How to Convince Stakeholders to Stop Batching & Blasting Emails

Just a reminder to BREATHE, please.

And, take pride in your work - you're doing a great job. 

You’ve audited, segmented, and strategised. You care. Validate yourself first before you fight battles.

Every business has targets: subscriptions, donations, conversion rates, renewals.

Show them how email supports those goals consistently over time, not just in one-off blasts.

Do not use an email example on its own - email is a grouped function. 

Leaders don’t need digital marketing 101. They need to know email:

• evolves,

• is strategic,

• supports multiple functions across the business,

• and is not a push channel for impulse decisions or hitting quick and pressuring sales targets. 

Give them frameworks: PPPP™ email ecosystem, awareness vs conversion, long-term impact vs short-term sale.

When we talk about the cost of inaction, we’re not saying:

“If you don’t send this email to everyone, you’ll lose £X in revenue.”

We’re saying:

“If we keep sending emails the wrong way, over time our deliverability, visibility, and impact will decline, making the channel weaker and less valuable.”

Here’s how to reframe the conversation in a way stakeholders can understand:

The right way to frame it

“We’re not saying one missed email costs us a sale. We’re saying that bad email practice, repeated over time, means fewer emails land in inboxes, fewer people see us, fewer people engage, and so fewer conversions happen anywhere in the funnel.”

So the cost isn’t just in one lost transaction. It’s:

• Decreased inbox placement = fewer people even seeing our emails.

• Engagement rates fall = platforms deprioritise our domain = less eyes on our email = can't use email as an awareness channel = less action and registers by audience 

• Long-term deliverability drops = hard and costly to recover 

• Brand and business visibility declines = fewer site and destination visits, fewer searches, fewer thoughts, feelings etc from our audience 

• And yes, sales, pipeline, donations, etc. start to slide.

A better calculation (use this language)

Instead of “email = sales/leads/conversions/outcomes,” try:

“Right now, email supports X% of our business touchpoints, measured through [insert KPI or metrics]. If our deliverability degrades, we lose visibility. That visibility loss currently supports approx £X in marketing impact. So if we keep degrading, we risk losing a portion of that.”

It's about risk to impact, not guaranteed conversion loss.

Example you can use

“Let’s say 40% of our list is currently disengaged and at risk of spam placement. That means potentially 40% of our visibility is lost if we keep sending the same way. We don’t need to assume they would all buy, but right now, those people contribute to brand awareness, remarketing pools, web traffic, and content performance. That’s the compounding loss of £x" 

Offer a small, controlled test:

• Segment out 5–20% engaged audience

• Send email flows or personalisation experiments

• Compare results to the full-blast baseline

If they refuse even this pilot, that tells you about the company culture, and maybe signals it's time to jump ship.

Use metaphors: ask executives to open their inboxes and imagine seeing dozens of repetitive business and brand emails every day.

Ask how they feel when that happens and what they do (delete, ignore...).

That emotional anchor helps them feel the pain you’re solving.

You’re flipping the traditional email mindset from “How many people can we reach?” to “What impact does email create?”

What this means:

• Email is not just a conversion channel. It's an impact channel that supports multiple goals: visibility, awareness, customer retention, brand recall and pipeline movement.

• Success isn’t just clicks and opens. It’s also how email influences downstream metrics like direct traffic, revenue enablement, searches, and customer relationships.

• Your strategy has to define the kind of impact you want - and measure that, not vanity metrics.

You're advocating for a structured, system-led, strategic ecosystem, not random sending.

The PPPP™ Email Framework isn’t the classic copywriting “Problem‑Promise‑Prove‑Push” model; it's a structured ecosystem for transforming email programs and functions.

It stands for:

Pillars

These are the three core foundations of effective email marketing:

1. Systems: Your tech stack, CRM, ESP, CMS, data integrations, fully operational and maintained.

2. Strategy: A strategic approach that aligns email with business goals, customer journeys, segmentation, and flows.

3. Data: Accurate, clean, and dynamic data that actually informs personalisation, timing, and audience understanding.

A healthy email ecosystem starts at the ground level: tech and people infrastructure.

Pyramid (Hierarchy of Needs)

Inspired by Maslow, this shows what must be in place before execution happens:

• Deliverability & sender reputation at the base

• Behavioural segmentation above that

• Core workflows and journeys in the middle

• Content, subject lines, and design at the top

You don't skip levels to get straight to design. If deliverability is weak or data is bad, everything above collapses.

Principles (Guiding Rules)

Your proprietary "best practice" playbook—modern, strategic, and flexible:

• Think of email as an ecosystem and function, not a channel

• Send strategically, not sporadically

• Protect deliverability over chasing vanity clicks

• Align email with sales, service, and product messaging

• Measure impact, not just opens and clicks

These principles replace outdated, one-size-fits-all "best practices" with guidance that fits real business ecosystems.

Plan

This is the “roadmap to action”:

• Audit using the PPPP framework (use the FREE Email Marketing Health Check to start or get an email audit with Beth here)

• Identify key weaknesses and prioritise

• Set incremental tests and measurable goals

• Use pilot segments to prove efficacy

• Scale the strategy and track progress

Instead of treating email like a quick “sales lever,” treat it as a relationship function:

• That means nurturing over time - expect slower results 

• Being useful and human, not pushy and robotic

• Focusing on relevance over reach

• Treating disengaged contacts differently, not ignoring them, but positioning messages in a way that resonates with who they are and where they are.

Okay, marketers, this is where your commercial hat needs to come on. If you want to get buy-in from the business, you’ve got to start talking in their language. That means money, impact, and risk.

Here’s what you need to do: help your stakeholders see the cost of doing nothing. Not in fluffy “we could do better” terms, but in hard, credible, quantifiable impact.

Talk money - show either cost of inaction or the amount of opportunity - use related figures, factsand data to back up your claims. 

This is about showing stakeholders: this isn’t hypothetical. This is real. And we’re bleeding opportunity by sticking with the status quo.

Now you’ve set the stage to ask: “Can we just test a smarter way?”

This is your power move. You don’t need to ask for permission to overhaul the entire database strategy overnight, you just need a slice of the list, a solid hypothesis, and a smart experiment.

Pick a segment. Clean it. Personalise the message. Reframe the flow. Then measure it over at least 6-12 months. 

When you can walk into a stakeholder conversation and say,

“We tested this with just 8% of our list, and we tripled engagement, plus replies were overwhelmingly positive and assisted revenue/conversions/results have grown by [x]…”

They’ll listen.

It’s low risk, high reward, and it builds you a bulletproof case to scale what works. Not to mention, it shows you as the strategic thinker who didn’t just push back, you proved the point with data.