Michael Levitz
June 16, 2025
I just finished recording a podcast with two of my email marketing heroes: Bob Frady (PropertyLens CEO, exited founder, and former email marketer at Live Nation and Expedia) and Dela Quist (author of The Frequency File and founder of email marketing agency Alchemy Worx).
These guys have lived through the ups and downs of email marketing, and still breathe fresh inspiration and approaches into the channel. After a session with them, it's hard not to view every email as opportunity to push the envelope, try something new, and get your audience excited about your brand.
And then I opened up Really Good Emails Annual Report. The average time to complete one email is up 44% from 2018. "What once took under six business days now stretches beyond eight, costing roughly three extra days per campaign and nearly 18 workdays over the course of a year."
It reminded me of of an amazing quote I heard from former Google Ad exec and entrepreneur Ben Hsi when he was giving us advice on our product: "As a business owner, when I create a post on social, it feels fun. I get this dopamine hit. When I create a marketing email, it feels like a high school writing assignment that I want to put off until the last minute."
How did the most effective marketing channel become the one that feels like homework?
Dela Quist has a simple rule: "There is nobody B2B or B2C that should send less than one email a week. Nobody, that's my view. I would argue two emails a week."
While email marketers worry about "bothering" their audience, every other channel is maximizing impressions.
"What would you say if I asked you to run one less TV ad or one less radio spot?" Dela asks. "The answer is most people would run more. Just get the impressions. It's an impressions game and impressions build up over time."
Meanwhile, "emails are the cheapest impressions that have ever existed since the beginning of time. There is no other channel that can deliver a brand impression for like 50 cents a thousand. Imagine that price."
Yet email marketers treat frequency like kryptonite while TV advertisers run the same commercial hundreds of times without blinking. "Only email marketers apologize for using their channel."
Bob Frady's most quoted insight cuts straight to the heart of email anxiety: "People don't sign up for your email. They sign up for your brand. They want to be part of your team."
This reframes everything. Your subscribers aren't victims being interrupted. They're fans who chose to be there. "When people sign up for your email, they want to hear from you," Bob explains. "That's why they signed up. Now they might get tired at some point, but people know how to use an unsubscribe button. Google's made it real easy."
Bob's approach to content reflects this mindset. Instead of rationing out email to his subscribers, he builds lean teams focused on discovering content his audience needs: "Start with a lot of ideas, sort them, and test them: these suck, these are good. And then the ones that we don't like, we'll test those too, because generating the content is so much simpler than it was 15 years ago."
When you believe your audience wants to hear from you, everything changes. You stop tiptoeing around them and start treating them like the engaged community they actually are.
For all the talk about frequency and audience engagement, there's still one ever-present barrier standing in the way: the blank page.
"My high school English teacher told me something that has stuck with me my entire life," Bob told is. "The empty page is your worst enemy because all it can do is show how stupid you are."
This is often the overlooked problem. You've built an audience that wants to hear from you. You've created a solid editorial calendar that mixes batch n' blast, segmentation, and behavioral automations. Now you need a consistent supply of topics, insights, and open-worthy content to claim your place in your audience's email routine.
"I used to write a weekly blog post and I hated it. You need some way to think of things to talk about that are unique and not just the same thing over and over. That's been the problem with traditional email programs. They just keep repeating their message through their own lens."
Dela's bottom line: "Emails are the cheapest impressions that have ever existed since the beginning of time. At 50 cents per thousand impressions, you're sitting on the most cost-effective marketing channel in history. Stop apologizing for using it."
Bob's revelation: "It's a new day and the possibilities are almost endless in terms of how you can improve your program by really leaning in rather than being tentative. The math is undeniable."
So here's the test both Bob and Dela would run: If you're sending monthly emails, try twice per month. If you're weekly, try twice per week. Test it for two weeks and watch what happens.
Your subscribers signed up for your brand, not your email. They want to be part of your team. The only question is: can you look at the world through their eyes and create ways to let them in?
Michael Levitz is the co-founder of Forecast.ing, a content prediction platform that helps marketers identify high-performing topics using data science and game theory. He previously led content strategy for global brands like Pampers, Samsung, and Verizon during his time as a Managing Director at R/GA. Michael co-hosts the AI content marketing podcast Forecast.ing the Brief, and his insights have been featured in Forbes, Inc., and TheStreet. Connect with him on LinkedIn.