The Marketing Operations Strategist - Email Is More Important Than ABM or AI

Hey! 👋

Hope you’re doing well!

Email is a bit of a lost art in ops nowadays — it often gets tossed to the side in favor of flashier channels/tools/tactics like ABM or AI. HOWEVER, this is a huge mistake, because email is the highest ROI channel you have in both marketing and sales.

I’ll explain why after a quick word from our sponsors:

So, why is email the highest ROI channel?

1. Owned Audience, Not Rented

• There’s no algorithm dependency: You control the distribution (unlike social or search).

2. High Intent and Personalization

• Email lists are often opted-in, meaning the audience actively wants your messages.

• Personalization and segmentation (based on behavior, lifecycle, etc.) are easier to coordinate in email and boost performance.

3. Clearer Attribution and ROI Tracking

• It’s easier to attribute conversions via UTM parameters and CRM integrations.

• You can measure opens, clicks, conversions…the full funnel.

4. Lifecycle Fit and Frequency

• Email touches every lifecycle stage: Welcome → nurture → conversion → retention → win-back.

• It can support multiple CTAs and formats in one message.

• Email enables sequenced automation (vs. single-touch ads).

5. Cost-Effective at Scale

• CPM (cost per thousand impressions) is low compared to paid media.

6. Integrates Across Your Stack

• Email connects with:

  • CRM (HubSpot, Salesforce)

  • CDP/Segmentation tools (like Segment)

  • Ecommerce (like Klaviyo + Shopify)

  • pretty much anything in B2B

Now you know why it matters, but what else? What do you need to know about email to run it effectively?

I have a few quick guides for you…you can copy + paste them into your own docs or reference them without anyone knowing. 🙂 The goal was to create guides that I wish I’d had earlier in my career.

📤 The Complete Guide to Email Deliverability

This guide outlines how to get more emails into inboxes by focusing on:

1. Authentication – Set up SPF, DKIM, DMARC, and BIMI to prove your emails are legit and protect your domain.

2. Sending Strategy – Warm up your domain, send consistently, clean your list, and focus on engagement.

3. Monitoring & Optimization – Use tools like Google Postmaster Tools and set up feedback loops to catch and fix deliverability issues fast.

Goal: Build trust with inbox providers so your emails avoid spam folders and actually get opened.

Link to the full guide: The Complete Guide to Email Deliverability

🤝✉️ Email Consent Compliance Guide

This guide breaks down how to stay compliant with global email laws and build trust through proper opt-in practices.

1. Understand Consent Types –
   Know the difference between:

   • Explicit Consent (checkbox or double opt-in — required for GDPR, PECR, CASL)

   • Implied Consent (past customer — OK under CAN-SPAM in limited cases)

   • Transactional Emails (don’t need consent but can’t be promotional)

2. Follow Consent Principles –
   Make sure consent is:

   • Freely given (no pre-checked boxes)

   • Specific and informed (people know exactly what they'll get)

   • Unambiguous (clear action required)

   • Documented (consent data is stored, including where and how you got consent)

3. Implement Compliance Best Practices –

   • Use double opt-in

   • Add privacy policy links to forms

   • Include unsubscribe links in every message

   • Let users manage their preferences

   • Keep detailed audit logs

   • For B2B: still follow consent rules (include company address, truthful subject lines)

Goal: Ensure you're legally compliant while improving subscriber trust and engagement.

Link to full guide: Email Consent Compliance Guide

Now, there’s more to email than these 2 guides, but I tried my best to include as many external resources as possible so you can dive in as deeply as you want. BTW, these are my first stabs at the templates, so please let me know if you have any feedback!

The key fundamentals I want you to walk away with:

1. Email deliverability is not something that you just “set and forget” — it’s an active environment that you need to manage. Make sure you understand the technical pieces but also actively monitor your reputation, to make sure your emails land in inboxes and not in the promotional tab or spam folder.

2. You need to focus on training your users on this content as well. Too many sales people are just spraying and praying emails all over the place, oftentimes on company-owned domains. They are effectively wrecking the domain and costing the company business, even if they are closing deals in the short term. Don’t get too technical, but explain to them the fundamentals and stress the importance of following best practices. Believe me…I once had a top-performing rep ruin an email domain and that company couldn’t set up another domain without Gmail immediately blacklisting them. The email services providers DO NOT mess around!!!! This goes for marketing too — in a perfect world, train them on how to monitor and manage their own email campaign performance.

3. Consent is not just a word, consent is the law. Many companies fly by the seat of their pants and hope to not get caught, but those who do get caught illegally retaining data or illegally emailing people face harsh consequences. In operations, a big part of our job is to protect the company — email consent compliance included. I’m not saying to go ultra conservative right off of the bat, but work with your legal counsel or team to talk through what is compliant and practical.

4. Email is arguably your most important channel. Want to invite someone to a webinar? Gotta email them. Want to invite someone to an in-person event? Probably have to email them. As people answer their phones less and less, email will become more and more critical. Don’t take this channel for granted, make it a focus, even as flashier trends come and go.

5. Treat email marketing like you would if you were sending the email to your friend. Don’t be spammy, annoying, creepy, or deceptive. If you do something malicious like require a reason for unsubscribing, it leaves that person with a bad impression and potentially burns a bridge. Or even worse (lol), you could get roasted on LinkedIn. 🤣

What I’m up to/what I’m studying 💭

Exciting news — I’m joining Vector as their Revenue Operations & GTM Strategy Lead! 🥰 I’m super stoked because I’m obsessed with the product and the team, AND I’ll be able to further build my RevOps and GTM Engineering muscles. I’ll be sure to share everything I learn along the way. 😁 

Dear Sara ✍️

New to marketing operations? On a team of one at your company? Shy/introverted? Wish you could ask a question to an experienced marketing operations professional, without them knowing who you are? Here’s your chance! Submit an anonymous question to me here and I’ll answer a new question in every issue.

Here’s my answer to a question from last week:

Oh wow….is it sad or funny that I knew where this was going halfway through? 🫠 Been there, done that with a slight remix.

OKAY so here’s what I recommend:

1. Be kind to yourself. I know that’s very chicken-soup-for-the-soul of me to say, but it’s true — you tried to advocate and be proactive and were shut down, and that’s frustrating…especially now since you’re holding the bag. Make sure you don’t try to immediately fix every little thing, you’ll burn out quickly.

2. Create a prioritization matrix. Look at your current responsibilities vs. newly added and talk with your manager/leadership about what matters the most to them. Then, analyze and project what you think you can reasonably do in a certain time frame (usually quarter over quarter). Then, go back to your manager and present your plan. This is the way to go because 1) You have some control over your own destiny 2) Your manager was involved in the process but not creating the deliverable, which they usually like and 3) You can use the completed artifact to advocate for yourself/explain what’s going on if stakeholders get frustrated about not getting everything they want right away. Actually I have one last piece on this tip — leave 10% of your capacity open if you can. Things always come up in Ops and that 10% could be the difference between a busy week and you feeling like you want to quit.

3. The great news is that HubSpot has a lot of free training material online, if you aren’t very familiar with HubSpot. Check out their academy and take their marketing automation training, and CRM too if that’s the CRM your company uses. Then, go into this panel (item #1) in HubSpot and see what the tool recommends you conquer first, from a system standpoint.

4. This isn’t comprehensive, but basically you want to document, document, document, audit, audit, audit. Get a lay of the land before you dive too deep into anything. You’ll start to see where issues lay and this will help you get an even clearer picture for your prioritization matrix. You might find this previous edition of The Marketing Operations Strategist helpful.

Good luck! Hang in there. 🫡

Thanks for reading,

❤️ Sara