More Emails. Less Revenue.

Email marketing is still one of the most powerful tools available to business owners, but success depends on something many people do not fully understand: deliverability. In a recent episode of MindShare, Kevin Chern sat down with Larry Heslin of Email Industries to explain why emails that look “sent” often never reach the inbox and how that gap can directly affect revenue. From the start, Larry frames email not as an outdated channel, but as one that continues to evolve and reward businesses that use it strategically.

The conversation quickly makes clear that email performance is about more than open or click-through rates. Before any of those metrics matter, a message has to land where the recipient will actually see it. That is why deliverability is such a critical topic for business owners. When spam filters bury, block, or reroute emails into secondary tabs, even the strongest campaign underperforms. Understanding and protecting deliverability is often the first step to making email a reliable driver of growth.

What deliverability really means

One of the most important distinctions Larry makes in the conversation is that delivery and deliverability are not the same thing. Delivery tells you only that your platform sent an email. Deliverability tells you where it landed. A platform may show that it sent an email to nearly every address on a list, but that does not mean recipients actually received it in their inboxes. Deliverability is about placement. It shows whether an email lands in the inbox, the promotions tab, the social tab, the spam folder, or never meaningfully appears at all. That difference is easy to overlook, but it has a major impact on how marketers should evaluate performance.

That is why deliverability matters more than open rates or click-through rates. Those downstream metrics only tell part of the story. If a message is filtered before the recipient has a real chance to engage, weak performance may have less to do with the campaign itself and more to do with inbox placement. In that sense, deliverability is the foundation of every email strategy. Before a business can improve engagement, conversions, or revenue from email, it must first ensure its messages are actually reaching people where they are most likely to be seen.

Deliverability is a reputation problem

Email marketing has changed significantly over time. In the past, marketers focused largely on making sure messages did not look obviously “spammy.” Subject lines packed with phrases like “free stuff,” excessive capitalization, or vague offers were once major red flags that could hurt inbox placement. Avoiding those old mistakes no longer protects deliverability; sender reputation now shapes modern deliverability far more than surface-level content choices do.

Today, mailbox providers evaluate senders using a broader set of trust signals, including opens, clicks, bounces, spam complaints, list quality, and overall sending behavior. In other words, deliverability now depends on whether the sender has built a track record that providers trust. Larry compares this to a credit score: different providers have different standards, and each one uses its own hidden algorithm to decide whether a sender has earned strong inbox placement.

That comparison is especially important because it shifts the focus from a single campaign to the larger pattern behind it. When messages are not getting through, companies often increase output to try to boost the numbers. However, poor practices such as over-sending, targeting disengaged segments, or ignoring warning signs can damage sender reputation over time and worsen deliverability. Inbox placement has to be earned through consistency, strong list management, and responsible sending habits. These factors shape a company’s reputation, which determines whether an email gets the chance to perform in the first place.

The warning signs and “email no-nos.”

Even strong email programs can run into trouble when foundational practices are ignored. One of the clearest takeaways from the episode is that deliverability problems rarely appear out of nowhere. Larry made this clear when he said, “9 out of every 10 incidents where we’ve seen impactful issues there were clear warning signs beforehand.” For the best results, businesses should monitor performance, maintain list quality, and treat email as an active system rather than something they can set and forget.

Larry also outlined several “email no-no’s” that teams should avoid. One of the most important is neglecting authentication protocols such as SPF, DKIM, and DMARC, which help mailbox providers verify that a sender is legitimate. Poor list hygiene can also be a major problem. Businesses that continue sending to old, invalid, or disengaged contacts increase the likelihood of bounces, complaints, and low engagement. Over-sending can have the same effect. When brands send too frequently without enough relevance or personalization, recipients begin to tune them out or mark them as spam, which hurts long-term performance.

Even though many deliverability factors fall outside of the content itself, technical and design choices still matter. Heavy HTML, too many images, broken links, and cluttered templates can all create a poor experience for both recipients and filtering systems. Deliverability requires discipline. Businesses cannot simply turn on an email campaign and leave it alone. They need regular monitoring, thoughtful segmentation, and a clear process for spotting problems before they become expensive.

Email works, but only with discipline

Larry is very confident in the future of email marketing. In the conversation, he said, “Email is always still going to continue to work, and it has continued to work.” Email is still, and likely always will be, one of the cheapest and most effective marketing channels available to businesses, but it is not a system that can be set up once and ignored. As the conversation makes clear, strong email performance demands ongoing discipline. Organizations must monitor engagement, maintain list quality, respect sending cadence, and pay close attention to deliverability over time. When those habits are in place, email can remain a consistent driver of revenue and customer engagement.

When those habits are missing, the damage is often gradual and expensive. Deliverability problems tend to build quietly, weakening sender reputation and making it less likely that future messages will reach the inbox. As a result, companies can waste time and effort sending emails to audiences who never see them. The biggest takeaway from the episode is that email still works, but only for businesses willing to manage it with the same care and consistency they would give any other high-performing revenue channel.

Watch the full conversation here on YouTube.