Who’s advocating for your email subscribers?

We all know what email marketing is supposed to do:

• Engage subscribers. 
• Build relationships. 
• Drive action. 
• Meet business goals.

That’s what the leadership team expects and what most email marketers are measured on. 

But if you want email to keep doing those things, someone inside your organization must take on a critical role. You need someone to advocate for your subscribers.

When no one’s looking out for your subscribers — or the health of your list — performance starts to erode. When emails go out too often, to too many subscribers, with too little relevance, your audience will notice and disengage. That directly undermines the very business goals that email is supposed to support.

The creep of quantity over quality

I was on a call recently with a client’s email team. The organization is large, and many different internal groups use email marketing. When I came on board, there was a steady decline in email performance. Opens, clicks and conversions were all slipping. To reverse the trend, we implemented a framework comprised of carrots and sticks that I’ve used successfully with other clients. 

One of the sticks was a mandated reduction in send quantities, enforced through segmentation. Each business unit would email only its engaged list, defined as anyone who had opened or clicked an email from that specific unit within the past two years.

This isn’t radical. It’s a proven best practice that reduces irrelevant email (good for subscribers) while improving results (good for stakeholders). It’s a win-win.

One of the carrots was strategic support to improve creative — stronger subject lines, more compelling copy and better design. The goal was to lift performance within smaller, more targeted audiences.

Then, during a weekly status call, we noticed something unusual: one of the business units was about to send to a list far larger than expected. It turned out that someone outside the email team had quietly added extra segments — people who hadn’t opened or clicked any of that unit’s emails in years.

These subscribers had engaged with other groups but not this unit, which completely undermined the purpose of the engaged-by-business-unit segments.

Dig deeper: 3 high-impact tactics to drive email engagement

I get it. There’s always the fear that sending to fewer people will mean fewer results. But sending to the wrong people, especially those who aren’t interested in your content, comes with consequences:

• Increased unsubscribes.
• More spam complaints.
• Lower open and click-through rates.
• List fatigue (and inbox apathy).
• Worst of all? Trained disengagement.

When subscribers repeatedly receive irrelevant messages, even occasionally relevant emails start getting ignored. That disengagement impacts not just the one business unit doing the over-mailing but the entire organization. 

Subscribers don’t distinguish between teams. Every message reflects the brand as a whole. When one team sends irrelevant email, it erodes trust in every message your organization sends.

Carrots, sticks and the need for an advocate

This is why I pair carrots with sticks in my strategy for situations like this:

• The stick: Enforce segmentation and set limits on who can be emailed.
• The carrot: Support teams in improving creative, so the emails they do send perform better.

Together, these tactics deliver real results — not just vanity metric bumps from smaller denominators, but measurable improvements in open and click rates, conversions and, where relevant, revenue.

None of this is possible if your organization still operates with a spray-and-pray, send-every-email-to-everyone mindset. Or if internal politics allow one team (or one executive’s favorite campaign) to override best practices.

That’s why you need an advocate. Someone to raise the red flag when send volume creeps up. Someone to ask the hard questions, like “Is this message relevant to all of these people?” — and then use data to answer them. 

Dig deeper: 6 ways email marketing can elevate customer engagement and loyalty

Email advocacy: It’s not (yet) a job title

Is subscriber advocate a full-time role? Not yet.

Is it a C-level position? Probably not.

Is anyone currently doing this work? Yes — and they deserve credit.

In some organizations, junior team members are already stepping into this role. They’re the senders, the specialists, the people elbow-deep in campaign builds and performance dashboards. They see the cracks in the foundation, research, test and try to improve things from the inside.

Sometimes, they’re the only ones in the organization who understand what’s happening with your list. But when they sound the alarm, they’re often ignored or overruled because of:

• Fear (“We won’t hit our numbers if we cut volume.”)
• Politics (“Yes, limit send quantities, just not from my group.”)
• Or ego (“Don’t touch those emails. The CEO loves them.”)

That’s precisely why subscriber advocacy needs to move upstream.

Let’s bring this back to you

Who’s currently advocating for your email subscribers? If your answer is “no one,” you’re not alone. But maybe it’s time to change that. Here’s where to start:

• Audit your sends: Who’s sending what? To whom? And how often?
• Define engagement: Choose a timeframe (12 months? 24?) and start tracking performance by engaged vs. unengaged audiences.
• Champion relevance: Not just frequency. Relevance. Because volume without value erodes trust and long-term performance.
• Support the advocate: Whether you hire for it, delegate it, or bring in outside help, make subscriber advocacy someone’s job. Even unofficially. Even temporarily. The ROI speaks for itself.

Because email is about relationships, and good relationships require boundaries, even if that means telling a colleague “no.” Especially then.

Dig deeper: 4 ways to increase email engagement with your current ESP