Why Your Email Marketing “Problem” Isn’t Actually About Email

Why Email May Be the Symptom, Not the Problem

When your email channel isn't performing, it can be insanely frustrating to understand why. Nobody's clicking the emails, the list isn't growing, and, of course, the worst one: nobody is buying. You start to ask yourself, “What the heck is going on?”

The thing is, most of the time, email is really just the symptom of the problem, but not necessarily the root cause. And this is what throws most people off. It could be the people you're attracting to your list, the offers you're using, the way your brand is being presented, or even the experience somebody has after they place an order.

If you don't take the time to understand these things, you can end up spending months, or even years in some cases, trying to improve your emails when they were never really the problem in the first place.

My name is Nick. I'm the founder of Barbs Media. At this point, we've worked with over 70 different ecommerce brands and have generated over $60 million in email-attributed revenue.

When we look at a brand's email performance, the first thing we need to understand is what's happening around it before we can make useful decisions about what needs to change. In this video, I want to walk through the things that I would look at if your email marketing feels like it's completely stopped working, because there's a good chance the solution goes beyond writing or designing a better campaign.

1. Look at the Quality of People Joining Your Email List

The first thing I would want to understand is: where are your subscribers coming from, and what made them interested in your brand in the first place? Because that has a huge influence on what you can reasonably expect your emails to do.

A growing list doesn't necessarily mean you're attracting good customers, especially if people are joining for a giveaway or an offer with little to no connection to your products.

If you sell premium apparel, for instance, but your acquisition message revolves around the lowest price, those subscribers may have little interest in an email about your materials or craftsmanship because you brought them in with a different expectation.

That doesn't make everyone who signs up for a discount a bad subscriber necessarily, since an incentive can help someone who already likes your brand take the next step. What matters is whether there's a real interest beyond it.

Look beyond how many subscribers your pop-up collects or what you paid to acquire them, and follow through to whether they actually placed an order, what they bought, and whether they came back. Fundamentally, those are the three most important things.

That's going to give you a much better understanding of which sources bring in valuable customers, rather than blaming your welcome series for struggling to convert people who just had very little interest to begin with.

2. You May Have Become Too Dependent on Discounts

This ties into the last point, but if your emails perform well during promotions and struggle with everything else, you need to look at how often you're giving people a discount and what you've been teaching them to expect.

This usually happens gradually, where an offer brings in revenue, so you run another one whenever you need a stronger week. Eventually, customers just learn to wait because why would you pay full price for something when you know that there's going to be another sale coming soon?

That also affects how people perceive your brand, especially if you're positioning yourself at a premium price point. You can talk about quality and craftsmanship and all that on your website, but if someone's main experience with you is an inbox full of flash sales, you can't expect that to actually work.

Promotions still have a place, but your emails need to give people reasons to buy between them, whether that means explaining the product's value, showing how it fits into their life, or just answering a question that's holding them back. Finding a real pain point is what's important.

When customers already want the product, an offer can help them make the decision. But if discounts are already doing all the convincing, protecting your margins becomes much harder.

3. Your Emails Have Become Repetitive

I've seen this one the most out of everything, to be honest. If you open your last 10 campaigns and look at them together, you'll often notice repetition that isn't obvious when you review each email individually.

If every campaign follows the same product image, short description, “shop now” format, your audience is going to start assuming that they already know what's inside it before they open it. You have to have scroll-stopping emails and differentiate them from time to time.

Product highlights have their place, but someone who's been on your list for six months needs more than another introduction to something they've already seen.

For an apparel brand, they might like a piece but feel unsure about how the fit is or how they would wear it, which gives you something useful to address through sizing advice, styling ideas, or examples from other customers.

You can explain a design decision, compare products, share customers' experiences, or write a more personal note about what's happening behind the scenes, using whatever format suits the message.

You want enough variety and substance that opening your emails continues to feel worthwhile, even when somebody isn't ready to buy that day.

4. Your Email Marketing Is Disconnected from the Rest of Your Business

Your customers move between your ads, website, socials, and emails as they get to know you. Those channels need to support the same experience.

It's very common, if you work with an agency in one or even more of these channels, that they're going to have their own prerogatives and their own ways of doing things, and each one is going to eat into the other. It's really important that all of those funnel into the same messaging.

Someone might discover you through an ad, check your Instagram, read reviews, and then subscribe while they're still considering a purchase. By the time your first email arrives, they already have expectations that it should build on.

That becomes difficult when the person managing your email doesn't know what types of ads are running, what's luring the subscribers in, which products are getting attention, or what's happening somewhere else in the business.

An ad might be performing well because it demonstrates a particular benefit, but your welcome series doesn't mention it at all. Or if you have an offer on your socials, people are expecting to see that offer in other parts of your business, your ads, or your emails. When they don't see it, obviously they're not going to be super pleased.

There's useful information in each channel that should inform the others. Whether that's a question appearing in your comments or a product demonstration getting attention in your ads, the message can take a different form in each place while still giving customers a consistent understanding of your products and why they should care.

5. You Aren't Investing Enough in Acquisition

Sometimes brands expect email revenue to keep growing while the number of new people entering the business has been declining for months. This is exceptionally common in subseigure brands.

If paid ads are your main acquisition source and you've reduced spending without replacing the traffic, you'll eventually feel it through fewer subscriptions, fewer first-time buyers, fewer customers who might return later, and fewer people in general entering your automated flows.

You can improve how well you convert and retain those people, yes, but there's a limit to how much growth you can generate from the same audience, especially when you sell something they only need occasionally.

A welcome series receiving half as many qualified subscribers may generate less revenue while converting just as effectively. Rebuilding it won't address the full problem.

Spending more on ads only makes sense when you're actually acquiring good customers at a cost the business can support. But if that's already happening, then underinvesting may be limiting your retention program as well.

Whether new customers come from ads, search content, or referrals, you need a consistent source of relevant interest to keep growing.

6. You're Relying Too Heavily on What Claio Tells You

If your entire performance review revolves around attributed revenue in Claio, you're missing a lot of the big picture. The platform, in my opinion, is the best one for email marketers.

However, it's very common that an order can be credited to an email even when the customer already intended to buy it in the first place or was influenced by another channel.

Understanding the Metrics That Matter

As retention marketers, it's extremely important to understand metrics like subscription to conversion, your average order value, customer lifetime value, and your repeat purchase rate.

Your subscription to conversion is going to tell you what percentage of new subscribers became customers within, let's say, a defined period like 30 days, which is going to help you evaluate the quality of your list growth. That's going to ultimately decide how much quality your list actually has.

Average order value tells you how much customers spend per order. Customer lifetime value helps you understand what customers contribute over their lifespan. And repeat purchase rate is going to show you how many customers are coming back after their first order. These are the numbers that we have the most control over when it comes to email and SMS marketing.

These metrics need context because customers acquired last month haven't had the same opportunity to return as customers acquired last year. Different products naturally have different buying cycles. But when you compare similar customer groups alongside total revenue and margin, you're going to get a clearer picture of whether the work is actually helping or not.

Klaviyo says email revenue is up while fewer subscribers convert and customers only return for deeper discounts. Well, I'd want you to understand that before you're calling it a success.

Your Product or Customer Experience Might Be the Problem

And the last thing is that your product might suck. Your product might not be as good as you think it is, or the experience might fall short of what your marketing promised.

You can build enough confidence to get that first order, but once the product arrives, the customer's experience has a much stronger influence on whether they buy again. No matter how great your emails or how good your loyalty programs are, if the product isn't good, they're not going to buy again.

If the fit is wrong, the quality disappoints, or the product doesn't work as expected, no amount of post-purchase emails are going to fix that. The same applies when the product is good, but delivery is frustrating or customer support is difficult to reach.

So before rewriting your win-back flow, read the reviews, look at return reasons, and speak to customer support because they may already understand what's preventing the second purchase. You might find something better education can address or discover that your marketing needs to set more realistic expectations. Sometimes the product itself just needs improvement.

You also need to account for what you sell because someone who's happy with a durable product may have no reason to replace it. If it's just a one-time purchase with a low-ticket item and they don't need to buy this every month, then that's the reason why they're not going to buy again. It's not because of any emails. It's that the product is so good, they just don't need it again.

A good retention program builds on a good customer experience. Any problems there deserve attention before you spend more time trying to persuade people to return.

Finding Where the Problem Starts

So if your email marketing is underperforming, working through these questions will help you understand where the problem starts and which changes deserve your attention.

Look at who you're attracting, the expectations you're creating, and how that carries through to the purchase and the experience afterward. Then you can measure whether your customers are becoming more valuable over time.

Getting Help and Working on Your Emails

And if you'd like help doing that for your brand, you can book a free audit with me through the link below. We're going to review your email and SMS setup, identify opportunities, and discuss what I would prioritize for your business.

And if you're ready to work on the emails themselves, check out my last video right over here, where I show you how to use AI to build a world-class email in about 5 minutes, which you can then export to a design suite like Figma to polish it off. I'm going to leave that video on the screen so you can follow the process and try it for your own brand.

Thanks for watching, and I'll see you in the next…