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The High Levers of Email Marketing

Author

Max Sturtevant
March 30, 2026

The Inbox Newsletter

Hey it’s Max from The Inbox Newsletter.

I had a call recently with one of my idols.

Someone I've followed and looked up to for years…

It was surreal to even be on a call with him.

While on the call with him, I was walking him through some email flows we were building for his business.

I was going deep on the smallest shit like the CTA placement, the design, the structure of each email…

I was trying to show off, honestly lol

He stopped me and asked one question:

"Isn't the highest lever just getting these emails in place? Does it really matter what they say right now?"

Just Send More Emails

I didn't have a good answer….

Because he was right.

"Then let’s just get them live tomorrow. Move on to the next thing."

I was so caught up in the details that I was extending the timeline… which was hurting results, instead of just getting these live (since they currently didn’t have this flow in place).

We would have spent another week focusing on making the emails perfect when having them 80% of the way done meant we could set them live ASAP and start capturing new leads immediately.

80% done and live is better than absolutely perfect, but takes 3x as long.

The effort it takes to go from 80% to 100% on one thing is the same effort it takes to get something else from 0-80%.

I'd rather have two things at 80% than one thing at 100%.

This made me think about how I can apply this to our brands.

You can spend all day tweaking fonts, optimizing subject lines, running A/B tests on button colors.

But if your flows aren't set up in the first place, none of that matters.

Here's your 0-80% when it comes to email:

  1. Get your flows live with at least 3 emails per flow. Welcome, all abandonment post-purchase, winback. They don't need to be perfect. They need to exist and be sending.

  2. Send 3 campaigns per week minimum. Consistency matters more than any individual email being a masterpiece.

  3. Have a dialed popup with a quiz-based, strong offer, collecting email and SMS.

These are the foundations that generate most of your results.

The 80-100% stuff - the A/B tests, the design tweaks, the perfect subject line formulas - all of that can come later. And it only matters if the foundation is already live.

Live and imperfect beats perfect and never launched 🫡 

Find out how to execute the high levers in my community here.

Email Inspiration Of The Day

Brand:
Beis

Email Design:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/11d_YhzFVChN9xmP8zek1x9TfUuRFFScv/view?usp=sharing 

Notes:
We need more photo gallery hero sections. This one is great as it shows the bag in a variety of use cases which matches the “Too Versatile” copy in the headline. Simple, clean, and effectiver.

Reply to this email if you have any questions or further content you want covered.

Cheers,

Max Sturtevant

P.S
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