Why Email Marketing Still Works

The newsletter that generates £1.2M per year — from 28,000 subscribers

In 2019, a freelance financial planner named Marcus started a free weekly newsletter about personal finance for people in their 30s. Not a blog. Not a podcast. Just an email, every Tuesday.

He wrote it himself. He answered reader questions. He explained what was actually happening in the economy, in plain English, without selling anything.

By year two, he had 28,000 subscribers and a 51% open rate — exceptional by any benchmark (a figure that, post-2021, would need click-through rate corroboration to verify genuine engagement, given Apple Mail Privacy Protection inflation).

He launched one product: a £39 financial planning workbook. In the first 24 hours, 1,100 subscribers bought it. That's £42,900 from a single email to people who had been reading his free content for two years.

He now sells two cohort-based courses per year, priced at £497. Each cohort fills within the week he announces it. Revenue: £1.2M per year. Team size: Marcus and one part-time assistant.

He's tried Instagram. He has a LinkedIn. Neither gets him clients. Email is his entire business.

(Illustrative scenario based on patterns common in email marketing. Specific figures are representative of real-world outcomes — not a verified account of a specific named company.)

Why email beats every other channel

This isn't nostalgia for an old technology. The numbers consistently show email outperforming every alternative:

The four reasons email wins:

1. You own the list. Your Instagram followers belong to Instagram. Your Twitter/X followers belong to Twitter. Your email subscribers belong to you — stored in your CRM or email platform, exportable, portable. If every social platform shut down tomorrow, your email list would still be yours.

2. Inbox is a different mindset. When someone opens email, they're in a processing mode — not a scroll mode. They're more focused, more deliberate. Email that reaches someone's inbox has already passed the first filter: they chose to receive it. Social content competes with everything else in a chaotic feed.

3. The algorithm doesn't stand between you and your audience. When you send an email to 10,000 subscribers, roughly 10,000 people receive it. Some will open, some won't — but delivery is direct. On Instagram, a post to 10,000 followers might reach 300–600 organically. The rest need the algorithm's blessing.

4. Personalisation is native to email. Email marketing platforms make it easy to send different content to different segments — new subscribers get different emails than long-time customers; buyers see different content than non-buyers; people who clicked a specific link get a follow-up. This level of personalisation is technically possible on social media but practically difficult.

The email marketing ecosystem

Before diving into tactics, understand the components:

Platform overview:

For a beginner: start with Kit or Mailchimp. Both have generous free tiers and are the easiest to use while learning.

What makes a healthy email list

Not all email lists are created equal. A list of 1,000 people who signed up specifically for what you offer, read your emails, and occasionally buy from you is worth more than a list of 50,000 people who barely remember signing up.

The four metrics that define list health:

Why these matter more than list size: A list with a 40% open rate has 40% of subscribers reading your emails. A list with a 10% open rate has 90% ignoring them. The quality of the subscriber relationship determines how much value the list can generate — not the raw number.

The email marketing mindset

The most important principle in email marketing is so simple it's frequently ignored: treat your subscribers like real people, not like a database.

Every subscriber is someone who handed you their email address — one of the few genuinely private things people still guard — and said: I trust you enough to let you into my inbox. The brands that build extraordinary email lists treat that trust as the precious thing it is.

The trust framework:

• Send when you have something worth saying — not because it's Tuesday and Tuesday is email day
• Every email should give more than it takes — more value delivered than attention consumed
• Be honest — what's inside the email matches what the subject line promised
• Make it easy to unsubscribe — counterintuitively, an easy unsubscribe keeps your list healthier (unhappy subscribers drag your open rates down and hurt deliverability)

Using AI to audit your email strategy: "Here is my current approach to email marketing: [describe list size, send frequency, open rate, what you send]. What are the biggest gaps? What's likely causing my open rate to be [X]? What one change would have the highest impact on list health?"

Back to Marcus

He's still writing the same newsletter he started in 2019. Every Tuesday. Same format, same voice, same promise: plain English, no selling, just useful.

The business model didn't change what he was doing. It just formalized an exchange that was already happening: his readers trusted him, and when he finally asked them to buy something useful, they did.

His Instagram has 3,000 followers. His LinkedIn does fine. But email is where his business actually lives — because email is where the relationship lives. The algorithm doesn't control it. The platform can't take it. It's his list, his readers, his relationship, built one Tuesday at a time.

Key takeaways

• Email has the highest ROI of any digital marketing channel — industry studies consistently cite £35–42 return per £1 spent (DMA UK research, ~2019; directional figure, varies by study and methodology). It outperforms social media, paid search, and display advertising for most businesses.
• You own your email list — it can't be taken away by an algorithm change or platform policy. That ownership is the core strategic value of email marketing.
• List health matters more than list size. A small, engaged list of genuine subscribers outperforms a large, disengaged one on every metric that matters to business.
• Email works because of explicit consent. Subscribers chose to hear from you. That relationship is more valuable than any algorithm-served impression.
• The mindset is service first. Every email should give more than it takes. Treat subscriber trust like the asset it is.