The economics nobody argues with
Paid channels charge you every time you want to speak to the same person. Email charges you almost nothing. For a healthy ecommerce brand, a quarter to a third of revenue from email is normal, and most of that comes from automated flows that run while you sleep.
Flows before campaigns, always
Welcome, abandoned checkout, browse abandonment, post-purchase, winback. These five flows do the compounding work. Campaigns (the sends you write each week) matter, but flows are the difference between a list and an asset. Most accounts I audit have two of the five, half-configured.
Why brands underinvest
Email isn't glamorous. Nobody screenshots an abandonment sequence. Agencies push paid because percentage-of-spend fees grow with ad budgets, not with email revenue. And founders check Meta's dashboard daily while Klaviyo quietly out-earns it.
The regulated market lesson
CBD and other restricted brands learned this the hard way: when the ad platforms lock you out, email is the whole game. Watching restricted brands build eight-figure revenues on owned channels should change how every brand weighs the inbox. You don't need permission to talk to your own list.