Is Email Marketing Still Effective? Maybe We’re Asking the Wrong Question

Is email marketing still effective? Yes, it can be. But I think we've given email far more importance than it deserves.

For years, online business advice treated the email list as sacred territory.

Build your list. Grow your list. Segment your list. Nurture your list. Create funnels to get people onto your list so you can send increasingly sophisticated sequences designed to move them toward a purchase.

There is nothing inherently wrong with any of this.

But it can turn into an extraordinary amount of infrastructure devoted to communicating with people who have already found you.

And that creates an interesting problem.

What are you building that helps the next person find you?

That question matters more to me now.

In Assets Over Algorithms, I explore the importance of creating work that continues creating value after the moment of publication. Email can certainly be part of that ecosystem. I just don't think it should necessarily be at the center of it.

Is Email Marketing Still Effective?

Email marketing can still be effective for maintaining relationships with people who already know your work, communicating offers, sharing new ideas, and inviting people back into your ecosystem.

What email does not do particularly well is create discovery.

Someone generally has to encounter you first.

They find an article. Hear you on a podcast. See a recommendation. Discover you through search or AI. Read something you've written. Follow a link.

Then they might subscribe.

Email begins after discovery.

That makes it useful, but it also clarifies its role.

The Problem With Making Your Email List the Center of Everything

The old online marketing model often looked something like this:

Get attention. Offer a lead magnet. Capture an email address. Nurture the lead. Make an offer.

It made sense in a particular era of internet marketing.

But it can encourage us to think about our best ideas as bait.

Write a useful article so someone downloads the checklist. Create a social post so someone joins the list. Put the really valuable resource behind an opt-in form.

I increasingly prefer a different approach.

Make more of your expertise available to be found.

Publish the useful article.

Create the substantial guide.

Explain the framework.

Develop the idea.

Connect it to the rest of your thinking.

Give your expertise durable places to live.

This creates something an email sequence cannot create nearly as well: surface area for discovery.

Email Is a Return System, Not a Discovery System

This distinction is useful.

I think of a modern expert business as needing at least two different kinds of infrastructure.

Discovery infrastructure helps someone encounter your work for the first time.

This might include search, AI retrieval, articles, guide pages, interviews, collaborations, referrals, social distribution, and other publicly accessible assets.

Return infrastructure gives people reasons and pathways to come back.

That might include email, newsletters, subscriptions, communities, bookmarked resources, recurring content, and direct relationships.

Both matter.

But they solve different problems.

If very few new people are finding your work, endlessly optimizing your newsletter may be solving a downstream problem while ignoring the upstream one.

Your Website Can Do More Than Collect Email Addresses

This is another place where I think online business strategy deserves reconsideration.

For years, websites were frequently designed around conversion.

Get the visitor onto the list.

That can make us strangely impatient with the person who has just arrived.

What if instead of immediately trying to capture them, we helped them keep discovering?

One article leads naturally to another.

A short explanation leads to a substantial guide.

A guide introduces a framework.

The framework connects to several related ideas.

Eventually the visitor begins to understand not simply what you know, but how you think.

This is recognition infrastructure.

And importantly, much of it remains available whether you are actively publishing that day or not.

What About Email List Segmentation?

Segmentation can absolutely make email more relevant.

If someone bought one product, expressed interest in a particular subject, or behaved in a way that tells you what they need, sending them more appropriate communication makes sense.

But segmentation is an optimization.

It should come after a more fundamental question:

Is email important enough in my particular business to justify this level of complexity?

For some businesses, absolutely.

For others, sophisticated tags, automations, sequences, behavioral triggers, funnels, and multiple audience segments can become a rather impressive machine that mostly creates more machine to maintain.

Complexity should earn its keep.

If simple, thoughtful emails produce the relationship you need, simple may be enough.

Build for Recognition, Not Just Retention

This is the larger shift.

A list is valuable because you have permission to contact people again.

A body of work is valuable because people can continue to find, understand, remember, and return to your ideas.

Those are not competing strategies.

But they aren't interchangeable either.

An email disappears down an inbox.

A strong article can be discovered months or years later.

Generally, a newsletter serves the people who subscribed.

A public guide can serve someone who doesn't know you exist yet.

An email sequence can deepen an existing relationship.

A coherent body of ideas can create the relationship in the first place.

That is why I would put considerably more energy into building durable, discoverable intellectual assets before obsessing over increasingly elaborate email systems.

So, Do You Still Need an Email List?

Probably.

I have one.

But I no longer think “build your email list” deserves to be the automatic answer to every question about growing an expert business.

Build something worth finding.

Build enough coherence that one useful idea leads naturally to another.

Create durable assets that explain what you know and reveal how you think.

Give people reasons to return.

Then use email where it genuinely helps maintain and deepen those relationships.

The question isn't simply is email marketing still effective?

A better question might be:

What infrastructure will help my expertise continue to be discovered, recognized, and remembered, even when I'm not actively marketing it?

Email may be part of that answer.

It just doesn't have to be the whole thing.

N.B. Post revised 2026.