👀 Situational Awareness

💰 E-Commerce

• Buy Buy Baby’s website is open again in time for Mother’s Day

• Shopify’s stock is fine despite tariffs. (Important because Shopify is an indicator of e-commerce general health)

• 🍕 Papa Johns pizza 70%+ of sales are digital! (Big companies using digital marketing more and more)

❤️ Mother’s Day

• Read about these 6 moms building businesses and raising families

😵 Gmail

• Have you seen the changes in your Gmail? “Deal Cards” highlight discounts at the top of your emails

📝 Body Copy

I saw this awesome article titled 7 Huge Content Marketing Challenges in 2025.

Here are the 7:

1. Content that converts

2. Knowing your audience

3. Being different than your competitors

4. Creating content consistently

5. Making good content

6. Making relevant content

7. Promoting your content

This list is true. These are major challenges for any business owner, especially one utilizing digital marketing.

Looking at this list seems daunting. Where do you start? All of these topics require time and resources.

The focus: When I look at this list, I think the lead domino is number two - knowing your audience.

Why?

Because knowing your audience helps you with one, three, five, and six.

Know your audience and this list of seven turns into three.

Apply this to email specifically: When your sending emails, the initial goal is for them to get delivered and then opened. When you know your audience, your emails are relevant to them.

There’s nothing more important than relevance when it comes to email performance. If I ran out of my Vitamin C this morning, and you send me a reminder email to order more Vitamin C, the odds are good I’m going to open that email and buy something.

Now what: If you’re starting out, you don’t know how to get to know your audience.

But you have to start somewhere. Initially, you’ll use your intuition, you’ll maybe do some research, you’ll maybe speak to a few customers, and you’ll piece together who you think your audience is.

One of the brands I’ve been working with for years was selling a product that we thought was for young college aged men who played video games.

It took us a few years to realize, but our primary customers were working moms in their 30s.

Yikes. We were massively wrong. And it should not have taken us so long to figure this out.

Why it matters: Finding the most receptive audience for your product or service makes marketing easier.

Sell water to thirsty travelers in the desert as they say.

Why is this so hard: We’re unwilling to challenge our own assumptions and test them in the real world. If you put enough content out there, the world will tell you where it’s landing - via feedback and reviewing analytics.

The best marketers are humble, always learning, and testing their assumptions. They’re on a scavenger hunt, putting the clues together over time.

Once the picture is clear, you can create relevant content.

📣 Call to Action

If your email doesn’t get delivered, then all the time you spent on it is meaningless.

Relevance comes back into play here. Which is derived from knowing your audience.

People don’t want to be spammed with irrelevant information.

So the email services are making it harder to get into the inbox. Microsoft recently announced that they’re cracking down and protecting the inbox even more.

Getting into the inbox is called deliverability.

There are factors that impact email deliverability.

Many of the factors are technical, but they can be summarized as follows:

Send emails that the people you’re sending them to want to see and open them.

In other words, be a good person and don’t abuse the ability to get into people’s inboxes.

Luckily, there are safeguards against people who misuse and abuse the ability to email anyone on the planet.

One of those safeguards is called the email blacklist, which I’ll define below.

🧠 Vocabulary

Defining and Demystifying Email Marketing Terms

Today’s term: Email Blacklist

What is it: List of internet addresses and websites that send spam.

So what? Emails coming from these places get marked as spam by the email service providers (like Gmail).

Why do they do this? To protect email users from bad folks trying to abuse emails.

Who maintains these lists? Third party organizations (just like how there are third parties that make credit scores).

Why should I care? If you’re sending emails, it’s critical to stay off these blacklists. Otherwise your recipients won’t see your emails.

Keep reading about blacklists

💰 Sponsored

We use and recommend (affiliate links) - Beehiiv for newsletters and Klaviyo for e-commerce email marketing.

🛠 Resource

• What’s an email Blast? Guide by AWeber. [LINK]

• What’s a newsletter? Guide by GetResponse. [LINK]

• Email statistics report for 2025 from Zero Bounce. [LINK]

  • Some of my favorites are:

    • 42% check their inbox 3-5 times per day.

    • 67% like short emails. 28% don’t care about email length if content is good.

    • 41% check email looking for discounts

🤔 Social Insight