Kyle from NutriSource knew his email marketing wasn't working the way it should.

Revenue from email was almost nonexistent, but he couldn't put his finger on what exactly needed to change or how to fix it. He was already paying an agency to handle it. But having an agency doesn't automatically mean your email program is healthy. It just means someone is supposed to be taking care of it.

When we looked under the hood, the picture was rough. The messaging wasn't targeted or even on brand. The flows weren't meeting customers where they were in the buying journey which meant revenue was leaking at every step in the customer buying journey.

Maybe the worst part was there was no pop-up on the site. It looked like they hadn't added a new subscriber in over a year.

That's 365 days of traffic just gone forever. I'm not even going to try to estimate the real cost of that miss.

Over the 90 days before we took over, email accounted for 2.74% of NutriSource's total revenue. Out of $535,616 in store sales, email contributed $14,692.

That's the picture of a store doing over half a million in revenue while email -  notoriously the highest-ROI channel in ecommerce - was barely a rounding error.

Issue 1 - The Cold List

We couldn't just flip a switch and start sending. When an email program has been underperforming this badly, going from near-silence to regular campaigns will land you in spam and eventually kill your deliverability rate all together.

So we spent five weeks warming the domain back up while we built the foundation underneath it — Welcome, Browse Abandonment, Abandoned Cart, and Abandoned Checkout flows. We ran five targeted campaigns during that warming period. Even before we were fully ramped, those five weeks generated $22,294 in sales.

Then we opened things up.

Over February and March 2026, NutriSource's email marketing generated nearly $97,000 in revenue — $78,100 from campaigns, $18,600 from flows. Total store revenue during that same period was $412,714. Email went from 2.74% of revenue to 23.5%. Open rates hit 45.1%. Conversion rate was 1% on campaigns and 2.29% on flows. Per-recipient profit came in at $1.05 on campaigns and $1.36 on flows.

Kyle's store is now consistently generating around $55,000 per month from email alone.

✅ Nothing about the product changed.

✅ Nothing about the traffic changed.

✅ Nothing about the customers changed.

Email just started doing its job — the right campaigns going to the right people, flows catching customers at every stage, and consistent communication keeping the brand in front of buyers who were already interested.

That's the thing about email marketing that most store owners don't realize until they see it. The revenue is already sitting there. It's in the list you already have, the traffic you're already getting, the customers who already bought once. It just isn't being captured because the infrastructure isn't set up right, the campaigns aren't going out consistently, and nobody's looking at the data to figure out what your customers actually need to hear next.

Kyle's story isn't unusual... but it is a good reminder of what can happen when email finally gets the attention it deserves.


Learn more about working with The Email Lady.