Why Proving Email's Value Internally Feels Like Screaming Into the Void
Let me guess: you’re the lone email voice at your company (or close to it), constantly trying to get stakeholders to care about inbox placement, broken authentication, or the fact that your emails are generating millions in revenue — but leadership’s eyes glaze over faster than a Thanksgiving turkey.
Sound familiar?
Yeah, well you’re not alone. In fact, during a recent deliverability roundtable I hosted, this was the most common pain point across the board. Even seasoned email pros at massive, well-respected brands shared how hard it is to get anyone outside of email to give a damn.
Why is it so hard to prove email’s value internally?
Let’s break it down.
1. Email is a Silent Workhorse
Unlike flashy ad campaigns or viral social content, email just… works.
It isn’t loud or sexy. It doesn’t demand attention (...until something breaks). But it’s consistent. And in a world obsessed with shiny new toys, consistency gets overlooked.
💌 When it’s successful, it delivers consistent revenue like a BOSS. Quietly. Reliably. Which is at least partially why a lot of us end up doing the email equivalent of janitorial work — essential, but invisible.
💌 When it struggles, the symptoms are often subtle, such as declining open rates, creeping spam placement, and gradual list fatigue. None of these scream "emergency" to people who aren’t deeply familiar with the channel.
2. Email is Everyone’s Side Job
Unless you’re at a major ecomm or B2C brand, odds are, email doesn’t have its own team. Maybe it lives under Marketing. IT or CRM. Or (lord help you) Sales.
Regardless, it ends up being owned by people juggling five (hundred) other things, and it becomes just one more box to check.
The result? Email isn’t seen as a strategic channel, so it doesn’t get the resources it needs.
And worse, decisions that directly impact performance (like changing sending domains, adjusting copy, or adding a countdown timer) get made without looping in the person responsible for deliverability.
3. We’ve Trained Leaders to Underestimate It
Really though, we need to own this one: we haven’t always told email’s story well.
We’ve allowed the narrative to be “email is low-cost, low-effort, and low-risk”... and now leadership treats it that way. Working for an email delivery company, I can tell you it's a race to the bottom... everybody wants to spend less on their email CPM.
But cheap ≠ disposable! Email is strategic, and it’s time we made that clear.
We’ve also over-indexed on vanity metrics. Open rates, click-throughs, and bounces might mean something to us, but they don’t move the needle for leadership. If we want email to be taken seriously, we need to translate its impact into the language of business. Impact. Value.
So, What Can We Do To Convey Email’s Value?
Let’s get tactical. Time to roll up those email marketin’ sleeves of yours!
💌 Translate Email Metrics into Business Impact
I know, I know… tying email data to business impact is hard.
Like, really hard. Customer.io surveyed over 600 lifecycle marketers to get a read on what’s working, what’s not, and where teams are investing this year and more than half of marketers say reporting is their biggest challenge – but most also say they aren’t planning to fix it any time soon. Sound familiar? 🤨
But no one outside of email cares about your open rate. They do care about revenue, cost savings, and customer retention. So, try framing your insights like this…
"We recovered $2M in revenue last year by improving inbox placement."
"Our triggered email program converts 3x higher than paid social — with zero media spend."
"By sunsetting unengaged contacts, we saved $14K/year in ESP fees without hurting revenue."
Better yet, tie your metrics back to business goals your stakeholders already care about, like reducing customer acquisition costs (CAC), increasing lifetime value (LTV), or improving net revenue retention.
Need to get more creative than that? I feel you. I wrote about the business impact of deliverability issues not too long ago, which gets into other ways to frame the value email (and unseen costs of not sending it right).
💌 Use Visuals to Show Progress or Problems
Graphs. Heatmaps. Before-and-after screenshots. Show the difference between 80% inbox placement and 98%. Show the spike in engagement after fixing broken DKIM. Make the invisible visible.
You’re not just reporting numbers… you’re telling a story!
People love to feel smart and nod along with your company’s success. Make that easy for them by letting them see the impact of good (or bad) email practices.
Keep the story simple. Ditch the jargon, add visuals, and make sure even your VP of Sales could follow it with half an ear.
If you find yourself shy on visuals without spending a billion hours hunched over a spreadsheet, again… I feel you. Here’s a little ditty I wrote on how email analogies can help you paint a mental picture to get your point across.
💌 Frame Deliverability as Risk Mitigation
Executives loooove risk reduction.
I’m getting sleepy just thinkin’ about using an analogy about insurance, but that’s exactly what deliverability is… insurance for your brand reputation!
You wouldn’t ignore a legal or compliance risk — whether that was a DDOS attack or even just the shaking fist of an angry trademark troll — so why would you ignore the channel that touches every customer in (very likely) too many ways to count?
Instead of talking about "warming a domain," say…
"We’re proactively avoiding $X in potential losses by protecting our sender reputation."
"A domain block at Gmail could cost us our top-performing revenue channel."
💌 Build Internal Allies
It’s easier to make change happen when you're not the only one ringing the alarm. You don’t need an army. Just one or two allies will do the trick.
By being curious about what motivates your colleagues in sales, marketing ops, analytics, and customer support, you’ll often find that the challenges they’re facing aren’t all that different from your own, even if they have entirely different goals.
So, find your people! In whatever way(s) you’re comfortable with:
💌 Use a good ol’ lunch-and-learn session to bring others up to speed on deliverability basics, or request an opportunity to give a quick update in a company all hands meetings. Keep in mind, you don’t need them to be experts! You just need them to stop unknowingly torching your sender reputation.
💌 Set some time aside for a casual chat with members of other teams. Where I work (SocketLabs) we do something called Coffee Pals. You get paired up with someone outside your team to talk about… whatever you want! It’s a great way to build trust (particularly if you work remotely), and you have the opportunity to gain mutual awareness about your day-to-day efforts for the business.
💌 Show interest in your colleagues’ work — ask questions, share helpful updates, and send kudos for a job well done. Collaboration starts with curiosity.
Also: get all kinds of cozy with your data team! They can help you validate and amplify your insights — especially when you need to get leadership buy-in.
💌 Document Wins, Losses, and Lessons
Keep receipts. Track changes, log outcomes, and share them often. If leadership won’t tell email’s story, you need to. If leadership isn’t giving email the recognition it deserves, be the one to start the narrative. You’re not bragging—you’re doing your job.
Start a running doc of experiments, optimizations, and remediations you’ve led. Capture before-and-after numbers with short summaries. Use ‘em in quarterly updates, retros, or team meetings.
And yes… share the losses, too. Transparency builds credibility and trust — two things marketers are often running short on.
💌 Reframe the Conversation Entirely
Sometimes you need to zoom out.
Remind leadership that email isn’t just a marketing channel. It’s your most direct line to the customer. It powers onboarding, account management, billing, support, upsells, product usage… the list goes on.
When email works, it builds trust at scale. When it doesn’t, the whole experience suffers and customers quietly walk away. That’s not a “marketing problem.” That’s a business problem.
How can you creatively make that case? (Ahem… using storytelling!)
"You're Killin' Me, Smalls"
FINE - I was about to wrap it up anyway. Here's your TLDR for this week's lesson.
Email is valuable. You know it. I know it. It’s time the rest of the company got the memo.
So, keep showing up. Keep telling the story. And if you ever need a reminder that your work matters, there’s a whole community of email nerds standing right behind you.
You’ve got this. 💌
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