378 - Email Urgency Tactics That Are Costing You Subscriber Trust
Release Date: 04/19/2026
393 - Why Being Picky About Email Marketing Paid Off for COE Founder Cody Cessna
Marketing With Laryssa
Cody Cessna almost didn't do email marketing at all. He told me straight up he didn't want to be the brand that annoys people and gets unsubscribed. And honestly, that instinct made our job harder - because we had to build in more restraint and intention than we might have with another brand. But he came around, and it's actually paying off. Cody is the founder of COE, a brand built for the active and working man who needs eyewear that can handle the job site without looking terrible doing it. He spent years as a lineman touching 16,000 volts every day, wearing safety glasses that were ugly...
info_outline
392 - I Subscribed to 362 Ecommerce Brands to See What Actually Happens After You Sign Up
Marketing With Laryssa
📥 Download the FREE Front Door Study: I subscribed to 362 real ecommerce brands - jewelry, fashion, beauty, home, wellness, accessories - using fresh email addresses and phone numbers I'd never used before. I just wanted to know what actually happens after you hand over your contact information. Not what a Klaviyo dashboard says is happening. What actually shows up in the inbox. Nearly half of them never sent a welcome email at all. That means 158 brands took someone's email address, made them a promise - usually a discount or incentive - and then went completely silent. And SMS had the...
info_outline
391 - Is It Time to Upgrade Your Text Message Marketing? An Honest Look at SMS vs RCS
Marketing With Laryssa
Every SMS marketing platform is pushing something called RCS right now, telling you it's the future of texting your customers. And the upgrade is real - but the pitch is leaving out a few things worth knowing before you make any decisions. RCS, which stands for Rich Communication Services, isn't actually new technology. It was standardized back in 2007. The reason everyone is suddenly talking about it in 2026 is that Apple only added support for it in iOS 18, which came out in fall 2024. Once iPhone users were covered, rich messaging across both major platforms became possible for the first...
info_outline
390 - Ecomm Entrepreneur Julie Cole Has Been Building Her Email List for 23 Years - Here's What She Knows
Marketing With Laryssa
390Julie Cole said something in our conversation that I haven't stopped thinking about. Social media, content, followers - all of it can disappear tomorrow. The only thing she actually owns is her email list. Julie is the co-founder of Mabel's Labels, the brand behind those indestructible labels you've seen on kids' water bottles and lunchboxes - the ones that survive the dishwasher, the microwave, and everything in between. She started the company 23 years ago in her sister's basement with three co-founders, none of them technical, trading a foosball table for their first website. It's since...
info_outline
389 - I Tested Klaviyo's New AI Tool - Here's What You Actually Need to Know
Marketing With Laryssa
Klaviyo has been rolling out something called Composer in beta - an AI agent that promises to build entire marketing campaigns from a single prompt. Audience, copy, design, segmentation, all of it. The promise is impressive. So I got access on a real client account and tested it myself. And my honest take is more nuanced than the hype - and more useful than the skeptics would have you believe. The short version: Composer is less an autonomous agent and more a really well-informed assistant. It knows your account data better than any outside AI tool could. It just still needs you. Where it...
info_outline
388 - Can You Actually Trust Your Email Marketing Numbers?
Marketing With Laryssa
$6,000 in Klaviyo. $600 in Google Analytics. Same campaign. Same week. Real numbers from a real account my team took over. If you've ever stared at two reports that should say the same thing and thought - is someone lying to me? - this episode is for you. Nobody is lying. But what's actually happening is something every ecommerce brand sending marketing emails needs to understand. Those two tools aren't giving you different answers because one of them is wrong. They're giving you different answers because they're asking completely different questions. Klaviyo is asking how much did the...
info_outline
387 - Where Your Email Marketing Welcome Flow Is Leaking Revenue
Marketing With Laryssa
The moment someone signs up for your emails is the highest attention moment you will ever have with that subscriber. They just said yes. They're interested. They're engaged. And most brands are using that window to send two, maybe three emails - and then calling it done. That's a problem. Because the subscribers who buy from email one were already close to purchasing anyway. The discount and the timing just pushed them over the edge. The rest of your welcome series exists for everyone who wasn't ready yet - the people who need more trust, more context, more touchpoints - and that group is...
info_outline
386 - More Segments, More Problems: Rethinking Email Segmentation
Marketing With Laryssa
Segmentation sounds like the answer to everything. The right message to the right person at the right time - that's the dream. And to be clear, I'm a segment stan. Smart segmentation is one of the most powerful things you can do for your email program. But the conversation around it is almost always one-directional: more segments, more targeting, more personalization. And at a certain point, that stops being true. I see brands build 12, 20, who even knows how many segments - and end up spending more time managing those segments than actually sending good campaigns. The result is a...
info_outline
385 - What Actually Makes an Email Marketing CTA Work (And Why Simple Wins Every Time)
Marketing With Laryssa
The call to action is the last thing someone reads before they click - or don't. And for something that important, it gets surprisingly little strategic thought in most email programs. What I see instead is one of two extremes. Either the CTA is completely ignored - "Shop Now" slapped on every button, same wording across every email, no thought given to whether it's actually doing its job. Or it's wildly overthought - someone spent 20 minutes trying to make the button sound clever and ended up with copy that nobody instantly understands. Both are a problem. And the fix is simpler than most...
info_outline
384 - The Email Marketing Popup Audit You Probably Haven't Done
Marketing With Laryssa
Popups have a reputation. We've all landed on a site, barely had a second to look around, and been hit with a full-screen form asking for an email address before we even know what the brand sells. That's not a popup problem - that's a strategy problem. A well-timed, well-designed popup is one of the most effective list growth tools an ecommerce brand has. Avoiding them because you don't want to seem pushy doesn't make your site feel more premium - it just means fewer people are entering your email ecosystem every single day. But here's the question I want to ask if you already have one: when...
info_outlineThere's a lawsuit in the news right now involving a major retailer and their email marketing. I'm not going to weigh in on the legal debate - but it did make me want to talk about something I think gets overlooked when email programs are moving fast.
Email is permission-based marketing. Someone gave you their address and said yes, you can communicate with me. That's not a small thing. And it comes with a responsibility that's easy to lose sight of when you're optimizing for clicks and conversions in the moment.
Urgency isn't the problem. A sale that genuinely ends, an item that's almost gone, a seasonal moment that isn't coming back - that's real urgency, and communicating it clearly is good marketing. The problem is when urgency became so effective, and email became such a volume game, that it started getting used as a default. Not because there was something real to communicate, but because it moves people.
And somewhere along the way, the subject line stopped reflecting reality - and started creating it.
Most brands, when they audit their own emails honestly, find more manufactured urgency than they realized. And the cost isn't just legal. It's the slow erosion of the trust your whole email program runs on.
In this episode, I break down the difference between urgency that's earned and urgency that's manufactured, why it matters more than most brands realize, and two practical things you can do right now to start thinking about your email program as a trust-building tool - not just a revenue lever.
✨ In this episode, you'll learn:
-
What the Ulta lawsuit is actually about - and why it's worth paying attention to even if you're a small brand
-
Why manufactured urgency became so common in email marketing (and why that doesn't make it okay)
-
The difference between urgency that's earned vs. urgency that just borrows against your audience's trust
-
How to think about every email you send as either a deposit or a withdrawal in your subscriber relationship
-
Why the trust problem isn't new - even if the legal risk is
-
How a promotional calendar stacked with rolling, overlapping sales is quietly training your audience not to respond
-
Two practical steps to audit your own urgency habits and start building a more sustainable email program
When your subscribers learn that your deadlines are real, you don't have to manufacture the pressure. The pressure's already there - because you've built a track record of meaning what you say.
Work with Joy Joya: https://joyjoya.com