see it.
If they don’t opt in, don’t fret! You can still send them a personal note asking if they’d like to receive your content and then opt them in that way. If you have a relationship with them, it’s pretty easy to take this follow-up step.
And if they opt out, all is not lost! They just may need a different engagement strategy, and you’re better off not wasting their time – and yours! – sending fruitless and potentially annoying email marketing. Maybe they’re better off getting a mailer or a LinkedIn message or a personal greeting at a conference. They may opt in later.
Now, if you’re listening to me and thinking, “this is great for B2B, but how do you do this at scale?” the answer is you use a mailer program like Constant Contact or MailerLite or MailChimp or Brevo or Zoho Campaigns or a CRM platform to help you manage and maintain your list. There’s even a good one in St. Louis called BenchmarkONE, formerly known as Hatchbuck.
These usually come with a cost, but they can save you a lot of time and trouble and also help you optimize your email campaigns so that you don’t waste a lot of time.
As for the content itself, I recommend once again using an AI tool to help you optimize the content inside your message. Remember that many people read email on their phones, so large graphics are often a bad idea unless they’re optimized for phone usage. Attachments and dubious links trigger spam filters and raise suspicions about scams, and long messages, I’m sorry to say, rarely get read. So be short, to the point, clear about what you want and focused on getting the reader to respond to your call to action or engagement tool. If you have something that person genuinely values, they’ll probably take a look at what you’re offering.
One more problem with email marketing comes from determining the frequency of your messages. Every day is too much for most people. Once a week can be too unless you have something worthwhile to share every week. Practically speaking, once a month or once a quarter is a good interval for touching base depending upon your audience, and you can always create high-value opt-in situations for people who want more contact.
For example, you can build an opt-in newsletter on a platform like Substack and have that go out weekly with longer-form content for those who want to hear from you more often.
You can also try to steer interested parties towards social media connections where they can opt in to hearing from you more regularly in their social feeds.
And of course you can ask those desiring a lot more contact to enroll in programs where they join communities of similarly interested customers.
It’s never a bad idea to ask people how often they want to hear from you – a little bit of research can go a long way there! – but it’s also good to look at how engaged people are at the interval level you select and see if you can get a boost by pulling back or being more frequent. You can also use some of the aforementioned tools to personalize frequency – and truthfully, as AI tools get more integrated into email marketing platforms, the frequency aspect of your strategy is going to move to set it and forget it anyhow because the tools will monitor what is and isn’t working at a personal level.
I hope these tips have been helpful! Email marketing is a useful tool done right, but it’s far from your only tool, so be sure to be conscious of how it’s playing into your broader strategy for incorporating digital marketing, earned media, social media, paid media, SEO and chatbot optimization.
I’m Sean in St. Louis, and this has been The Marketing Gateway. See ya next time!
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