(And Why Most Solutions Miss the Mark)
You’ve read about ACME Inc. and EMCA Inc., you might be thinking, “Okay, I get it. I want to be more like EMCA. But how?”
It’s a great question. And to answer it, we first need to understand why it’s so hard to break out of the ACME pattern.
The Truth About Email Marketing Success
Here’s something that might surprise you: Most of the technical challenges in email marketing were solved years ago.
Want to send a million emails? There are dozens of platforms that can do that.
Need to segment your list? Every decent ESP has that capability.
Looking to automate campaigns? Take your pick of tools.
The real challenges aren’t technical at all. They’re strategic and systemic.
Let me show you what I mean.
The Deliverability Trap
Picture this: Your open rates are dropping. The natural response? Check your deliverability.
You Google “how to improve email deliverability” and find the usual advice:
- “Clean your list regularly”
- “Use authentication protocols”
- “Monitor your sender reputation”
All good advice. But here’s what nobody tells you is that the real issue isn’t deliverability in general – it’s your inbox placement rate. And that’s a much thornier problem.
Let me explain.
Your emails might be getting delivered (not bouncing), but are they actually reaching the inbox? Or are they being filtered into the spam folder? Your ESP has all the spam complaint feedback loops (FBLs) with all major ISPs but Google doesn’t have one. And with Gmail now representing about 50% of most email lists, this is a crucial question.
The catch is that Gmail doesn’t provide a FBL system like other major providers do. This means you have no direct way of knowing if your subscribers have have SPAM button in one of your emails. And you keep sending and they keep ending up in Spam.
Sure, Google Postmaster tells you something, but it’s by far and large an inadequate tool.
Back to our story. “No problem,” you think. “I’ll just segment more actively and create better content!”
If only it were that simple.
Low engagement rates are usually what trigger poor inbox placement in the first place. But once you’re in that hole, you can’t just segment and optimize your way out of it. Why? Because now you’re dealing with:
- A damaged sender reputation that takes months to rebuild
- Reduced visibility even to engaged subscribers
- A need to maintain revenue while fixing the underlying issues
- Technical debt from previous “quick fix” attempts
It’s a classic catch-22: You need better engagement to improve inbox placement, but you can’t get better engagement when your emails aren’t reaching the inbox.
The Automation Paradox
Here’s another common scenario: You invest in a powerful automation platform, expecting it to solve your email marketing challenges.
Six months later, you have:
- A complex web of automation flows that nobody fully understands
- Dozens of segments that may or may not be relevant anymore
- Campaigns that trigger without clear purpose
- Data, but no actionable insights
But the real problem runs deeper.
Most marketers approach automation like they’re building a maze – complex paths with multiple decision points and intricate logic. It looks impressive on paper, but here’s what actually happens:
While you can map out every possible path a subscriber might take, they’re standing at the edge of darkness. They can’t see what’s coming next. They don’t know your carefully planned journey. To them, each email either resonates or it doesn’t.
I’ve seen companies build elaborate 30-step automation flows when a simple 5-step sequence would have been more effective. Why? Because they’re focusing on what’s technically possible rather than what’s actually valuable to the subscriber.
The Real Roadblocks
Let’s look at these core challenges in detail:
1. The Knowledge Gap
Most email marketing education focuses on tactics rather than principles. Here’s what this looks like in practice:
- A SaaS company implements all the “best practices” they can find:
- Welcome sequences
- Abandoned cart reminders
- Re-engagement campaigns
- But they don’t understand why these elements work (or don’t) for their specific business model.
- An e-commerce brand copies successful campaigns from their competitors, not realizing that timing, context, and audience expectations matter more than the actual content.
- A B2B company invests in expensive marketing automation tools but uses them to essentially send batch-and-blast campaigns on a schedule.
2. The Systems Problem
Email marketing isn’t just about sending emails. It’s about building systems that:
- Consistently deliver value to subscribers
- Automatically segment based on behavior
- Trigger the right message at the right time
- Scale without breaking
But most companies try to build these systems backwards. Here’s what I mean:
Imagine building a house. You wouldn’t start by buying furniture and then try to design the house around it. But this is exactly what many companies do with email marketing:
- They buy an ESP first, then try to fit their strategy to its capabilities
- They create automation flows before understanding their user journey
- They implement tracking before deciding what metrics actually matter
3. The Pressure Cooker
Remember how I mentioned that almost no one has three months to thoroughly plan their email marketing program?
This is the reality for most marketers:
- You need results this quarter (preferably this month)
- Your list isn’t performing as well as it used to
- Management wants to see immediate improvements
- You don’t have time to start from scratch
So you do what seems logical: send more emails to more people more often.
And the cycle continues.
Breaking the Cycle
Here’s the thing: Moving from an ACME approach to an EMCA approach isn’t just about changing what you do. It’s about changing how you think about email marketing.
It requires understanding:
- Why certain approaches work (and others don’t)
- How to build systems that scale
- When to use automation (and when not to)
- What metrics actually matter (and why)
Most importantly, it requires a framework that lets you implement these changes without having to stop your current program.
Because let’s be honest – you still need to hit your numbers while building something better.
The Path Forward
After working with hundreds of companies across dozens of industries, I’ve discovered something interesting: The companies that successfully transition from ACME to EMCA all follow a similar pattern.
They don’t do it by:
- Buying more expensive tools
- Hiring more people
- Completely overhauling their program overnight
Instead, they follow a systematic approach that lets them build a better email marketing program while maintaining (and often improving) their current results.
This is exactly why I created the 9 Steps of Email method. But before I tell you about that…
Learn more about how to transform your email marketing –>
Note: In the next section, you’ll discover a proven framework for building sustainable, profitable email marketing programs. One that works whether you’re just starting out or trying to fix an existing program…
