This article was published in 2026 and references a historical event from 2015, included here for context and accuracy.
- Tension: Email marketing was supposed to become more customer-centric through technology, yet sophisticated personalization tools have only intensified company-first extraction strategies.
- Noise: Marketing industry narratives frame automation and AI-driven hyperpersonalization as delivering customer value while obscuring how these tools primarily optimize conversion rather than relevance.
- Direct Message: Email’s sustained ROI advantage exists because the channel structurally requires earning attention rather than capturing it, forcing marketers to deliver actual value or face immediate subscriber disengagement.
To learn more about our editorial approach, explore The Direct Message methodology.
Back in 2015, Brennan Carlson made a statement that seemed almost counterintuitive coming from someone whose job was to sell email marketing services: “Less is more.” As SVP of business development at email service provider Lyris, Carlson had every incentive to encourage maximum email volume from clients.
Instead, he told marketers to pull back. A decade later, with email marketing generating $36 for every dollar spent and claiming 4.6 billion global users, that tension between restraint and exploitation has only intensified.
The remarkable thing about email’s persistence isn’t just its ROI, though the numbers remain staggering.
What’s striking is how an ostensibly “old” channel continues to outperform newer, shinier alternatives precisely because of constraints that marketers initially saw as limitations. You can’t force someone to open an email.
You can’t guarantee they’ll see it when you want them to. You can’t control how long they’ll look at it.
These apparent weaknesses are actually email’s fundamental strength, but only for the marketers who understand what that means.
When efficiency becomes extraction
Carlson’s 2015 critique centered on what he called “the supply chain industrialization of marketing.” He wasn’t being metaphorical.
The language marketers used then, and still use now, reveals a transactional mindset: customer lifetime value, purchase funnels, touchpoint optimization, engagement metrics.
Each term treats human attention as a resource to be harvested rather than earned.
“CLV is about extracting value from a customer,” Carlson observed. “Marketers need to think about how to deliver value to a customer.” The distinction matters more than semantic precision suggests.
Extraction assumes a finite resource that companies have the right to access. Delivery assumes an ongoing exchange where value flows both directions.
A decade later, that extraction mentality has only become more sophisticated. Marketing automation now enables what experts predict will become common by 2026: brands sending more than 100,000 variations of a single email campaign, each micro-targeted based on behavioral data, purchase history, browsing patterns, and predictive analytics.
The technology enables unprecedented personalization, but the underlying assumption remains extractive. We’re getting better at taking what we want from customers, not better at giving them what they need.
The disconnect manifests in how marketers discuss their work.
They talk about “customer journeys” as if recipients are on guided tours through branded experiences.
But as Carlson noted, “most customers are not on a ‘customer journey’ or looking to engage with your brand. Marketers think in touchpoints; customers think, ‘Please don’t touch me.'”
That gap between marketer intention and recipient reality hasn’t narrowed in ten years. It’s widened, precisely because technology now enables more frequent, more targeted, more “personalized” interruptions.
The sophisticated distraction of hyper-relevance
The contemporary email marketing discourse centers obsessively on personalization, and for understandable reasons. Research shows that 71% of customers expect personalized experiences, with 76% expressing frustration when they don’t receive them.
Segmented emails generate 50% higher click-through rates than unsegmented campaigns. The evidence supporting personalization seems overwhelming.
Yet something curious happens when brands push personalization too far.
Oracle’s Chad White observed that clients who embraced machine learning-driven content eventually decided to pull back in favor of more brand messaging. They discovered that excessive personalization undermined brand identity.
When every email feels custom-tailored to individual behavior, customers lose the shared experience that builds brand affinity.
This represents a more subtle form of the extraction problem. Hyper-personalization sounds customer-centric, but it often serves company objectives first.
The goal isn’t to give customers what they value; it’s to remove friction from purchase paths.
The distinction becomes clear when you examine what gets personalized: product recommendations based on browsing history, dynamic pricing based on purchase propensity, urgency messaging timed to exploit decision fatigue.
These tactics optimize conversion, not customer wellbeing.
The noise around personalization also obscures simpler truths about email effectiveness. Carlson emphasized relevance, but his definition focused on knowing your audience and acknowledging what you don’t know.
That’s fundamentally different from algorithmic micro-targeting. Knowing your audience means understanding their broader context, needs, and constraints.
It means sending fewer, better emails rather than more, smarter interruptions.
What actually earns attention
Email’s enduring effectiveness stems from an unavoidable constraint: you can’t make someone read your message.
Unlike social media feeds that control what users see, or display ads that intercept attention, or push notifications that demand immediate response, email requires the recipient to choose engagement.
That constraint forces a fundamentally different relationship between sender and receiver.
The channels that demand attention perform worse than the channel that must earn it, and that asymmetry reveals more about marketing effectiveness than any amount of optimization ever could.
When Carlson said email needed to be “a win-win environment,” he wasn’t advocating for softer messaging or customer appeasement. He was identifying the structural requirement for email success.
If recipients don’t get value from opening your emails, they stop opening them. The feedback loop is direct and unforgiving.
No amount of subject line optimization or send-time tuning overcomes content that serves company interests over recipient needs.
This explains why email continues to outperform channels with more sophisticated targeting capabilities and more immersive formats.
In 2024, 52% of consumers made purchases directly from emails, outpacing social media posts and ads. The conversion advantage exists precisely because email recipients have already demonstrated interest by opening the message.
That voluntary attention is qualitatively different from attention captured through algorithmic feeds or interruptive advertising.
Building for resistance, not conquest
The practical implications of understanding email’s constraint-based effectiveness are more radical than most marketing orthodoxy acknowledges. If you accept that email works because it requires earning attention rather than capturing it, then standard practices around frequency, segmentation, and automation need reevaluation.
Carlson’s assertion that “email drip campaigns are a great concept but they’re inhuman” identified the core problem with automation-first approaches.
Automated sequences optimize for company efficiency, not recipient experience. They assume customers move through predictable stages at predictable intervals, that predetermined messages will remain relevant regardless of changing circumstances, that more touches equal more engagement.
These assumptions prioritize marketer convenience over recipient autonomy.
The alternative isn’t abandoning automation or personalization. It’s subordinating those capabilities to a different organizing principle: resistance to irrelevance.
Instead of asking “how can we automate more touchpoints,” ask “what would make someone actively want this message in their inbox?” Instead of “how can we personalize at scale,” ask “what shared experience do we want customers to have with our brand?”
Email remains digital marketing’s stalwart pillar not despite its limitations but because of them. The channel forces respect for recipient attention in ways newer platforms don’t require.
The companies that thrive through email understand this implicitly. They send less frequently because they have something worth saying.
They personalize thoughtfully because they’re delivering value, not just optimizing conversion. They treat inboxes as spaces to be invited into, not battlefields to be won.
The contrast between email’s sustained effectiveness and the endless churn of “next big channel” hype reveals something fundamental about marketing strategy.
The platforms that promise to solve the attention problem through better targeting, more immersive formats, or algorithmic distribution consistently underperform the channel that simply requires earning attention one recipient at a time.
That’s not a limitation to be overcome through optimization. It’s a feature that creates the very constraints that make email work.
