Email underbuilt

Considered Content asked over 1,000 senior B2B tech marketers what they use, and what they think works.

Email marketing came out as the most popular lead gen tactic in technology, but ranked 34th for effectiveness.

Content syndication ranked 6th for effectiveness in brand building, but 37th for popularity.

Now, this is all perception, not incrementality, and people are famously bad witnesses to their own work.

But it’s still useful, because it shows how the people running the machine feel about the machine.

Why are we so bad at leveraging what we know works?

The cheap channel trap

Here’s the pattern I see repeating, and it’s a bit boring because it’s structural, but stay with me.

Email stays in the plan because it’s cheap, it looks measurable enough, and it feels owned.

Owned channels win internal debates because they don’t require a procurement fight, a platform learning curve, or a new line in the budget.

So email gets kept even when it’s underpowered, because it’s easier to keep a weak thing than to fund a better thing.

Then the team watches performance drift, blames “audience fatigue”, and tries to fix it with a subject line workshop.

The trap persists because “cheap” also means “nobody invests time in it”, and time is the only input that actually changes quality.

Your emails are competing with 117 other emails

Email is not failing in an ideal environment where every message gets a thoughtful read.

Microsoft’s Work Trend Index puts the average worker at 117+ emails a day, with most skimmed in under a minute.

So your newsletter is trying to create demand while being processed at the speed of a 2008 Blackberry on 1% battery.

This is where the economics die in the light, because the channel feels cheap right up until you need deliverability, list hygiene, and message quality to survive the inbox.

Deliverability turned email into a compliance project

If you send more than 5,000 messages a day, Gmail now requires one-click unsubscribe for marketing and subscribed messages.

Other providers are pushing in the same direction, with expectations around authentication and a clear unsubscribe path.

Standards like RFC 8058 exist because mail providers are tired of everyone pretending “unsubscribe” is a design choice rather than what it’s becoming in most countries - a regulatory expectation.

Spam complaints and disengagement are a reputation problem as much as they are an engagement the people whose product is email.

So “email is cheap” is only true if you’re happy shooting into the dark.

”Email marketing” is two different systems wearing one label

When a survey says “email marketing”, people usually picture newsletters, nurtures, and outbound sequences.

That stuff is fighting for resource in a hostile, crowded place, and it often gets built by whoever has half an hour between meetings.

But there’s another category of email that customers actually want to receive.

Onboarding emails, access changes, security alerts, billing updates, document delivery, complaint handling, and the confirmations you did what you said you’d do.

Transactional and automated emails are relationship builders that can run without hammering the inbox, which is a polite way of saying “stop treating everything like a campaign”.

In a lot of companies, marketing never touches these, which is strange given they’re some of the most read messages the business sends.

A team you’ll recognise in five seconds

A B2B SaaS team sends a weekly newsletter and a couple of nurtures, from a marketing domain with decent authority, and on not-too-bad templates.

The product sends onboarding and account emails from a different domain, with default styling, broken spacing, and the emotional warmth of an error log.

Customer Success uses a third system for “important updates”, because that’s how the tool was set up in 2019 and nobody wants to change it.

The marketing team are saying “email doesn’t really drive growth in our industry - no one reads emails anymore”, because the CTR is 1.2%.

Meanwhile, the operational emails are doing the actual work of trust building, expectation setting, and reducing perceived risk, even they look like they were assembled on Windows 64.

Anyway, deliverability takes a dive after a quarter of aggressive cold outbound, and the first place it shows up is in the emails customers were relying on, because sender reputation doesn’t care about your org chart.

Why this keeps happening

Email sits in the gap between marketing, product, support, and security, which means it belongs to everyone in theory and no one in practice.

Campaign emails get attention because they can be “pushed out” on a whim, at low cost, and it seems like the kind of thing marketing should be spending their time on making look pretty.

Operational emails get ignored because they look “functional”, and functional work rarely wins a budget argument until something breaks.

The incentives also skew hard toward sending more, because volume creates more to measure, and a feeling of activity, even if you’re secretly training the audience (or their inboxes) to ignore you.

(Deliverability and privacy limitations raised the minimum standard, but we still plan email like it’s 2016, when the inbox was less militant.)

And because inbox overload is real, the gap between a great email and a good email is the gap between being read and being deleted on sight.

Decisions that change the outcome (and the trade-offs)

Decide whether email is a “marketing channel” or a “customer communications surface”, because the second choice forces cross-functional ownership and slows down random sends.

Audit across automated and transactional email quarterly, because you will find duplicated sends, broken logic, and brand drift, and you will hate it and want to fix it.

Protect deliverability like a product metric, and as a critical business risk, because going straight to junk limits outbound comms for more than marketing alone - plus people will be furious.

Coordinate your sending domains and authentication approach where sensible, because it reduces inconsistency, but it also means security and marketing have to speak to each other like adults.

Set a bar for what “enough” looks like for campaign email, because if you can’t fund quality creative and segmentation work, you need to make a strategic choice about what good looks like to justify why.

A diagnostic that beats most debates

Count how many different systems send emails to a paying customer in their first 30 days, and how many distinct identities and styles they see.

If the answer is “lots”, you don’t have an email strategy, you have email.

If you fix that, you have something consistent that starts to act more like everyday interface for brand trust.