We don’t have a line item for Mailchimp, Klaviyo, or any of their competitors. It seems an odd statement for the founder of an AI-first marketing agency, but the reason is simple: we are pathologically focused on outcomes, not the processes that supposedly create them.
Your average email marketing function is a monument to inefficiency. It starts with a person, let’s call them £42,500 (the average salary in London). Add a manager to approve their work, a designer to slice up images, and a SaaS subscription that charges by the contact. You are easily at £150,000 a year before you have generated a single pound of revenue. For what? To get a 22% open rate?
This is industrial-age thinking. It celebrates the factory floor—the meetings, the briefs, the A/B tests on button colours. It is a cost centre masquerading as a creative department. The uncomfortable truth is that email marketing is not a tool. It is not a channel. It is a financial outcome. Everything else is noise.
The Great Deception: Activity vs. Attributable Revenue
The marketing industry has a dangerous addiction to proxy metrics. We obsess over open rates, click-through rates, and list growth because they are easy to measure, not because they are a direct line to profit.
Celebrating a high open rate is like a car factory celebrating how many doors it fitted this week, not how many cars it sold. It is a measure of activity, not achievement. It tells you something is happening, but it doesn’t tell you if it’s the right thing.
Take a giant like Marks & Spencer. The Sparks card and its associated app represent one of the most sophisticated first-party data capture operations in UK retail. Millions of customers, billions of transaction data points. It is a goldmine. Yet, how much of the resource allocated to that programme is spent on the process of marketing? The teams, the inter-departmental meetings, the campaign sign-offs, the manual segmentation, the weekly performance reports full of proxy metrics. The machine becomes about feeding itself, not about generating maximal, attributable revenue from the data it holds.
The entire ecosystem is built to sustain this deception. Agencies sell you 'sprints'. SaaS platforms sell you tiered plans based on activity levels. You pay for the doing, not the done.
To break out of this cycle, you need to change your mental model. Stop thinking about a 'tech stack' and start thinking about an 'Outcome Stack'. It has three layers.
This is your raw material. It’s the first-party data sitting in your Shopify, your CRM, your POS system. It’s messy, often incomplete, but it is the source of all value. Getting this layer clean and accessible is the most important, and most frequently ignored, part of the entire stack. Without a direct, real-time feed of customer behaviour and transactional data, you are flying blind.
This is where the 'thinking' happens. Historically, this layer has been occupied exclusively by humans. A strategist pores over the data, identifies a customer segment (e.g., 'high-spending customers who have not purchased in 90 days'), devises an offer (a 15% discount on their favourite category), and writes a brief. This human-led intelligence is slow, expensive, and biased by the marketer's own limited experience.
This is the commoditised 'doing'. The physical sending of the email, the SMS, or the push notification. Services like Amazon SES and SendGrid have made the cost of this layer a race to the bottom. It is a utility, as functional and unglamorous as electricity.