I will attempt to argue against email marketing as a channel for any startup (B2b or B2c). 1. Channel is extremely crowded. Everyone has read the same best-pra

I will attempt to argue against email marketing as a channel for any startup (B2b or B2c). 1. Channel is extremely crowded. Everyone has read the same best-practices and optimization techniques. So emails from most companies (each one of them thinking that they are ‘differentiated) regress in quality and content to a mean. 2. Because it is so measurable (a marketer’s dream), this channel becomes less about what the emails say, but more about tricks to get one to open and click. 3. Excessive click optimization might erode “brand” (my conjecture). Since “brand” falls under the “soft stuff” in marketing, it gets attention as a second class citizen after one has taken care of the measurable stuff. (Defining brand as the ‘impression a word creates in your mind when you hear that word’) 4. Once a startup gives up on the ‘crutch’ of email - may be the team will think anew and innovate. Due to its measurability, my personal opinion is that companies don’t explore other channels - meaning, there isn’t a lot of invention going on. If one visited a random saas startup and saw a day in the life of their “email marketing team”, I bet they are all roughly doing the same thing and have the same goals. I fear that no one wants to lose out on the 1% out of 1 million attention that emails are able to get - consistently and repeatably - and are thus like a drug that one can’t get off of :-) and thus companies don’t risk inventing new channels. This is probably an ignorant rant (Eg a good counter argument would simply be - “email is popular because it works!”). Given the number of emails I get, I do wish more companies tried more creative techniques to grab attention. (The Snapchat vending machine for spectacles comes to mind as a good attempt at innovation. I must confess I have zero knowledge of how the numbers on that approach worked) In ecommerce, companies like brandless are doing well at getting attention without playing the standard email game (standard email game = ‘buy lists—>optimize—>$’ -> repeat). Having said this, the advice in this article is very sensible - if someone comes to your site and didn’t complete the purchase, it doesn’t hurt to ask again. I am just raising a caution against taking email marketing for granted - esp if an entrepreneur is just starting out - presumably she can take some risk and try innovative ways of grabbing attention, than just email.