Brands have never had more channels available to them, yet genuine audience ownership has never felt more elusive. 

Take LinkedIn. Most B2B brands invest heavily in building a presence there, and over time accumulate thousands of followers. It’s great for visibility and brand awareness. But it’s also worth noting that as of 2025, LinkedIn company pages account for only around 1–2% of users' feeds. What’s more, if a social channel changed its algorithm overnight, or a platform shut down entirely, your entire following there would disappear with it.   

Against that backdrop, email stands apart for a structural reason that matters more than any metric; an email list is one of the few assets in a marketing stack that a brand truly owns. It’s built on direct consent, accessible on demand and immune to the rent-seeking dynamics of third-party platforms.  

But somehow, email marketing is often overlooked. It continues to make returns; approximately £38 for every £1 invested, a ratio that has strengthened over the past five years. Solid email sequences tend to generate a 42% average open rate, while one in three email clicks convert. 

The strategic question, then, is whether you’re extracting its full value. Here are seven areas where most brands aren’t.  
 

1. Your GDPR touchpoint is probably wasted 

Consent mechanics are non-negotiable. But the copy and design around them doesn't have to be clinical and forgettable. Your opt-in moment is, by definition, the first impression a prospective subscriber gets of the type of content you’re going to send them. And yet the vast majority of brands treat it as a legal formality: a checkbox, a vague promise about 'updates and offers' and a button that says 'subscribe'. 

That's a missed opportunity on two counts. First, unclear value propositions attract low-quality subscribers who will disengage quickly, dragging down your deliverability and skewing your idea of who your engaged audience actually is. Second, a well-crafted opt-in moment can actively excite people about what they're signing up for, and your brand as a whole.  

Lead with what the subscriber specifically gets. If you send a weekly digest of industry insight, say that. If subscribers get early access to new products, say that too. And write the whole thing in your brand's tone of voice, because this is the first signal of what's to come. A brand that sounds genuine, direct and considered in its opt-in copy sets an expectation it can then consistently meet. 

Tone approaches:

No: “Subscribe to our newsletter to receive updates and special offers. By entering your email, you agree to receive marketing communications from us. You can unsubscribe at any time.” 

Yes: “We want you to be ahead in the conversation. Sign up to receive exclusive commentaries on the latest shifts in technology, policy and trends shaping the energy sector. We'll share links to reports, insights and events we think will benefit you. You can unsubscribe at any time via the link in every email.” 
 

2. Segment from the very beginning 

Your sign-up form is your first chance to understand who you're talking to. Used well, it can tell you whether someone is a buyer, a browser, a decision-maker or a student doing research. The challenge is capturing that intelligence without creating friction, because every additional field you add to a form reduces the number of people who complete it. 

Hidden form fields and UTM parameters solve a lot of this discreetly. They can pass campaign source, landing page context, or referral data into your CRM automatically, without asking the subscriber a single extra question. Someone who signs up via a landing page for a specific product range is telling you something meaningful, even if they haven't filled in a 'what are you interested in?' dropdown.  

Build your forms and your data architecture to capture those signals from day one. The data won't always be perfect, and UTM strings get broken or dropped more often than you'd like. But having the infrastructure in place is far better than trying to retrofit segmentation logic onto a flat, undifferentiated list two years down the line. 
 

3. Not everyone on your list should get every email 

This is probably the most consequential point on this list, and the most consistently ignored. Segmented email campaigns generate 30% more opens and 50% more click-throughs than non-segmented ones.  

The analogy that makes this click for most marketers is paid social. Nobody running a meta campaign would serve the same creative to a cold lookalike audience and a warm retargeting list of people who've already visited the checkout page. The message, the offer and the tone would be completely different, because the audiences are at completely different stages. Email is no different, and yet batch-and-blast remains the default approach for a huge proportion of brands.  

Segment by behaviour, by lifecycle stage, by product interest and even by firmographic data if you're B2B. The goal is for every subscriber to feel like the email they're reading was written with them in mind, because the ones that do get opened, clicked and acted on. 

4. Think beyond the email you're writing right now 

Every email exists in a sequence, even if you haven't deliberately designed one. Your subscriber remembers, consciously or not, how your last email made them feel. They have a sense of your cadence, your content style and what you tend to ask them to do. All of that context shapes how they engage with your subject line before they've even opened the message. 

Write with that in mind. What did this segment receive last week? What stage of the relationship are you in? An early-stage welcome sequence should feel exploratory and generous. A re-engagement email to lapsed subscribers needs to acknowledge the gap without being awkward about it. A promotional email to long-term, high-value customers should feel like a reward, not a push.   

It's also worth thinking about the competitive inbox context. Your subscribers are receiving emails from your competitors and dozens of other brands in their sector. If you know your audience well, you can make reasonable assumptions about what else is landing in their inbox. That line of thinking is particularly valuable when it comes to subject lines and preview text. Standing out isn't just about clever wordplay. Sometimes it's about being the email that treats the reader like an adult and gets to the point. 
 

5. Get the visual and text balance right 

An email built entirely from one large image is a deliverability risk and an accessibility problem. If images are blocked by default, which they are in many corporate email clients, your subscriber sees nothing. Additionally, 35% of mobile users now view emails in Dark Mode… an image-only email with a white background can effectively blind the reader the moment they open it. Text-only emails, meanwhile, can feel like a wall of words in a busy inbox, and they miss the opportunity to reinforce visual brand identity. 

The rule of thumb is a 60/40 split in favour of text, and there’s a logical reason. Text does the functional work, carrying core messages, your CTA, your key offer. It renders everywhere, works with screen readers, and it's what spam filters and ISPs can actually read and evaluate. Images do the brand work, reinforcing visual identity, create hierarchy and give the eye somewhere to land.  
 

Think of images as punctuation; a header visual to set tone, a product shot to anchor the offer, or a secondary visual to break up a longer email. They shouldn't be carrying the message (or anything out with a punchy headline). If you stripped every image from your email and the communication still made complete sense, you've got the balance right. If it collapses without them, you haven't. 
 

6. Shorter usually wins, but not always 

You’ve probably been taught that concise emails perform better. That’s true when it comes to new subscribers or disengaged contacts. People who are still forming an opinion of your brand will not read eight paragraphs before they've decided whether you're worth their time. Get to the point quickly, make the value obvious and give them one clear thing to do. 

That said, there is a segment of most lists who actively want longer reads, whether that’s detailed analysis, in-depth product information or a note from your CEO. In fact, it’s the goal to achieve this; these tend to be your most engaged subscribers, the people who open consistently, click regularly and are closest to a purchase or a long-term relationship. Serving them the same stripped-back email you'd send to a cold contact undersells what you could offer.  
 

Put simple - the answer isn't to write longer emails for everyone. It's to know which part of your list wants depth and write for them accordingly. 

 
7. Your buttons deserve more attention than you're giving them 

Replacing a plain text link with a properly designed CTA button can increase click-throughs by 28%. But the design is only half of it. Button copy is where most brands sabotage themselves. 'Submit', 'read more', and 'click here' are bland and don’t say nothing, especially when lacking context. They fail to set expectations and waste the one moment in the email where you have the reader's attention and a clear opportunity to direct it. 

Write button text that describes exactly what will happen next. Lead with a verb. Reinforce the value of clicking rather than just describing the mechanical action. 'Download the guide', 'book your consultation', 'see the full results': all of these are more useful to the reader and more likely to convert than anything generic. We’ve written a whole separate article on button copy which you can read next.  

And when it comes to reporting, don't stop at the headline click-through rate. Drill down into which specific link or button drove the action. An email with four links and a 3% CTR tells you very little. Knowing that 2.8% of those clicks went to one specific button, and 0.2% went to everything else, tells you a great deal about what your audience actually cares about. That's where the useful insight is, and that's what should inform the next send.