There’s a new breed of email marketers who are profitably scaling email accounts… the same way elite media buyers profitably scale their ad accounts…

The most staggering part?

They’re generating the same, tangible business outcomes that top media buyers do… but with a more profitable sales channel… and an audience that businesses already own.

Let me illustrate with a quick story:

4 years after becoming a copywriter & email marketer, I thought I made a huge mistake in my career…

I thought I should’ve started as a ‘media buyer’ instead.

The way I approached the work was so different than everyone else, and I wondered if I’d chosen the wrong path.

But what I discovered next completely changed my perspective on email marketing and scaling businesses…

The Evolution: From Email Marketer to Email Growth Marketer

Most email marketers & copywriters are the right brain, creative types. I was more of the left brain type.

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Coming up with email ideas & creative angles was kinda unnatural. It was difficult… My work life sucked. I dreaded writing emails.

The way I approached the work was so different than everyone else.

While most email folks were obsessing over subject lines and open rates, I was analyzing data trends and conversion patterns.

I’d stare at spreadsheets, PowerBI, and identify unique opportunities to grow revenue in places where others couldn’t even think to look.

After a while, I started questioning my career choice…

Had I made a massive mistake? Should I have gone the media buyer route instead?

But then something weird happened:

I started producing more revenue from email lists… without even writing emails anymore!

I was scaling email accounts… Seeing revenue grow… Year over Year (YoY)… consistently.

I wasn’t just managing lists anymore – I was transforming entire business models through the email channel.

While everyone else was A/B testing subject lines, I was restructuring entire funnels… with email segmentation strategies based on customer behavior patterns and profitability & margin growth metrics.

People started reaching out to me for “growth marketing services.”

What the does that even mean, I thought?

After some research, I saw it was a role a lot of companies were bending over backwards to hire.

But most growth marketers had backgrounds as ‘CRO, SEO, or media buyers.’

I was an email guy. Or so I thought…

What I didn’t realize… is that what you actually do is irrelevant.

No one cares what you ‘do’. They care about what you do for them… WITH what you do.

Their benefit first. How you provide that benefit second.

And all I ever cared about really, was helping businesses make tons of money from their email list… And profitably scale.

That’s when I realized my left brain, analytical approach was my superpower.

I wasn’t just an email marketer who could write high-converting email copy.

I was evolving into something different: an Email Growth Marketer.

This evolution happened gradually the more I started seeing email as a strategic growth lever across the entire business…

I began applying growth marketing principles specifically to email lists:

• Systematically testing conversion points throughout the funnel (from click -> opt-in -> cash collected)
• Tracking cohort performance over time vs. just individual campaign performance
• Building predictive models for email revenue based on acquisition sources and buyer behavior
• Developing custom segmentation strategies that boosted both immediate conversion rates and customer lifetime value

What separated me from traditional growth marketers was my deep email expertise.

What separated me from traditional email marketers was my growth marketing approach.

The combination created something powerful that businesses desperately needed…

Email Growth Marketing vs. Traditional Email Marketing

What is growth marketing? 

Growth marketing is a data-driven, experimental approach to increasing customer acquisition, retention, and revenue.

It focuses on optimizing the entire customer lifecycle, from attracting new customers to retaining existing ones, with the goal of driving sustainable growth and maximizing the value of marketing efforts.

Growth marketers are concerned with the entire funnel. 

The biggest thing here is DATA. Growth marketers are obsessed about the numbers and metrics. 

The best business owners I know, know their metrics like the back of their hand.

They’ll easily tell me what their CAC is, LTV, cost-per-booked call, etc. 

Growth marketers are the same way. And because they know the numbers, they know what to optimize to grow the business. The difference is… they understand the marketing and conversions side to INFLUENCE those numbers. 

I recently helped a client grow their LTV and increase trial conversion rates by 51%.

This is something a regular email marketer wouldn’t know how to do.

They would likely be obsessing over open rates or click rates…

But as a growth marketer who knows the other metrics like trial conversion rates, across the full funnel, I was able to fix this and help the company scale on cold traffic.

Only a growth marketer who sees the full funnel and is obsessed with the key business metrics, and how they can use email to influence those metrics would see this, and then have the marketing and technical abilities to execute what’s needed to drive business growth. 

What most email marketers get wrong 

Most email marketers focus on vanity metrics like opens and clicks.

They don’t know how to grow the list…

They aren’t masters of the entire customer life cycle… 

They aren’t experts in data analysis.

Since they aren’t masters of the customer lifecycle, they can’t grow profit per subscriber on command, by knowing what to sell each person at the right time in their customer journey for maximum conversions and buyer LTV growth. 

Since they aren’t experts in data analysis, they don’t know what metrics to look at or how to get access to that data, and make data driven decisions to grow the business. 

And since they can’t grow the list either, they can’t do a main thing we discuss on this blog:

Grow the email list while simultaneously increasing EPS. 

Growth marketers are focused on key business metrics. Mostly revenue. But also the core metrics that help you grow revenue, like CAC, LTV, retention, etc. 

Think of it this way…

Difference between regular email marketing and email growth marketing:

• Regular Email Marketing = Engagement, Opens, Clicks, 
• Regular Email Marketing focuses on broadcasts and newsletters
• Email Growth Marketing builds systematic sequences and customer journeys
• Email Growth Marketing = CAC, LTV, onboarding, revenue growth, retention
• Revenue-tied success metrics vs. vanity metrics
• Growth approach incorporates optimization, testing, and continual refinement
• Strategic focus on business metrics rather than just email-specific metrics

What is an Email Growth Marketer? (And Why It’s Different)

What is an email growth marketer? And what’s their secret to growing email marketing revenue faster & easier than anybody else in the market?

In simple terms, it’s basically growth marketing, but with a deep channel expertise in email marketing.

The T-Shaped Marketer

Ryan Deiss, founder of DigitalMarketer, popularized the concept of the T-shaped marketer.

This philosophy describes someone with:

• Broad knowledge across many marketing disciplines (the horizontal bar of the T)
• Deep expertise in one specific area (the vertical bar of the T)

For an email growth marketer, this means having:

1. Depth in email marketing: Expert-level skills in list building, segmentation, copywriting, automation sequences, deliverability, testing, and email analytics
2. Breadth across marketing: Working knowledge of other channels/business areas; marketing strategy, CAC/LTV, CRO, Offer Creation, content marketing, SEO, paid advertising, social media, and conversion rate optimization

This T-shaped approach is particularly valuable because email marketing doesn’t exist in isolation.

The most effective email growth marketers understand how email fits into the broader marketing ecosystem and customer journey.

Most growth marketers specialize in paid ads. They’re experts at scaling Facebook campaigns or Google Ads. They know how to optimize for CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost) and tweak targeting to improve ROAS (Return on Ad Spend).

But their expertise typically revolves around paid channels where you’re renting someone else’s audience…

Email growth marketers are fundamentally different… and tend to drive better business outcomes: 

They understand how to convert leads faster, which lowers your CAC…

And they’re good at boosting LTV too.

We focus on owned media – specifically, your email list – and apply sophisticated growth marketing principles to scale revenue through your email channel.

What matters is the business’s growth goals, and how you can align email to support those growth goals.

It’s about understanding how email fits into the entire business’ ecosystem.

An email growth marketer doesn’t look at email in isolation – they look at how it connects to every other aspect of your business.

Think about it like this:

A traditional email marketer might obsess over open rates and click-through rates. They’ll spend hours creating the perfect subject lines.

A growth marketer might analyze and optimize funnels, landing pages and paid advertising channels.

But an email growth marketer combines both skill sets… to produce consistent, profitable business growth.

It’s almost like if you were to take someone with the job email list manager or email marketing director… And you were to “install” a CMO and a CFO brain into theirs (not accounting CFOs either, lol—I’m talking M&A and Capital deploying rockstar CFOs).

Then after installing these brains, you didn’t change their title at all… You still let them run your email list. The difference now is they see the entire picture differently.

Like Tom Brady sees the game, the field, and can devise whatever strategy will win the game. In this case, it’s not really just growing your email revenue… It’s actually growing your company, consistently, profitably.

When analyzing email performance, an email growth marketer isn’t just looking at typical email KPIs. They’re examining:

• How email campaigns impact overall customer acquisition costs
• How email sequences affect customer lifetime value
• How segmentation strategies influence retention and repeat purchase rates
• How email content and frequency correlate with overall business growth metrics

This isn’t for beginners who don’t know where their business is going… It’s for those building real companies, who want to maximize shareholder value. Who want to make their investors rich… Be featured in Forbes… Bloomberg… Founders looking to IPO… Exit for millions of dollars.

And in order to do that… They must be showing consistent, profitable growth.

What makes email growth marketing powerful is that it focuses on the most profitable marketing channel. Email consistently delivers the highest ROI of any digital channel – with average returns between $36-$42 for every $1 spent according to industry research.

By applying sophisticated growth marketing tactics to this already-profitable channel, businesses can achieve massive leaps in overall profit.

The T-Shaped Marketers’ Advantage

The T-shaped email growth marketer is uniquely positioned to drive profit because they combine email’s high-ROI potential with a versatile growth marketing skill set…

They can optimize email campaigns while collaborating with paid ads or content teams to create cohesive customer journeys.

While paid ads specialists focus narrowly on acquisition, email growth marketers prioritize retention and monetization, ensuring long-term profitability… AND they focus on acquisition…

The Email Growth Marketer handles:

• Acquisition: Converting cold traffic to leads through lead magnets and nurture sequences
• Ascension: Strategically moving customers to higher-value offers and increased LTV
• Retention: Building long-term relationships through engagement and reactivation campaigns
• Integration with Customer Value Journey framework for seamless progression

Email growth marketers stand out by embracing a T-shaped skill set. By combining deep email expertise with broader growth marketing skills. This is where Ryan Deiss’s T-shaped philosophy comes in…

The T-shaped marketer has a wide foundation (the horizontal bar) of general skills – understanding paid ads, SEO, content, and analytics—paired with deep specialization (the vertical stem) in one area, like email.

For email growth marketers, the vertical stem means mastering list growth, deliverability, segmentation, and copywriting, while the horizontal bar equips them to integrate email with other channels:

They can…

• Align email campaigns with paid ad funnels
• Optimize landing pages
• Coordinate with content teams to ensure cohesive messaging
• Give sales teams “closer swipes” to send their prospects they have active deals with (and SQLs)

Deiss emphasizes that T-shaped marketers are “force multipliers” because they see the entire marketing ecosystem.

A paid ads specialist might optimize a Facebook campaign in isolation, but an email growth marketer ensures that campaign feeds into a nurture sequence, re-engaging leads who didn’t convert.

This holistic approach maximizes ROI.

Deiss’s philosophy also highlights adaptability:

T-shaped marketers can pivot when ad platforms change algorithms or email deliverability rules shift, making them resilient in a volatile digital marketing world.

So to recap: Following an email growth marketing strategy, instead of a typical email marketing strategy is the path to growing your company profitably.

The Shift from List Manager to Growth Partner

When I realized the power of email growth marketing, I threw my copywriter & email list manager hats in the dumpster…

And I replaced it with this new approach that lets businesses scale more consistently… and more profitably…

See, you can increase email revenue, but still have a ‘down year.’

And you can also be ‘scaling’ but still leaving a ton of money on the ground by not focusing on email with this new approach…

Because an email list manager – they can just take your email list, and they can make the most of that email list…

But on the other hand… An email GROWTH marketer is someone who can also help you grow that list, and grow your business.

The reality is you can make more money from your emails…

But it could also impact your other sales channels as well.

So while you’re making more money from your emails, your business is actually making less money overall.

With email growth marketing the goal actually isn’t really to just help you do better with email…

The goal is to use emails as the “TOOL” that grows your business…

It’s a holistic approach that factors in all your other sales channels, and your business’s vision…

And leverages email as the best way to help you reach your company’s vision.

I started doing this because I was running my clients’ email lists, and I realized that many times, there were other holes that they had in their businesses… And in order to actually get them better results with email… I had to plug up some of these holes.

Like, for example, if their product pages or sales pages weren’t converting…

I’d write them new product pages or sales pages…

And if they were using a VSL or webinar, and that wasn’t converting…

I’d write them new webinars/VSLs…

And then I would BUILD those new product pages, sales pages, or VSL/Webinar pages.

Selfishly, though… Doing these things actually made my emails convert better 😎

Cuz when you think about it… There’s no sense in sending people to a page via email, when we know the page doesn’t convert, right?

Truth be told: As an email growth marketer who knows the entire funnel, I know if I’m gonna launch an email campaign but I look at the sales page and I know the sales page isn’t gonna convert, I’m going to do the right thing by fixing the page before launching.

My focus shifted from my email copy & ’email list management’ services… To being a true growth partner for businesses. Able to show them each day, hey here’s how what you’re paying me to do is helping you profitably get to your goal.

I positioned myself as a growth partner, with their best interests in mind.

Lately I’ve generated $470 million in pipeline value… And increased company valuations by 125%. 

I’m just a growth partner who makes sure your email list makes money and contributes to your goals.

Quite simple really.

But that also means, I don’t say yes to “extra pair of hands projects”. I command high rates, performance bonuses, equity. Because I’m not bringing emails to the table. I’m bringing business acumen. Understanding of your value chain. How we can help you exit or grow shareholder value.

That’s way more exciting than open rates & click rates, and even “revenue per blast.”

Once I started doing this, email marketing was fun again. I loved jumping into all the data, optimizing and scaling profits for businesses. Because now I wasn’t just an email service provider – I was a strategic growth partner.

This shift completely transformed the conversations I was having with clients…

Instead of talking about deliverability issues and open rates, we were talking about company valuation, exit strategies, and Year-over-Year growth targets.

We were discussing how email connected to broader business goals, and how we could use the email channel to systematically grow the entire business.

Core Components of Email Growth Marketing

If I were to really try and simplify what I do, think of it as three core buckets: 

1. Email Marketing
2. Conversion Optimization
3. List Growth. 

These are the three fundamental pillars of the email growth marketing approach.

Let’s break down each component and how they work together to create an unstoppable growth engine:

1. Email Marketing 

First, the Email Marketing component isn’t just about sending emails. It’s about creating a strategic communication framework that nurtures relationships and drives conversions. But here’s where my approach differs dramatically from conventional wisdom.

The part that produces the highest ROI for my email clients is actually this unique segmentation approach I use, that:

• Converts new leads into buyers faster (and pays back your ads faster)
• Turns those buyers into repeat buyers at a higher rate (boosts retention + C-LTV)
• Ascends those buyers into premium backend programs, and high-priced product bundles (increases AOV, and makes you more money per customer)

This creates a consistent flywheel for converting leads into buyers, and buyers into repeat buyers more easily. Combined with a segmented approach that sends the right message to the right person, at the right time… it totally transforms the economics of your business.

In fact, a #1 education company in their niche told me this method “doubled their conversion rates” from their email list, and their list is growing faster than ever now.

2. Conversion Optimization

The second component, Conversion Optimization, extends well beyond emails. CRO could be anything from creating a new sales page or funnel to fixing a popup form. It’s about ensuring that every touchpoint in the customer journey is optimized for conversion.

When I help clients with CRO, I’m looking at:

• How effectively landing pages convert visitors to subscribers
• How well sales pages convert email clicks to purchases
• How seamlessly the checkout process works
• How effectively upsell opportunities are presented
• How compelling the overall funnel experience is

3. List Growth

The third component, List Growth, focuses on sustainable, profitable growth of your email list. 

This isn’t just about getting more subscribers – it’s about getting the RIGHT subscribers who will engage, purchase, and then keep purchasing.

List growth could be lead gen, tripwire offers, or just straight up scaling on cold traffic – which I help clients do. 

But the key is ensuring that growth is profitable and aligned with the business’s broader objectives.

For example, since my backend offer is email & growth marketing for course creators, info & education businesses, I started creating more lead magnets and low ticket products for that audience. Whereas, previously, I was doing broader email marketing offers, which would attract people from multiple niches. 

So be mindful, if you’re heading in a different direction in your business or are planning to launch a new offer, it might make sense to add more people to your list who will be more congruent to that offer. 

Or alternatively, do a deep analysis of your best subscribers who have the highest LTV, and identify the commonalities between them and how they signed up. Then, do what it takes to get more people like them on your email list.

Email Marketing Strategy

Now, here’s a counter-intuitive insight that many email marketers miss: 

For some businesses, sending a daily email is the best email strategy for them to reach their company’s growth & revenue goals. 

For other businesses, sending 2-3 emails a day is the best plan for them. 

Meanwhile, I have other clients, where we mail on average once per month, with more frequent mailing during certain seasons, all of which, are industry-specific.

For instance, with back to school book & edutech companies, we have more frequent mailing periods pre-semester (right before the semester begins).

It’s taking a yearly approach looking at your business as a system that we want to grow Year-over-Year. Looking at it like an investor would – understanding the cyclical sales pattern of your industry, understanding your company’s historical sales results, what you’re forecasting for the future, and then devising an email strategy that allows you to stay on track to continually grow this company into an empire.

When these three components work in harmony, they create a powerful growth engine that systematically drives revenue. The improved conversion rates from one area feed into better performance in another, creating a flywheel of revenue growth.

It’s a formulaic process for growing your list, and generating more revenue from each person who gets on your list.

You see a higher lead value and higher customer lifetime value.

Why Most Email Marketing Fails to Scale Revenue

Most email marketing fails to scale revenue because it operates in a silo, completely disconnected from the rest of the business. I see it all the time – companies with “successful” email campaigns that somehow don’t translate to actual business growth.

The common mistake? Focusing on email metrics instead of business outcomes. 

As industry data shows, email marketing is too significant to be ignored with 44% of B2B marketers citing it as their most effective channel and 59% of buyers saying marketing emails influence their purchase decisions. But the way most businesses approach it is fundamentally flawed.

There’s the hidden problem I call the email-funnel disconnect – sending people to pages that don’t convert. As WebFX points out, neglecting your call to action (CTA) in your email is one of the most critical mistakes, since the CTA helps guide subscribers to take the next step.

But it goes even deeper than that…

I’ve found that the most devastating email marketing mistake isn’t even about the emails themselves. It’s about the disconnect between your email strategy and your overall business strategy.

You can be growing your email marketing revenue while your company’s revenue is actually declining.

Think about it: a disjointed approach sends customers mixed messages, diminishing the trust and credibility of your brand. When your emails say one thing but your website, sales team, and customer success say something else, you’re essentially pulling in different directions.

But here’s the insight most email marketers miss: sometimes the solution isn’t in the emails at all. I once completely changed a company’s hiring process because they thought they needed a copywriter (who I would copychief and give ideas to).

What they actually needed was a financial researcher who could identify unique angles & trends.

We had enough marketing power and copywriting talent – what we were missing was someone who could spot trends our competitors couldn’t see.

This is what separates traditional email marketers from email growth marketers. Instead of scattering efforts across channels where emails go one way and social media posts another, a holistic approach unifies every marketing element into one seamless effort.

The irony is that by focusing less on the emails themselves and more on the entire customer journey, your email performance actually improves. When all the pieces work together – when your emails lead to pages that convert, when your messaging is consistent, when your segmentation aligns with the customer’s actual needs – that’s when email marketing rapidly scales your revenue.

The biggest mistake I see is marketers treating email as just another marketing channel rather than a strategic growth tool. In a holistic marketing approach, every tactic supports and amplifies others, creating a seamless customer experience across all channels.

The Email Growth Marketer’s Playbook for Scaling

The part that produces the highest ROI for my email clients is actually this unique segmentation approach I use, that:

• Converts new leads into buyers faster (and pays back your ads faster)
• Turns those buyers into repeat buyers at a higher rate (boosts retention + C-LTV)
• Ascends those buyers into premium backend programs, and high-priced product bundles (increases AOV, and makes you more money per customer)

It’s a formulaic process for growing your list, and generating more revenue with each person who gets on your list. You see a higher lead value and higher customer lifetime value. Better conversion rates = more leads. Better conversion rates also = more purchases (both 1st time & repeat purchases).

Marketers generate 760% more email revenue from segmented campaigns. Yet most businesses are still sending the same generic emails to their entire list.

What makes my approach different is that I don’t just segment by basic demographics or interests. I look at the entire customer journey and segment based on behavioral patterns, engagement levels, purchase history.

For new leads, we create personalized onboarding sequences that quickly build trust and move them toward that first purchase. For existing customers, we analyze their buying patterns to predict what they will buy next – and when.

This creates a consistent flywheel for converting leads into buyers, and buyers into repeat buyers more easily. Combined with a segmented approach that sends the right message to the right person, at the right time… it completely transforms the economics of your business.

One of the counter-intuitive insights I’ve discovered is that email frequency needs to be customized based on industry-specific cycles and company growth goals.

For some businesses, sending a daily email is the best email strategy to reach their company’s growth & revenue goals.

For other businesses, sending 2-3 emails a day is the best plan.

Meanwhile, I have other clients who mail on average once per month, with more frequent sends during tax season.

With back to school book & edutech companies, we have heavier mailing periods pre-semester (right before the semester begins).

The most powerful part is when you begin to understand the cyclical sales pattern of your industry.

You’re understanding your company’s historical sales results, forecasting for the future, and then devising an email strategy that allows you to stay on track to continually grow into an empire…

From Email List to Business Empire: The Strategic Vision

I’ve watched businesses transform from struggling startups to powerhouse brands, all by leveraging their email list with the right approach…

It’s about adopting an investor mindset: understanding the cyclical sales pattern of your industry, analyzing your company’s historical sales results, and developing an email strategy that allows you to stay on track to continually grow.

I helped a #1 seller on Teachable get an 825% ROAS by rewriting and rebuilding her funnel and webinar autoresponder emails…

I also beat a long-standing sales page control for a multi-8 figure direct response company by over 30%. And in that same promotion, I wrote an email control that still gets sent to this day.

The most successful businesses I’ve worked with treat their email list as the nucleus of business – not just a traction channel. Everything revolves around the email list.

Here’s what an investor-minded approach to email strategy looks like:

First, you analyze your historical data to identify patterns.

When do sales typically surge?
When do they drop?
What events or seasons impact your business cycle?

Then you build your email strategy around these patterns, creating specialized campaigns for high-potential periods.

This is the mindset shift that separates ordinary email marketers from email growth marketers.

Conclusion

When I began this journey, I thought my analytical approach to email marketing was a weakness. Now I understand it was the foundation for something more powerful.

The evolution from email marketer to email growth marketer is a fundamental shift in how you approach marketing & business growth. It’s about transcending a channel-specific mindset into a holistic revenue growth engine.

The companies that understand this difference are the ones scaling while their competitors struggle to maintain consistent growth.

The real difference is in viewing email through the lens of an investor – rather than a marketer.

When you adopt this perspective, you naturally focus on metrics that matter to the business: customer lifetime value, predictable revenue growth, and shareholder value.

As this methodology continues to evolve, my hope is that more businesses will recognize the distinction between tactical email marketing and strategic email growth marketing. The opportunity isn’t just to improve email performance – it’s to fundamentally transform how businesses scale, and let them do so more profitably.

After all, I didn’t set out to create a new category – I was simply searching for a better way to help my clients businesses grow – including the ones I’m an investor in.

The fact that this approach has now become a recognized methodology speaks to the gap it fills in modern business strategy, and you would be wise to adopt it for your own business.