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393 - Why Being Picky About Email Marketing Paid Off for COE Founder Cody Cessna

Marketing With Laryssa

Release Date: 08/03/2026

393 - Why Being Picky About Email Marketing Paid Off for COE Founder Cody Cessna show art 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 show art 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 show art 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 show art 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 show art 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? show art 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 show art 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 show art 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) show art 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 show art 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...

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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 and sunglasses that weren't actually rated for protection. So he built what didn't exist. No design background, no marketing background - he learned Shopify from YouTube videos.

What I really wanted to dig into with him was the marketing side: how a founder-first approach to ads, real world lifestyle photography, and a very intentional email strategy have all worked together to build a brand that customers come back to - fast. COE's average repurchase timeline is around 55 days, which is well ahead of the ecommerce average.

This one is worth listening to whether you're skeptical about email like Cody was, or just want to hear how a working-class founder with no marketing background figured it out.

✨ In this episode, you'll learn:

  • How Cody built COE from a real problem he lived every day on the job - and why that credibility still gives him an edge over bigger competitors
  • Why he almost didn't do email marketing - and what changed his mind
  • How he uses real world, on-the-job photography instead of polished studio shoots - and why it converts better
  • The fake podcast ad strategy that's been one of their best performing formats
  • Why founder storytelling has been COE's most consistent marketing asset from day one
  • How a 55-day repurchase cycle shapes their entire email flow strategy
  • The cross-sell and win back approach that keeps customers coming back for backup pairs, new colorways, and replacement lenses
  • What seven years of building an ecommerce brand actually taught him that he wishes he'd known sooner

When you love what you do, work doesn't feel like work. That's the energy of this whole conversation.

Connect with COE:

Work with Joy Joya: https://joyjoya.com