You can’t convince leadership with emotion. You have to convince them with numbers, logic, and language they actually understand.
The formula:
Email Visibility = (Deliverability × Engagement × Trust) ÷ Volume
Every “just send it” moment erodes one of those three factors. And once visibility drops, everything downstream (brand awareness, pipeline, site visits, sales, donations) declines too - whether or not it’s directly tracked in email.
Show this to your boss. Draw it on your forehead if you must.
Translation for leadership: “If we increase volume without improving quality, we make every other factor work harder and reduce overall visibility.”
How to reframe the conversations:
They say: “Can we just send it to everyone?"
You say: “Sending to everyone doesn’t give us more reach, it gives us more risk. When we hit disengaged inboxes, mailbox providers stop trusting our emails. So the more we send, the less people actually see us”
They say: “We can’t just stop emailing people, we’ll lose potential sales.”
You say: “We’re not losing sales by emailing less. We’re losing sales by emailing badly. People who don’t open or engage can be potential buyers, but with how we're approaching email they’re damaging our reach for the ones who are.”
They say: “That email didn’t drive any sales. Why didn’t it work?”
You say: “Email isn’t a performance channel, it’s a performance enabler. One email might not convert, but it builds the trust, awareness, and recognition that helps assist and influence the next action.”
If you can back all this with data, you've won.
How to communicate with leadership (and win them over)
Test, don’t argue
Create tests with a cleaned, engaged segment vs. a full list send.
Show the difference in delivery, engagement, and conversion - data ends debates faster than opinions.
Run a deliverability audit
You need to rule out that this is an issue for you. Batch and blast always correlates to poor deliverability. An audit will give you the ammunition to prove your point. Reply if you need help with this!
Use the “visibility at risk” calculation
Estimate what % of your audience is disengaged (say 40%). The more you send to them, it can impact your engaged audience and therefore this will grow over time. So what % could this be in a year, in a month?
Translate metrics into business language
Leaders don’t care about what we know; they care about reach, cost efficiency, and risk. So translate that into an outcome for them.
Set a new KPI
Track Inbox Visibility Rate - the % of your audience that can actually receive and engage with your emails (basically not landing spam). This turns deliverability into a measurable business metric. You can learn how to track this in my upcoming masterclasses.
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