Email marketing does more than push products

How do you assess whether an email campaign has worked?

The typical answer is simple enough. You send an email, someone opens it, clicks the product being promoted, then buys it. Lovely when it happens. But if that is the only way you judge the campaign, you’re underestimating what email is actually doing.

An email about one product doesn’t only create demand for that one product. It can remind someone to reorder something they already use. It can send them back to the website to browse. It can trigger a purchase for a completely different product. It can also do something less obvious but still commercially useful, put the brand back into the customer’s mind.

Becoming the brand people mentally associate with a product has enormous commercial value. Think of a fizzy soft drink.

I would bet a decent amount of money that most people thought of Coca-Cola. That is the power of brand association.

Most people aren’t sat around waiting to buy the exact thing you happen to be promoting on the exact day you promote it, and this is why email marketing is often measured too narrowly.

If you send an email about Product A and someone buys Product B two days later, was the email a failure? Not necessarily. If the email reminded them the business existed and sent them back to the website, it has played a role in making the sale more likely.

We saw this recently with an e-commerce campaign. The email was pushing the company’s second best-selling product, but a lot of the sales that followed came from the brand’s best-selling item instead.

That doesn’t make the campaign a failure. It suggests the email did what email often does best: it brought people back, reopened the buying thought, and let them buy the thing they were already most comfortable buying.

The problem is that role is harder to measure neatly. That doesn’t make it worthless.

This is also why industry benchmarks can cause trouble

As I covered in my previous post on Google and Microsoft Ads benchmarks, benchmarks are useful, but only when they’re treated as context rather than law.

Klaviyo’s benchmarks show that placed order rates from email campaigns are often below 1%. So if you’re emailing a smaller list and expecting every campaign to produce obvious direct sales, you can easily draw the wrong conclusion.

The campaign may not have failed. The audience might be too small to judge too aggressively, or the timing might not have been right. The email may have supported a buying decision rather than being the final click before purchase.

This is why email shouldn’t be treated as a one-shot sales blast. It’s called email nurturing for a reason.

It’s a repeatable visibility tool. It keeps the business present, gives customers prompts, reminds them what they liked, what they need, what they nearly bought, or what they’ve bought before.

I’m not advocating that you start battering people with product pushes and hoping something sticks.

Frequency is an important factor to judge. Klaviyo often recommends a consistent email rhythm, with two emails per week being a common starting point. Some companies email every day and make it work, others would damage their list doing the same thing. The tolerance depends on the audience, the product, the offer, and whether the emails are actually useful enough to justify their place in the inbox.

Testing beats guessing when it comes to email marketing

A high open rate is usually a good sign. It suggests the subject line has done enough to earn attention, but the open rate alone isn’t everything. You still need to look at clicks, purchases, unsubscribes, site behaviour, and whether people continue engaging over time.

We recently tested this for an e-commerce brand. Despite me having a strong dislike for emojis in sentences, I had to put personal biases aside and test. Adding an emoji to the end of the subject line increased the average open rate from 40% to 62%. The click rate also doubled.

That doesn’t mean every brand should start adding emojis to the end of every subject line. If you look at your own Gmail, Hotmail, or whatever free email account you use, you’ll see that not every company does it.

But it does mean that small changes can make a measurable difference, and email marketing should be tested rather than guessed.

The bigger point is this: email campaigns shouldn’t only be judged by whether someone buys the exact product being pushed in that exact email. That’s too narrow and you’ll miss other important observations.

Email can absolutely drive direct sales, but it can also remind people of your brand, reactivate old customers, redirect attention, and keep your business in the customer’s memory.

If you ignore the bigger picture, you may end up switching off campaigns that are doing more commercial work than the numbers first suggest.