Your email program is overdue for a portfolio review

For most of my consulting career, email audits followed a fairly predictable pattern. I’d review a client’s email program and look for three things: what worked, what didn’t, and what was missing. The goal was simple: build on what worked, fix or retire what didn’t, and identify opportunities the organization hadn’t yet explored.

When I first started consulting, many organizations simply weren’t doing enough with email. They weren’t taking advantage of automation, segmentation, or lifecycle marketing. There were obvious opportunities to improve results by building new capabilities.

Lately, though, I’ve noticed a shift. Today’s email programs are overgrown. Most organizations didn’t set out to create sprawling collections of newsletters, automations, nurture campaigns, onboarding series, event promotions, and one-off initiatives. Each was created for a legitimate reason. A business need emerged, a campaign was proposed, resources were invested, and another piece was added to the ecosystem.

This isn’t the result of poor marketing. It’s almost the opposite. Organizations are much more sophisticated. They’ve embraced marketing automation, invested in lifecycle marketing, and built increasingly personalized customer journeys. Every new campaign was created to solve a business problem, and at the time, most of those decisions made perfect sense.

That’s why today’s email audits look different. The biggest opportunity often isn’t adding another campaign. It’s deciding what still belongs.

How did we get here?

Organizations are very good at adding to their email programs, but much less disciplined about asking whether each new initiative represents the best use of marketing resources.

I was reminded of this while working with a client who wanted nurture campaigns for several gated content downloads. Following up with downloaded content is generally a best practice, so we developed the nurture strategy and messaging.

Months later, I checked the results. A few of those automations never sent a single email because the content offers weren’t generating any downloads. There was nothing wrong with the campaigns themselves. They simply had no audience.

One of the things I value most about consulting is helping clients invest their limited budgets where they’ll generate the greatest return. I’d much rather help a client invest in an initiative that produces measurable business value than develop something that never has the opportunity to make an impact. When we spend time and budget on campaigns that never run, we miss the opportunity to invest those same resources where they could make a real difference.

The same thing happens over time across an entire email ecosystem. Organizations keep adding campaigns because each one seems worthwhile on its own. Very few stop to ask whether it’s the best investment or how it fits into the larger strategy.

The question we’ve stopped asking

The more organizations I work with, the more I think we’re asking the wrong questions. We tend to evaluate email one campaign at a time.

• Should we optimize this automation?
• Should we update that newsletter?
• Should we build another nurture campaign?

Those aren’t bad questions. They’re just too small. The bigger issue is whether the entire email ecosystem intentionally supports the organization’s most important goals.

Think about a building. Every load-bearing beam exists because it supports something essential. Remove it, and the structure is weaker.

Now imagine spending 10 years renovating that building and adding support beams every time someone started a new project. Eventually, you’d have beams running through the dining room, blocking hallways, maybe even cutting through the bathtub. They aren’t making the building stronger. They’re simply taking up space because no one ever stopped to ask whether they were carrying any weight.

Mature email ecosystems evolve the same way. Every campaign contributes something. The real test is whether it contributes enough to justify the time, budget, creative energy, and organizational attention it consumes. 

More importantly, if you were designing your email ecosystem today, knowing your current business priorities, audiences, and resources, would you build the same program?

That’s very different from asking whether an individual campaign performs reasonably well.

It’s a portfolio decision. That’s how mature email programs need to think.

Maybe it’s time for some Swedish Death Cleaning

This shift in my consulting work keeps bringing me back to the idea of Swedish Death Cleaning.

If you’re not familiar with it, Swedish Death Cleaning is the practice of intentionally going through your possessions and deciding what deserves a place in the next chapter of your life. It’s not about getting rid of things for the sake of having less. It’s about making deliberate choices so that what remains is useful, meaningful, and aligned with what’s most important.

Email ecosystems deserve the same treatment. Every newsletter, automation, nurture campaign, and triggered message should answer a simple question: Is this one of the best uses of our time, budget, and creative energy to help the organization achieve its goals?

That’s a very different standard than asking whether a campaign is working. A campaign can generate opens, clicks, and even occasional conversions without being one of the highest-value investments your team could make. The real opportunity isn’t optimizing every existing program. It’s stepping back, looking at the ecosystem as a whole, and intentionally deciding what deserves to stay, what should change, and where to invest those resources instead.

That’s the shift I’ve made in my own consulting. I still believe in optimization. But increasingly, optimization comes after something much more important: making sure the email ecosystem itself intentionally supports the organization’s strategic priorities.

Only then does it make sense to optimize what’s left.

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