What’s More Effective Than Email Marketing?

It’s not uncommon for a DTC brand to sit on a database of 500,000 contacts. At that scale, the default reaction is almost always the same: lean into mass automation.

To reach such a massive audience, it makes sense to build campaigns and flows.

But there’s a major blind spot: consumers know when they’re receiving an automated marketing message. If you think you’re a pro at spotting AI LinkedIn posts, don’t be naive to assume your customers can’t identify a mass marketing email.

Industry data confirms this shift in consumer behavior. According to the Omnisend Ecommerce Email Marketing Benchmark Report, standard promotional email blasts yield average click-through rates under 1.8%. Further research published by Gartner reveals that 63% of consumers actively ignore brands that rely on non-personalized or repetitive promotional messaging.

Your buyers are signed up for 15 or 20 other brand lists. Even if you send a promo communication once a week, your target audience is receiving a collective ton from all the brands they’ve signed up for.

And because all your competitors use the same clever promo phrases, the same discount offers, and similar design styles, your buyer is dealing with a world of sameness.

So I ran an experiment.

Instead of relying purely on automated emails, I manually contacted a select group of customers.

No templates. No automation software. Just genuine, plain-text messages. I shaped my content around what I learned about their behavior. Nothing too comprehensive, just enough to get a feel for who they are and where they are in their journey.

I had significantly higher response rates. And the responses were high and meaningful. Like these people had been waiting to receive a genuine human message.

Here’s the wild part: many of the questions they responded to were questions we’ve had in our automated outreaches for years. They simply didn’t respond to those automated messages. But when a real human asked, they actually responded.

Data on consumer connection explains why this works: McKinsey & Company reports in its Next in Personalization Report that brands executing genuine, high-touch personalization generate 40% more revenue from those interactions than average players. Additionally, the Edelman Trust Barometer shows that 81% of buyers require personal trust in a brand before making repeat purchases.

If you bring this strategy to a CEO, the immediate pushback is obvious: “Why spend time manually emailing 100 people when we have 500,000 on the list?”

Because doing things that don’t scale builds incredible brand equity.

This isn’t about turning off email platforms or manually typing half a million messages. It’s about stopping viewing one-to-one communication as “inefficient” and starting viewing it as a high-yield retention strategy.

This type of one-to-one communication happens in B2B, just not in D2C.

And think about how memorable this would be for the end customer. I’m convinced it’ll drive up lifetime value and word of mouth.

How does one make the math work? Start by having someone do this on a part-time basis: 2 hours a day. Do this for a month and study the retention and lifetime trends for the group this person was handling. If the business impact is greater than what you paid for this part-time resource, scale the program. Let the program fund itself.