I’ve sat with a lot of high-ticket service businesses over the years, and I’ve yet to find one that had email fully integrated into its growth strategy. Not one. I don’t say that to pick on anybody; I say it because email is the closest thing to free money I know of, and almost nobody bends down to pick it up.
The short version: high-ticket service companies should treat email as six distinct tools—a welcome, a pre-positioning email, a transactional email, a promotional email, a review request, and a newsletter—each doing one specific job in the customer journey. Run them as automations and they cost very little, drive revenue rather than just leads, and compound over time.
There’s More to Email Than Hating It
Most email sucks. I know. You know. Everyone knows. We get too much of it, most of it has no value, and that’s all before the flood from scammers, spammers, and companies who keep sending until you buy or die. Email’s reputation for being annoying is what leaders often focus on, because it’s in our faces every day.
But then there’s the valuable side of email:
- A promotion from a company you love that arrives at just the right time, telling you about a sale you’d never have known about otherwise.
- A welcome or anniversary email that makes you feel valued and deepens your connection to the brand.
- A useful note with next steps, an itemized receipt, or a reminder to schedule the thing you’d otherwise have forgotten.
People don’t hate email. They hate being asked for their attention and having their time and energy wasted. Email happens to be one of the most common places that happens, so we dismiss the whole channel. But when emails carry real value, the mental calculus changes, and email becomes a highly effective, infinitely scalable, low-cost way to get chosen again and again in a wide variety of contexts.
Six Types of Email to Start Loving
There are six kinds of marketing email that can be powerful, but how, when, and whether any of them gets used depends on your specific situation:
- A welcome email that makes a fantastic first impression.
- A pre-positioning email that frames the relationship before it starts.
- A transactional email that rides along with the journey steps people already expect to engage with, like opening a receipt.
- A promotional email that drives a specific action—announcing an offer, or waking up customers who’ve gone quiet.
- A review request that turns a good outcome into proof.
- A newsletter that keeps you in the room over the long haul.
Set them up right, and any or all six can run on automations—at scale, for very little weekly effort—punching way above their weight in marketing-spend efficiency. I’ll dig into each one here, and in the posts to come.
3 Key Perspectives on Email That Make Companies Successful
1) Think of email as a tool, not a means of communication.
Any form of communication can be valuable or bothersome, depending on how it’s used and how the person on the receiving end is feeling. So, it’s better to think of each type of email as a tool that does a specific job, like a hammer or a screwdriver. When you need a screwdriver, a hammer just won’t do—and vice versa. And if there’s no specific job to be done, you don’t need the tool at all, and walking around with a hammer for no reason is just weird.
This is where I see so many firms get into trouble. They start emailing without a real plan. Not only does that fail to produce the value they want, it annoys people and moves relationships backwards.
The key idea is that every email should be built so it makes sense as part of your customer’s journey and delivers real value. Let me give you an example.
Every year I get an email, obviously promotional, from a company that sells flowers. The whole thing is one big graphic showing off the arrangements that are on sale. In almost any other context, it would be promotional spam. It doesn’t even look good. What makes it different is the two lines at the top: “Hi, you asked us to remind you about your daughter’s birthday coming up! Here are some flowers we think she’d love, and as always, you can order in advance for the lowest possible price.” That’s value. I can’t get mad about it, because I literally asked for it. The brand is helping me order far enough ahead to catch a sale and skip the last-minute fees. So here’s a challenge for you: think about how you might get customers to literally ask for your emails.
2) Someone who knows what they’re doing owns the program.
Most of the time, when a leader looks at an email marketing program, it all seems very simple. We all send emails every day! It’s straightforward: you put in an address, you type out some stuff, you hit send. Email platforms try to make it look as easy as possible—anyone can upload a list, write an email, and send it to thousands of people. It seems low-skill, so leaders don’t think about it the way they think about pay-per-click or television advertising.
A proper email program needs to be owned and managed constantly. The tactic is free on a per-unit basis, but you’ll spend payroll hours operating it, and there’s real cost to setting it up well. This is not a job for the receptionist; it’s a job for a skilled digital marketer. Whether that person sits on your team, works as a freelancer, or comes through an agency, the skill with which the tool is used is what determines your results. A strong strategy and tight tactical execution immediately set you apart from all the other crappy email programs out there—and that creates leverage no other marketing tactic can match.
3) Recognize that email is about revenue as much (or more) as lead generation.
Top-performing email programs treat email as a customer-experience function, not just a lead-generation function. Yes, it’s great to send the email that tells someone about a sale they click through and buy from. But the more powerful form of email marketing, especially for high-ticket services businesses, is subtler. It’s about building and maintaining authentic relationships at scale. Let me give you an example.
One of the highest-ROI email implementations I’ve ever been part of was also one of the simplest. It was for a home services company that had mapped its customer journey and identified specific gaps it wanted to close. The biggest gap was getting customers to keep their appointments. Our research revealed it was largely a case of nerves: they were nervous about a stranger in their home, nervous they might say yes, nervous about a high-pressure pitch. The list goes on.
We built a simple pre-positioning email that showed customers who was coming to their home, humanized that person, offered some social proof, and gave them a reason to be excited for the appointment. We handed it to the sales team, which ran an A/B split test across two groups of reps with equivalent skill and tenure. One group ran appointments where the customer got the email; the other group did not.
Not a single net-new lead came out of this effort,and that’s fine. It was all about driving the downstream metrics through the customer journey toward close. In the end, we saw statistically significant improvements in every metric which, when rolled out across the whole team and annualized, carried a sales lift of $6 million. Since the leads were already in our system, there was virtually no associated marketing cost, which means everything we’d have spent to generate that revenue dropped straight to profit.
Why Email Offers Massive Leverage
One skilled person can reach every customer you’ve ever touched—or would ever want to touch—in an afternoon, with personalized, relevant, genuinely valuable content that creates revenue almost out of thin air and can move nearly every metric in your sales and marketing process. It’s always on, always ready, and runs with near-perfect accuracy. The software that operates these systems has gotten so sophisticated it can do almost anything you design. But with great power comes great responsibility.
When this works, it works at any scale: hundreds of people, thousands, hundreds of thousands. It doesn’t really matter. It can also break at any scale—and it’s almost always user error. So if you’re going to capture the value of an email program, treat it with the respect it deserves, from both a revenue and a brand standpoint. Invest in seeding the field, tending it with a skilled hand, and give it a place in the sales-and-marketing conversation beyond being the thing Cathy handles when she has a free moment.