Your Team Member Handles Email Marketing - But Who’s Handling the Strategy?
Not long ago, I started working with a sustainable jewellery brand.
They created beautiful products. Had a genuine mission. A community they cared about deeply.
But their email marketing setup wasn’t quite working - though nobody could put their finger on why.
They had someone handling their emails. She was capable, conscientious, keeping track of the performance metrics. But their automations felt unreliable. Were they firing correctly? Reaching the right people? And quietly, the bigger question: could their emails be driving more revenue than they were?
They didn’t know. And they didn’t know what they didn’t know.
They had a skill gap in the team and needed someone to come in, map everything that was running, and tell them honestly: what’s working, what isn’t, and where the opportunities are.
That’s what I did. What I found surprised even them.
If you have someone on your team who ‘does emails’, keep reading.
The difference between ‘doing emails’ and having an email strategy
What ‘handling emails’ usually looks like in a small brand
Here’s something I see that happens with smaller brands: A founder or marketing lead realises emails need attention. So they hand it to someone on the team.
That person is good at their job. They know the message or the products. They’re organised. They care. But email lands in their lap alongside five other responsibilities; or perhaps they’re focused on email specifically, but they’re earlier in their career and haven’t yet had the depth of experience to audit the organisation’s setup.
Either way, the result tends to look the same.
The multi-role marketer
This is the web coordinator, the VA, the junior marketing hire who ‘handles emails’ alongside everything else. Newsletters go out infrequently. Campaigns happen around launches or sales. When something urgent comes up, email is the first thing that slips.
It’s the reality of a small team with a long list.
The dedicated but junior email person
This one’s more nuanced. They’re focused on email. They can build, schedule, and send. But reviewing the full system, the tech set up, spotting what’s broken, identifying what’s missing? That takes a different level of expertise.
Automations exist. But nobody’s entirely sure if they’re all working correctly. A welcome series is live. But is it doing what it was set up to do?
An abandoned cart flow is running (probably). But is it capturing all the right site users and adding them to the journey correctly? The honest answer is: we think so, but we’ve never properly checked.
In both scenarios, the gap is the same. Email is being sent. But it isn’t being properly strategised.
“There’s no visibility into what’s actually running. No review of whether it’s working. No plan for what comes next.”
Sending emails and growing a high-performing email channel are two different things.
What I found when I audited the jewellery brand
When I came in to review their setup, the first job was to document everything. What flows existed. What was live. What was actually having an impact.
That alone was valuable. They’d never had a clear picture of their own email ecosystem.
Then came the findings.
Revenue leaks in the automations. Flows that were misfiring, or not firing at all.
Subscribers falling through the cracks. Missed customer touch points for lapsing customers.
An abandoned cart email that was sending to the wrong segment, missing the people it was supposed to catch.
A welcome series that introduced the brand beautifully. But didn’t guide anyone toward a first purchase.
A minimal post-purchase flow. No prompt to come back, leave a review, or tell a friend.
None of this was the result of carelessness. It was the result of a setup that had never been properly reviewed by someone who knew what to look for.
You can’t fix what you can’t see.
What a specialist actually does, and why it’s different
I want to be specific here, because I think ‘email strategist’ can sound vague. So here’s what it actually means in practice.
Audits the full ecosystem. Not just ‘does this email look good’ but ‘is this entire system working together to drive revenue?’
Designs lifecycle flows based on real customer behaviour, not gut feeling.
Identifies list health issues you didn’t know existed. Including technical problems quietly reducing your reach.
Finds opt-in gaps and builds a joined-up capture strategy across the whole customer journey.
Reads the data. Not just what open rates, click rates, and engagement metrics are, but why they look the way they do. And what to change.
Understands deliverability: sender reputation, inbox placement, what’s stopping your emails from being seen.
Aligns strategy with your values. For the brands I work with, this matters. Emails that nurture, not push. Marketing that feels like your brand, not a generic sales sequence.
Two examples from recent client work:
Slow travel brand: list growth & welcome journey
A travel client wanted to grow their email list but didn’t know where to start. I mapped out their full customer journey to share with them, identified where opt-in touchpoints were missing, and added new ones at the moments that mattered.
Then, we designed a new welcome journey to match. Fresh content, written for the person who’d just signed up.
The result: a coherent subscriber experience from the very first email, not a sequence that felt disconnected from how they arrived.
Education & ecommerce brand: a list health mystery
This client noticed a discrepancy. Their list showed one volume. Their actual sends were consistently lower. After investigation, I found a series of auto-suppressions being quietly applied to every send - filters set up at some point, never revisited.
We reviewed each one, removed those that were no longer relevant, and immediately improved their deliverable audience size. A problem nobody knew they had. Fixed.
The result isn’t just better emails. It’s a channel that works smoothly, even when you’re not watching it.
Signs it might be time to bring in some expert support
This isn’t a list designed to make you feel behind. It’s a prompt to pay attention to the feeling you might already have.
Your automations were set up once and haven’t been reviewed since. You’re not fully sure they’re working correctly.
You’re sending emails, but you have no real sense of whether they’re performing as well as they could.
Open rates look okay. But engagement is flat and nothing seems to convert.
Email keeps getting deprioritised. There’s always something more urgent.
You know segmentation should be happening. But not sure where to start.
You have a niggling feeling something isn’t working with your email channel. You just can’t pinpoint what.
If two or more of those feel familiar, you’re not imagining it.
And everything I’ve described above is fixable.
What working together actually looks like
I work with sustainability-focused brands to audit their existing email setup, identify the gaps, and build a strategy that converts - without compromising their voice or their values.
Some clients want me to audit and hand over a clear set of recommendations for their team to implement. Others want me to stay involved and do it with them. Either works.
If you’re curious about what’s actually going on in your email programme, an audit is the best place to start. You’ll come away with a clear picture of what’s running, what’s working, and exactly what to do next.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do I need to make changes to my current team in order to bring in a strategist?
Not at all. The most effective set-up is often both a strategist to design and oversee the system, and your team member to execute day-to-day. Think of it as giving your team the framework they need to do their best work.
Having someone on your team who handles emails is great.
But handling emails and strategically growing email as a revenue channel are two different jobs. And when they’re treated as the same thing, that’s usually where the gaps quietly appear.
What do I actually get at the end of an email audit?
A clear, documented picture of everything that’s running, reports and insights on what’s working, what isn’t, and a prioritised list of what to fix. You’ll know exactly where you stand.
From there, you can choose: take the plan and implement it with your team, or have me stay involved and do it with you.
What does an email strategist do that a generalist doesn’t?
A strategist thinks in systems. They look at the full customer lifecycle: how someone finds you, joins your list, gets nurtured, buys, and comes back. Then designs email flows that support every stage. They know what to look for when something’s not working. They read the data and know what to do with it.
Execution without strategy is just sending emails. Strategy turns email into a channel that grows your business.
Is it too early to invest in email strategy for a small brand?
The earlier you get the foundations right, the better. Email is consistently one of the highest-ROI marketing channels* available to growing brands.¹ If it isn’t working as a reliable revenue driver for you yet, that’s worth paying attention to now - not later.
With brands that I work with, once we document what is running, optimise the journeys, fix any leaks, and put a real strategy behind their email, it can become one of the most consistent parts of your business. Quiet. Intentional. Working.
That’s what email can do. When someone’s actually steering it.
If you’d like to find out what yours is really capable of, let’s talk.
Resources & References
* Source: many trusted marketing organisations state this, including Litmus ROI of Email Marketing
