INBOX WINS: THE EMAIL RETURNS
Jamin Smith, Founder of Pantaloon (and newsletter aficionado) on why email is the smartest weapon in your marketing arsenal
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Jamin Smith, Founder of Pantaloon
mail is easy to underestimate as a comms channel; a rusty sword in an arsenal now dominated by shiny laser-guns and heat-
seeking missiles. The focus of marketeers and comms-minded publishing people shifted from the inbox to the bright-lights of social media some time ago and it was easy to be enthralled. Follower numbers! Virality! Infinite-scroll feeds! It was all very exciting, wasn’t it? In a perfect digital ecosystem, this one-to-
many approach to comms has been fantastically effective, with publishers and studios able to engage directly with their players out in the open. But the ecosystem is not perfect. The social media landscape is not what it once was; atrophying and fragmenting into something much harder to gain attention or engagement from. Trying to convey anything worthwhile on Twitter today is much like shouting into a bin, only with a much louder echo. These more modern weapons are subject to the whims of their manufacturers, we’ve seen. The worrying part of this is that your audiences
on these platforms are not yours, not really. Rather, they’re a product of the platforms, served up to advertisers and leveraged as data-points by their owners. This isn’t new; we all know what we’re signing up for at this point. But if the platform
16 | MCV/DEVELOP June/July 2025
shifts or disappears - again, as we’ve seen with Twitter - so too does that audience, migrating to the next platform that attains critical mass of conversation. It’s transient, then. The most impassioned argument I can make
for email and one-to-one marketing is how it side steps these algorithms and the whims of its owners. It’s not subject to all the nonsense, and stands defiantly right in the middle of the aggressively shifting sands of the comms space. Since the shift away from chronological timelines, there’s no guarantee that your followers - those that have actively chosen to follow you - will see your carefully crafted post anyway. With email, however, there is no algorithm to filter your message through; you are the master of your own destiny (or open rate, more specifically). This, in very reductive terms, is why email is
currently going through a renaissance of sorts, driven by the challenges and constraints of social media. Most notably, we’ve seen a shift from those with existing followings to the likes of Substack or Beehive, putting their messages and musings directly into inboxes with a more long-form approach. It’s a good model for those from legacy media backgrounds, especially those with sizable audiences that might convert to a paid subscription.
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