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Today, we’re continuing with part two of the series on bad takes from agencies (yes, I renamed it to “bad takes” instead of “common lies” because to be accurate, most of these statements are just due to a lack of experience and insights grounded in statistically significant data).

I’d like to focus on the front end in this edition, but let’s start off with one more bad take on email marketing that I came across recently on X before we get to Meta ads.

Email is better than ads?

Many email marketers like to make blanket statements like:

"Emails convert 5 to 10x better than ads do."

"Customer retention is more important than acquisition."

"The average ROI for email marketing is $40 for every $1 spent."

This is completely misguided. It’s not an either/or game. You need both ads and email:

1. Ads to acquire new customers and build an email list

2. Emails to retain customers / convert subscribers into customers

Statements like the above from agencies are extremely misleading. Of course, emails convert better because they’re being sent to a warm audience. The purpose of running ads to cold traffic is to acquire new customers who have never heard of your business before.

Naturally, your ROI will be lower because of the cost of your ad spend, but without ads, there is no email list to send to.

You need both.

Separately, this brings up another related point that I’ve been thinking about recently.

There are two ways to approach email marketing:

1. Emails as ad impressions:

Every email is another impression in your customers' journey. The more emails you send, the more revenue you generate because there are more impressions.

2. Emails as a channel for value and engagement

Every email is sent only when you have something to say. Engaging, high quality, and entertaining content is prioritized over volume.

If your brand can consistently come up with engaging, high quality content subscribers look forward to, then the second option becomes more viable and perhaps preferable.

However, in most cases, a higher volume of emails is the better option. There’s no one right way; it just depends on your strategy and brand positioning.

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Media buying is dead?

A common idea promoted by many marketers these days is that great media buying cannot make terrible ad creatives work.

This is true in the majority of cases; however, they also often imply that media buying is dead or doesn’t matter anymore.

While I completely agree that ad creatives are the priority, a large volume of ad creatives is not the answer to all your problems.

A skilled media buyer will be able to squeeze out more juice from your creatives and maximize your ad account’s performance with the right structure and account optimizations.

So while media buying skills aren’t as important of a factor as they used they be five to eight years ago, they still matter.

High CPMs and CPCs and low CTRs are leading indicators of poor performance?

The truth is most media buying metrics don’t generally correlate with performance.

For example, your CPMs might be high, but that just may mean you're targeting a more lucrative and competitive audience with a high purchase intent.

Your CTR may be low, but the people who click may actually be more qualified buyers.

I’ve had CPMs increase, and my campaign performance improved with the ROAS skyrocketing. I’ve had lower CTRs, and I still increased profitability as my conversion rate increased.

In many cases, I artificially increased the effective CPCs by adding an interstitial page like an advertorial between my ads and sales page (check out some other good examples I’ve broken down in prior newsletters like this and this).

By filtering traffic through an additional step, the effective cost of each click to my sales or product page became more expensive, but it also became more qualified (viewers going through multiple steps had shown more interest and had consumed more marketing content, priming them for the purchase).

This is also relevant for email marketing metrics.

Many marketers and brands panic when their open rates, click-through rates, or revenue per recipient fluctuate.

However, as long as your list is growing at a healthy rate based on your benchmarks and overall email revenue and retention are maximized, the individual metrics don’t matter so much.

They can be used as a rough guideposts for success, but you can't isolate metrics and look at them in a vacuum.

You need to take a holistic approach and ask yourself if your overall profitability is optimized.

Aim for the highest ROAS possible?

When you’re speaking with an inexperienced marketing team, the initial questions they’ll always ask are around ROAS.

What’s the ROAS of that ad? What ROAS can you guarantee us? How can we increase the ROAS?

This is misguided.

What matters is whether an ad is scalable.

I’d rather be able to spend $1 million on an ad at a 2x ROAS instead of being limited to $10k at a 5x ROAS.

The ROAS is important, but it’s only one part of the story. Typically, as you scale, your ROAS drops. So getting a 5x ROAS is much more feasible at $500 a day than at $10,000 a day or more in ad spend.

What matters most is maximizing your contribution margin, and this requires stability at scale.

Other factors at play include your gross margins and AOV. If you’re bundling high margin products together and you have positioned them with a high perceived value, then you can also tolerate a higher break even ROAS, leading to more stability at higher ad spend.

These factors that are external to your media buying contribute significantly to your ability to scale your ads.

Overall, the theme of this newsletter seems to be that a holistic approach is always superior to getting bogged down with individual metrics. By shifting your decision-making framework, you can achieve better results.

Any other bad takes you’ve come across recently? Feel free to share your thoughts by replying back.

On my end, I still have to put together a future newsletter on upsells…Separately, I’m putting the final touches on the email marketing playbook that I’ll share in the coming days.

I’m also going to be putting out more content on my YouTube channel that I’ll be sharing soon.

Talk soon,

Sharad

@pmktg00

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