Email Marketing: The Most Underused and Valuable Tool You Have

Written By James Hards – Head of Client Accounts at WorkWith Studios

Part three of How to Market your Business: Navigating Digital Marketing in the Cycling Industry

As someone who has worked across a broad scope of digital marketing, no other channel puts a smile on my face like email marketing. This is, more often than not, the most valuable channel you can have at your disposal and is chronically underused by brands and retailers.

Simply put, email marketing allows you to reach people that want to hear from you, and there are few other channels that offer this with the same consistency and content freedom. With basic pillars in place, it is easily possible to see returns as high as 35:1, and when you also consider the brand-building benefits, user experience, and opportunities to learn about your customers/fans…. it would be foolish not to take a closer look. 

Here are a few tips and insights into some of the key principles that we hope will help you, or at the very least give you an idea of how much potential is within this one channel.

Grow Your Audience

Most brands that want to invest more in email marketing might have a few different data sources (places where users can sign up). These could be in the footer of your website, a website pop over (yes, you might hate them, but they do work), Meta Lead Generation adverts (check out the Paid Social article) or maybe at checkout. 

Make sure they are all connected to your ESP (email service provider) and that you track where users are coming from – this initial sign-up source alone will allow you to create more personalised messages and get a greater understanding of their intent.

It can be easy to get ahead of yourself when it comes to capturing data and adding lots of form fields, which in theory will give you lots of useful information, but sadly, in practice is often a hurdle too high and can put users off entirely. Always remember that you can progressively profile users at a later time, though.

Today, users recognise the inherent worth of their data, and it is a more closely guarded, valuable asset than ever before. To earn it, you must enter into an honest value exchange. Be prepared to offer something in return, whether that’s your expert insights and knowledge or a concrete, tangible incentive. Always motivate the sign-up action by making the immediate benefit clear to your users.

Segment Your Audience

Here are some very basic segments that are worth starting with for any e-commerce brand. If you’ve integrated your website, then there will be hundreds of different data points you can segment your audience, and by extension, your messaging.

• New Leads
• Active Leads
• Non-active Leads
• Unengaged leads
• New Customers
• Existing Customers
• Inactive Customers
• Bounced Last 30 Days

You can segment on nearly anything. Really. You may need to ask your users for their input, but once you capture it as a data point, then you can use conditional logic to create different audiences. 

Bonus tip: Don’t want to explicitly ask your audience for more data? Give them multiple content choices based on what you want to learn, and then track the click action. We class this type of profiling as ‘implicit data’ collection.

Source: Klaviyo

Talk to your Audience

Basic automations that will be relevant to all ecommerce brands include a multi-part welcome series, an abandoned cart & browse email, a reactivation series and also a sunset flow. This simple setup alone will take care of most of the critical points within a customer lifecycle. 

Supplement your automations with ‘ad hoc’ marketing email campaigns that communicate your news and updates. Keep in mind email ‘frequency’ and set a cap as to how many emails a user can receive in a set time window (in Klaviyo, this is called ‘Smart Send’).

Remember that Transactional emails happen as well. It may not be ‘marketing’, but they show in the same space (inbox) and from the same sender (you). You have far more control over your marketing campaigns, so be aware of all the comms a user might receive.

Source: Klaviyo 2025 Benchmark Report.

Show Up Better

Email design can make or break a brand. You have control over what your content looks like, and be under no illusion, your audience knows this. 

At the bare minimum, try to incorporate design elements from your website and look at consistencies within spacing/padding, fonts & sizes, colour palette, images, etc.

Most of your audience is likely viewing your email on a mobile device. Design for this and make sure your content stacks correctly and is readable.

Dark mode is a hard one to cater for, but if you are using black/grey logos in PNG format, then try adding a white drop shadow/outer glow so you don’t lose them entirely when the inbox provider flips the hex codes on your coded colours.

Get Better Results

‘Deliverability’ is a word you may not have come across before, but it’s big in email marketing! There are specific triggers that will determine whether an email campaign will be rejected by an inbox provider. From the technical and action-based ‘sender reputation’ and ‘authentication protocols’ to more content and design factors (brands – please stop sending image-only emails!)

The psychology behind marketing messages deserves its own article, but there’s a big one with email marketing – the subject line. You need to be descriptive of your content, but also inspire action (to open the email). It’s easy to go full ‘clickbait’, but ideally, to maintain your legitimacy, you want to be a step or two before that point. ‘Legit-bait’ if you will…

Understand Your Results

Looking at an email report and you’ll see Open Rate as a primary metric. Ever since Apple rolled out MPP (mail privacy protection), you need to be careful with this result, as different ESPs will report Open Rates in different ways. It is an unreliable metric when looked at out of context of other open rates.. 

Click rates are unaffected by MPP, so can be used as a gauge of effectiveness (as long as you are including consistent CTAs!)

Make sure you check your attribution window. By default, most ESPs will attribute conversions to anyone who opened an email in a 30-day window. That may not be right for your business, so don’t be afraid to change it.

Want to see your email data in GA4? Make sure you have enabled UTM tracking in your ESP. If you’re not sure how to build a UTM campaign parameter, then follow this format.

Source: your email service provider (Mailchimp, Klaviyo, dotdigital, etc)

Medium: email

Campaign: internal-content-name 

Source: Klaviyo

Summary

Email is a funny channel. It is an incredibly comprehensive database of your best fans and customers, wrapped up in a design language and content framework that has been largely unchanged for 20 years.

Those 20 years of marketing insight and developed software give brands a lot of power, so be sure to use it responsibly and aim for the ‘marketing trinity’ of Right Message, Right Person, Right Time.

If you read this article and it’s made you more confused, then please just remember these four really key points, and it will go some way to making email better for everyone.

Don’t email users without their consent. Can you prove you have permission? 

Don’t collect data you don’t need. It’s weird and will ultimately make your dataset confusing and unmanageable.

Don’t send needless emails. Do you believe in the content you’re sending? Would you like to receive it?

Don’t put all your content in the email. Use your email as a vehicle to take users to a destination and inspire an action.

Sadly, there is a lot more that we could have covered in this article; we barely scratched the surface! If you want to learn more about email marketing or understand how it could help your business, then you can reach the WorkWith Studios team on info@workwithstudios.com or visit us at www.workwithstudios.com