Email returns a high ROI, but only when it's done right. Miss one of the steps and your forecasting tool becomes a crystal ball. So before anything else, identify the goals you're assigning to the channel, and answer three questions honestly.
What are you looking to accomplish?
"More sales, obviously." Easy answer. Now make it real: you run a portal with a dozen products on it. Which goal takes precedence? Focus is simple with one goal and rare with several.
A few examples of what real goal sets look like:
Job site
- Drive more job applications and traffic.
- Push users to complete profiles and use the different sections.
- Nurture leads toward buying job ads.
- Build brand trust and recognition.
Travel portal
- Generate sales across tickets, accommodation, and car rentals.
- Boost engagement on the community side.
- Recruit new service providers onto the platform.
- Support affiliates with current deals and angles.
Insurance broker
- Run a pre-sales education program toward a free consultation.
- Cross-sell existing customers to raise lifetime value.
- Publish product insights to support brand authority.
You get the picture. Depending on your size and ambition you could add more, but don't. Keep it short.
There's a deeper move here, though. Most teams ask what they want to get from email; the better question is what they want to accomplish through it. Same goals, inverted posture:
A job site
| Traditional goal | Better approach |
|---|---|
| Create more job applications | Help job seekers find relevant opportunities faster |
| Drive more traffic | Keep candidates informed about positions matching their skills |
| Convert employers into paying clients | Help employers understand the candidate market |
| Build brand awareness | Share useful insights about industry trends |
An e-commerce store
| Traditional goal | Better approach |
|---|---|
| Increase sales | Help customers discover products they'll love |
| Reduce cart abandonment | Make sure customers never miss a relevant deal |
| Drive repeat purchases | Keep customers informed about products they care about |
| Boost average order value | Make buying decisions easier |
The left and right columns chase the same outcomes; only the posture flips. That posture is the whole game, which is also why your goals matter less, on their own, than you'd think.
Are you ready to commit?
Anyone can have goals. The real question is whether you'll bite the bullet and resource them, which depends entirely on how important email is (or could be) to your business.
A proper program costs software, hardware, knowledge, and people to keep it running. If email is genuinely load-bearing for your model, commit. If it's a "nice to have," do something else well instead. There are other channels and they work.
"Aren't there hundreds of ESPs that rent the software as a service?" There are. But the cloud is just someone else's computer, and ESPs are someone else's people, hardware, and software, all priced in, and steadily rising. Going with the easiest SaaS and rolling blindly with it is what I call mailchimping your way through email: looking for the simplest option and never learning what's underneath it.
Nothing against MailChimp; they spread real awareness and have generally stood on the side of privacy and decency. The problem is that many people learned email only through tools like it, so their entire vocabulary is lists, segments, auto-responders, and the Send button. Then:
"My ESP has great deliverability, my emails always hit the inbox, I shouldn't worry about stuff I'm no expert in."
How do you know your deliverability is good? How many addresses have you seed-tested? What happens the day your ESP loses that edge, or drops you for a bounce rate slightly over their threshold? That has happened to plenty of companies. Use an ESP, just understand what you're using. It's your money and your growth at stake.
Now that you know what you want from email, figure out what you're working with.
The value proposition of your channel
I keep this to one question the subscriber asks, consciously or not:
Why should I read this email now, instead of doing anything else with my time?
Which hides three smaller ones:
- Who are you, and what do you want? Not just your brand name: what you stand for, why you're qualified to help, what makes you different, and why they should trust you.
- What's in it for me? Specific (not "great content" but "industry insights that help you make better decisions"), relevant to what they actually care about, unique enough that they can't easily get it elsewhere, and worth their time.
- Why now? The timing (why this moment), the urgency (what they'd miss), and the relevance (why it matters to them today).
Answer all three, for every email, and you're most of the way there. This is also why your goals don't matter much on their own: if your emails don't answer these questions for the reader, no goal will save them.
Most companies never install this thinking. Ask them the value proposition of their email channel and you get "well, they gave us their address, so we email them; everyone does" or, worse, "we blast them to boost sales." Please don't blast anyone with anything. Email is the most personal place on the Internet, and many countries treat it that way. Spamming is still legal in the U.S., but Europe, Canada, and others have strict laws against it. And in the U.S., know this: fewer and fewer people unsubscribe. More just endure until they snap and hit report spam, which is one of the biggest sources of trouble there is.
Define your personas
You need to know who's on the other side, or you'll send irrelevant messages. Unless your product serves a very narrow pocket of people, define personas, not stock photos and demographics, but working profiles you can write to.
Give each a name and a short backstory, then answer:
What's their ideal end result? Where are they now, where do they want to be? You're the facilitator of that trip. For a fitness product the after is "lose weight" or "build muscle." Name the before and the after explicitly. It's the one part of their journey you know in advance, like looking through that crystal ball.
| Before | After | |
|---|---|---|
| Situation | where they are now | where they want to be |
| Feeling | the frustration | the relief |
| Status | how they're seen now | how they want to be seen |
The before-and-after row is the one that matters most: it's the one part of their journey you can see in advance, like looking through that crystal ball.
What's blocking them? Know the roadblock so you can press on it occasionally (finding a job is hard, getting fit is hard because of X) without overdoing it. Look in four places: external roadblocks (circumstances, time, money), internal ones (fears, beliefs, habits), knowledge gaps, and the practical implementation hurdles that stop people even once they're convinced.
What gets them one step closer? This is where your product enters: X is hard because of Y, but Z makes it easier. You're the facilitator, not the hero.
What do they think and feel, see, hear, and say and do? This is the empathy map: work each quadrant until you can hear them.
Get into their head and find the exact phrases that trigger a "familiarity click": the moment they recognize themselves in your words, drop their guard, and start seeing you as one of their tribe. That's where trust starts, and it's what lets you write sharper subject lines, more compelling copy, better triggers, and better timing.
Common pitfalls to avoid
A few ways this step goes wrong:
- The assumption trap: deciding you already know your audience instead of doing the research.
- Everything to everyone: trying to speak to too many personas at once, so you connect with none of them.
- Goals first: fixating on your numbers before you understand what the people on the other end actually need.
- The static persona: treating a persona as fixed once it's written, rather than something that keeps evolving.
That's Step 1. It's the cheap step to skip and the expensive one to get wrong, so it's worth a second read.
