Let's start with an uncomfortable question. If email is the highest ROI channel available to you, the one channel you actually own, why does it keep landing at the bottom of your priority list?
I sat down with Matt Treacey, author of Natural Orders, to talk through this exact tension. Matt has spent years helping businesses build email systems that don't just grow lists, they grow revenue, without turning subscribers into people who dread seeing your name in their inbox. What came out of that conversation was less a list of tactics and more a way of thinking. And once you see it, you cannot unsee it.
Here it is. Your email list is not a megaphone. It's an ecosystem. And ecosystems either flourish or they collapse. There is not much middle ground.
Email Is Still the Most Underrated Channel You Have
Matt said something early in our conversation that stuck with me. What keeps him up at night is not spam, though spam is a real problem. What keeps him up is how overlooked email is, given what it actually delivers.
The numbers back him up. Current research puts average email marketing ROI somewhere between $36 and $42 for every dollar spent, with retail and ecommerce brands seeing closer to $45. Litmus
For context, worth flagging here because things have shifted since this conversation first happened. At the time, Google Ads was being cited around $2 back for every $1 spent. That gap has closed. Current benchmarks put Google Ads closer to $8 per dollar, with social ads landing somewhere between $2 and $4. Omnisend
Even with that improvement, email is still not close. Nothing else touches it. And there's a second reason Matt cares about this channel beyond the return. Email is the one place you actually own your relationship with your audience. No algorithm change can take your list away from you. No platform update can bury your message in a feed nobody scrolls through anymore. That ownership is worth more than people give it credit for.
Reflect on this for a second. If every other channel you use disappeared tomorrow, would you still be able to reach your audience? If the honest answer is no, that's the gap email is built to close.
Fix Your Traffic to Subscriber Conversion Before You Chase More Traffic
Here's where Matt said something that reframed the whole conversation for me. Most businesses are obsessed with growing traffic. Doubling traffic is brutally hard. But doubling what Matt calls your traffic to subscriber conversion, the percentage of site visitors who actually become subscribers, is a much easier lever to pull.
He compared it to filling a leaky bucket. You can keep pouring more water in, or you can patch the hole. Patching the hole is almost always the smarter move.
Matt's advice for patching that hole is what he calls hyper-specific opt-ins. Instead of one generic newsletter signup box on every page, go into your analytics, find your top five pages by traffic, and build something valuable specifically for the intent behind each one of those pages. Not a generic "10 tips" PDF. Something people would genuinely be willing to pay for.
I love how Matt framed the mistake most marketers make here. They treat list building like a sledgehammer when it should be a scalpel. Context and specificity beat volume every single time.
Practical takeaway: Pull up your analytics this week. Find your five highest-traffic pages. Ask what problem someone on each of those pages is actually trying to solve. Build one focused resource per page instead of one generic offer for your whole site.
Stop Hitting New Subscribers With the Sledgehammer
Someone just handed you their email address. What do you do next?
If your answer involves a discount code or a sales pitch, Matt would tell you to slow down. He leans on a framework from Eugene Schwartz's classic book Breakthrough Advertising, called the five stages of awareness: unaware, problem aware, solution aware, product aware, and most aware.
Most people landing on your site and opting in are somewhere between problem aware and solution aware. They know they have a challenge. They might not fully understand their options yet. Hit them with a sales offer at that stage and you've skipped several steps in a conversation they haven't finished having with themselves.
Matt's approach is to spend your first few emails, maybe three or four, restating and validating the problem the subscriber already knows they have. People respond to confirmation bias. We love seeing our own beliefs reflected back at us, and that's genuinely a strong way to earn an open. Then move into three or four emails exploring the solution space broadly, without shoehorning your product into every message. The people who actually engage with those solution-aware emails are the ones you segment out and guide toward a real decision.
This is B2B, remember. The sales cycle is longer. Respecting that timeline is not a nice-to-have. It's the whole strategy.
Value Isn't a Buzzword. It's the Whole Job.
I pushed Matt on this because "provide value" gets thrown around so often it has practically stopped meaning anything. His answer was refreshingly simple.
Value is anything that helps someone solve a problem, overcome an issue, or do their job a little better. That's it. That's the whole definition. And he has a heuristic he uses to check every email before it goes out: educate, inspire, or entertain. If an email is not doing at least one of those three things, don't send it.
This connects to something bigger than email tactics. Business, at its core, is about creating value for people. Every email you send is a small opportunity to help someone reach a point they couldn't reach on their own, or to hand them an insight they didn't have five minutes ago. Think of it as a catalyst moment for the actual human on the other side of that inbox, because that's exactly what they are.
Ask yourself before your next send: Does this email educate, inspire, or entertain? If you can't answer yes, it's not ready yet.
Grow Your List Like an Ecosystem
Matt's background is in ecology, and it shows up in the best possible way in how he thinks about email. He breaks list growth into three stages borrowed from how ecosystems actually develop: dispersal, recruitment, and establishment.
Dispersal is where you're focused purely on getting people onto your list and creating an environment they want to stick around in. The metric that matters here is engagement. Matt points to Nir Eyal's Hooked as a useful resource for building the kind of habit loop that makes people look forward to your emails instead of dreading them.
Recruitment is when a subscriber becomes a permanent, engaged member of your ecosystem. In plain terms, that's conversion. This is where specificity, segmentation, and personalization do their heaviest lifting, which also explains why email's ROI is so far ahead of everything else.
Establishment is your flourishing rainforest. You have the data. You know who your top subscribers are. You can start doing genuinely interesting things, increasing repeat purchases, increasing average order value, and bringing in new traffic to keep the whole system fed.
I love this visual, honestly. Picture your email list not as a spreadsheet of contacts but as a rainforest you are actively cultivating. That changes how you treat every single subscriber in it.
The Two Ways a List Collapses
Matt was direct about the mistakes that sink most email programs, and he framed them, fittingly, as two kinds of ecosystem collapse.
The top-down cascade happens when you skip building a strong foundation. You start pushing offers too early, engagement drops, unsubscribes climb, and the whole system starts eating itself. It gets worse because email providers track your sender reputation. Send consistently poor emails and you get shuffled onto lower-priority servers, which tanks your deliverability even further. That's a hole that takes a long time to climb out of.
The bottom-up cascade is what happens when you never build your own list at all, staying dependent on rented platforms instead. One policy change, one algorithm shift, and you have no recourse. This is the platform risk Matt mentioned earlier, showing up as a structural failure instead of just a missed opportunity.
Both collapses are avoidable. Both start with the same fix: respect the relationship before you ask anything of it.
What a Healthy List Actually Looks Like in 2026
Matt gave a clear picture of what success looks like, and it's worth updating his numbers against where things actually sit today.
His original benchmark was unsubscribes under roughly 0.35 percent and open rates around 35 percent or higher. Current regional data shows healthy unsubscribe rates trending even tighter, often between 0.1 and 0.2 percent, while average open rates vary widely by industry and region, anywhere from the high teens to above 40 percent. Benchmark Email
Matt's caveat about open rates deserves to be repeated loudly. He called open rate an unreliable lag indicator even back then, and that's only become more true. Apple's Mail Privacy Protection auto-opens a huge share of emails on Apple devices regardless of whether a human actually looked at them. Treat open rate as a rough temperature check, never as your scoreboard.
The second marker of a healthy list, and arguably the more important one, is whether you're actually collecting behavioral data on your subscribers. Are you tagging who opened email A versus email B? Are you tracking what that behavior means for your business goals? That data is what lets you move into Matt's establishment stage and start making real strategic decisions instead of guesses.
The Biggest Myth in B2B Email
I asked Matt to bust a myth, and he didn't hesitate. The myth is that every new subscriber needs to be hit with an offer immediately. It's not true, and chasing that instinct is exactly what causes the top-down collapse we just talked about.
He also raised something worth sitting with. So much of marketing's real impact cannot be cleanly measured, and modern marketing has become so obsessed with what can be tracked that it ignores everything that can't. Attribution, in particular, is genuinely messy. Very few marketers will admit out loud how hard it actually is to trace a purchase back to its true origin.
Part of what made this murkier is the assumption that third-party cookies were about to disappear entirely. That timeline changed. Google walked back its plan to fully deprecate third-party cookies in Chrome in 2024 and introduced a user choice prompt instead, so cookies did not vanish the way the industry expected. Ethyca That said, Safari and Firefox already block third-party tracking by default, and privacy regulation keeps tightening regardless of what Chrome decides to do. The direction hasn't changed, only the pace.
Which makes Matt's core point land even harder now than it did in 2023. Owning your list, your walled garden, matters more in a world where tracking keeps getting less reliable, not less.
Where to Go From Here
Here's what I want you to take from this whole conversation. Stop treating your email list like a number you're trying to grow and start treating it like an ecosystem you're responsible for tending.
Fix your traffic to subscriber conversion before you spend another dollar driving more traffic. Meet new subscribers where they actually are in their thinking instead of where you wish they were. Make every email earn its place by educating, inspiring, or entertaining. And build the kind of list health that lets you flourish for years instead of collapsing in a quarter.
None of this requires a bigger budget. It requires a different sequence, and a genuine respect for the human being who trusted you enough to hand over their inbox.
If you're staring at your current email program and you're not sure which stage of the ecosystem you're actually in, that's exactly where Sidekick Strategies comes in. We'll walk through your list, your sequences, and your data with you, one stage at a time, and build the roadmap to get you from wherever you are now to a fully established, flourishing system.
