Give Your Email Program a Portfolio Review Now

For years, my consulting work followed a familiar rhythm. I would walk into an organization, review its email program, and break it down into three categories: what was working, what wasn’t, and what was missing. The strategy was straightforward , amplify successes, eliminate failures, and uncover untapped opportunities.

Back then, the problem was usually underinvestment. Companies weren’t doing enough with email marketing. They lacked automation, segmentation, and lifecycle marketing capabilities. The path to improvement was clear: build new systems and strategies to capture obvious value.

But the landscape has flipped. Today, the challenge isn’t scarcity , it’s overgrowth. Most email ecosystems have become sprawling, tangled collections of newsletters, nurture campaigns, onboarding sequences, event promotions, and one-off automations. Each piece was added with good intent. A business need arose. A campaign was greenlit. Resources were allocated. The program grew, piece by piece.

This isn’t a sign of failure. In many ways, it reflects success. Organizations have become more sophisticated. They’ve adopted marketing automation, invested in customer journeys, and built increasingly personalized experiences. Every new campaign solved a real problem at the time.

That’s why my email audits look different now. The biggest opportunity isn’t adding another campaign. It’s deciding what still belongs.

How did we get here?

Organizations are excellent at adding to their email programs. They are far less disciplined about asking whether each addition represents the best use of marketing resources.

I saw this clearly while working with a client who wanted nurture campaigns for several gated content downloads. Following up on downloads is a best practice, so we built the strategy and messaging. Months later, I checked the performance. Several automations had never sent a single email. The content offers weren’t generating any downloads. The campaigns themselves were fine. They simply had no audience.

What I value most in consulting is helping clients invest limited budgets where they’ll generate the greatest return. I’d rather help a client fund an initiative that drives measurable business value than build something that never has the chance to make an impact. When we spend time and budget on campaigns that never run, we lose the opportunity to invest those same resources where they could make a real difference.

This pattern repeats across entire email ecosystems. Organizations keep adding campaigns because each one seems worthwhile on its own. Very few stop to ask whether it’s the best investment or how it fits into the larger strategy.

The question we’ve stopped asking

The more organizations I work with, the more I believe we’re asking the wrong questions. We evaluate email one campaign at a time.

Should we optimize this automation?

Should we update that newsletter?

Should we build another nurture campaign?

Those aren’t bad questions. They’re just too narrow. The bigger issue is whether the entire email ecosystem intentionally supports the organization’s most important goals.

Think about a building. Every load-bearing beam exists because it supports something essential. Remove it, and the structure weakens. Now imagine spending 10 years renovating that building, adding support beams every time someone started a new project. Eventually, you’d have beams running through the dining room, blocking hallways, maybe even cutting through the bathtub. They aren’t making the building stronger. They’re just taking up space because no one ever stopped to ask whether they were carrying any weight.

Mature email ecosystems evolve the same way. Every campaign contributes something. The real test is whether it contributes enough to justify the time, budget, creative energy, and organizational attention it consumes.

More importantly, if you were designing your email program today, knowing your current business priorities, audiences, and resources, would you build the same system?

That’s a very different question from asking whether an individual campaign performs reasonably well. It’s a portfolio decision. That’s how mature email programs need to think.

Maybe it’s time for some Swedish Death Cleaning

This shift in my consulting work keeps bringing me back to the idea of Swedish Death Cleaning. If you’re not familiar with it, it’s the practice of intentionally going through your possessions and deciding what deserves a place in the next chapter of your life. It’s not about getting rid of things for the sake of having less. It’s about making deliberate choices so that what remains is useful, meaningful, and aligned with what’s most important.

Email ecosystems deserve the same treatment. Every newsletter, automation, nurture campaign, and triggered message should answer a simple question: Is this one of the best uses of our time, budget, and creative energy to help the organization achieve its goals?

That’s a very different standard than asking whether a campaign is working. A campaign can generate opens, clicks, and even occasional conversions without being one of the highest-value investments your team could make. The real opportunity isn’t optimizing every existing program. It’s stepping back, looking at the ecosystem as a whole, and intentionally deciding what deserves to stay, what should change, and where to invest those resources instead.

That’s the shift I’ve made in my own consulting. I still believe in optimization. But increasingly, optimization comes after something much more important: making sure the email program itself intentionally supports the organization’s strategic priorities.

Only then does it make sense to optimize what’s left.