Most of the content you read on social media around email marketing is fluffy bullshit.
Marketers propagating “best practices”, ludicrous Klaviyo attribution screenshots and peddling soundbites around flows that anybody with half a brain could dispute.
I’ve picked 7 of the myths that really get under my skin in today’s article that nobody wants to say out loud – but I will.
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1. Your Welcome Flow is Skewing Attribution
That shiny revenue number your ESP shows from the welcome flow? Yeah… it’s a lie — or at least a misleading half-truth.
Why? Because attribution models give undue credit to emails that happen to fire when someone’s already on their way to purchase. Especially in the first few days of signup when intent is sky-high. The welcome flow is essentially riding the coattails of intent from the ad itself, as opposed to doing any real nurturing.
A few weeks ago on LinkedIn, Wiehan created a post that explained the issue clearly:
“For this DTC skincare brand:
10,241 newsletter subscribers converted within the first 30 minutes.
Only 2,550 newsletter subscribers converted between days 1 and 30 after signing up for the email list.
Email and SMS take a lot of credit for conversions that happen within the first 30 minutes of someone making a purchase.
But is email and SMS being over-credited?
The short answer: Yes (and we all know this deep down).
Instead of debating this endlessly, here are practical ways to maximize revenue from the cohort that converts within the first 30 minutes, while also showcasing your value:
↳ Tactic 1: Serve the coupon code on the success page and the email.
↳ Tactic 2: Be aggressive with email/SMS messaging volume on day 0 of signup.
↳ Tactic 3: Increase AOV on the first purchase through bundles.
↳ Tactic 4: Showcase high-margin products in the first email to nudge customers toward the products you want them to purchase.
↳ Tactic 5: Enable order editing to allow customers to modify their orders without needing customer support, reducing operational expenses (OpEx).
↳ Tactic 6: Make your customer support team available to assist with guided selling while customers are actively shopping.
e.g. Add a live chat widget, include phone numbers in your email/SMS, offer "Reply to this email/SMS for 1:1 support" options.
↳ Tactic 7: Test different incentives (and have fun with it).
e.g. 2-for-1 deals, gift-with-purchase offers, mystery discounts, etc.”
Case closed: stop trying to over-credit email & SMS in the Welcome Flow and focus on the customer journey instead.
2. The First 24 Hours Upon Subscription Are Cornerstone to Your Welcome Flow — After Then, It Falls Off a Cliff
Everyone obsesses over 7-day sequences, but the truth? Email fatigue sets in fast.
If you haven’t captured attention and converted in the first 24 hours post-subscription, your chances plummet. This is when engagement is at its peak. Your brand is fresh. Curiosity is high.
But after day one? Open rates drop, clicks tank, and that welcome sequence becomes background noise.
Again, Wiehan thoroughly debunked this myth in another LinkedIn post.
The best brands frontload value, clarity, and compelling offers immediately. If your welcome strategy is a “slow drip” — you’re losing sales.
3. Email Capitalises Upon Brand Equity from Intent
This one might sting: email doesn’t magically “build relationships.” It’s not a standalone nurturing tool.
Email works best when it’s capitalising upon the intent already scooped up from an ad algorithm. This is why META and Google are such strong machines: they help you discover customers that are “in the market” and likely to buy.
If your brand isn’t already strong, email can’t make it strong. It’s an amplifier, not a foundation.
You can’t nurture what doesn’t exist. You capitalise on brand equity and buyer intent — not create it from scratch.
Now, this is not to say email doesn’t play a role in nurturing subscribers. But it’s not in the way portrayed by marketers on social media, of customers magically being strung along and sitting on the edge of their seats waiting for your next email.
Most of the time, we’re capitalising upon fortuitous timing. And that’s ok, because it still takes skill to show up at the right time when consumers are most likely to buy.
4. Your Ability to Drive Repurchases Post 90 Days of Subscription Falls Off a Cliff
Your ability to influence repurchase rates falls off a cliff post-90 days for most brands in FMCG.
This is because after 90 days, email engagement falls off a cliff.
If you aren’t building an omnichannel retention strategy, you’re going to struggle to make an incremental impact.
Don’t believe me? Simply pull a segment report for new subscribers and analyse a cohort table for most CPG brands. Post 90 days, your ability to influence consumer behaviour on email alone is limited.
This doesn’t mean you should stop targeting these individuals. But it should mean that you focus your intent on the leverage you have in the first 90 days of the customer journey, as opposed to overindexing strategies like winback flows that won’t move the needle.
But after 90 days, even your best subscribers start to ghost you. They’ve seen your tricks, your subject lines, your offers. Unless you're constantly refreshing your strategy or the product has natural replenishment cycles, re-engagement becomes a massive uphill battle.
5. Your Abandoned Cart Flows Don’t Yield the Revenue You’re Expecting
Everyone loves to point at their abandoned cart flow as proof of how “automated revenue” works.
But here’s the uncomfortable reality: most abandoned cart revenue is cannibalising attribution.
Think about it. The customer was already buying. The email just happened to catch them mid-journey. Maybe they got distracted. Maybe they planned to come back. You didn’t necessarily “save the sale” — you just slid in with a reminder and may be simply over-attributing sales.
Cart abandonment flows aren’t magic. Most of the time their true incremental impact can be disputed throughout holdout testing.
That’s not to say they don’t work at all or aren’t worth setting up. But it is my sincere belief that it makes more sense to find out why your abandonment rate is so high first, and then using these insights to create a better customer journey so that the issue is less prevalent in the first place.
How do you do this? By leveraging qualitative research in your flows like this.
6. The True Incremental Gains are Found in Campaigns
If it wasn’t clear enough by now, it is my belief that most automation capitalises on intent that’s already been built through acquisition campaigns.
I’m not saying this to be provocative. Flows still drive a significant amount of incremental revenue over time and I’d much rather have them than not.
But if we’re talking about ways to drive true long-term incremental revenue, it’s through email and SMS campaigns that really move the needle.
These are things like product drops, promotions and company announcements.
This is a lever you have much more control over in testing and measuring, as opposed to flows, which are primarily determined by the amount of traffic that is delivered to your website AND the quality of that traffic as well.
7. You Can’t Gamify the Promo Tab
You can’t “trick” Gmail into thinking your offer email is transactional. You can’t bypass the sorting algorithm forever. What you can do is show up in the promo tab and actually matter.
The best brands don’t try to game the system; they make themselves the most exciting thing in that inbox.
You don’t need to hit Primary; you need to make your Promo presence irresistible.
