Run Emails Like a Media Buyer

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⚔️ The Media Buyer Mindset for Email Pros

Stop “nurturing.” Start converting. Here’s how to rewire your emails using the same mental model as elite media buyers.

Marketers love to romanticize email. “It’s about relationships.” “It’s the long game.” All true until you realize your beautiful welcome flow is doing everything except driving revenue.

Meanwhile, media buyers are testing hooks like mad scientists, killing what doesn’t convert, and scaling what does.

They don’t write emails. They build outcomes.

Time for email marketers to steal a page from their playbook.

The “Click-Conversion Cascade”

Here’s the shift: think like a paid funnel. Every email = a micro-funnel with four jobs.

Hook → Belief → Friction Kill → CTA

1. Hook: A subject line or opening line that stops the scroll.
2. Belief: A single line that makes the reader say, “I need this.”
3. Friction Kill: Kill the one thought that would make them bounce.
4. CTA: Just one. Make it clear and confident.

Real Example: A DTC Brand That Switched Gears

A wellness brand with a 90k list had a friendly, story-driven welcome flow. Open rates were solid. Sales? Meh.

We rewrote Email 1 using the Cascade:

• Subject: “You’ll Either Love This or Unsubscribe Tomorrow”

• Belief: “Most people get this wrong and pay for it for years.”

• Friction Kill: “You don’t need to overhaul your life. This takes 4 minutes.”

• CTA: “Try the 4-minute shift →”

That one email? CTR up 3.2x. Revenue up 57% in 48 hours. No new list. No retargeting. Just better intent.

One Contrarian Truth

Segmenting isn’t always smart. Polarizing is.

When you try to speak to everyone, you water down urgency. Call out who it’s not for. That makes your real buyer lean in.

You don’t need more flows. You need to build belief faster, reduce friction earlier, and stop being polite. Write emails like you’re spending money to send them, and watch what happens next.

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🔗 Links Actually Boost LinkedIn Engagement
Insights from SEJ

A new LinkedIn study by Metricool analyzed over 577,000 posts and shattered the myth that external links hurt performance. The findings offer a revised content strategy guide for marketers in 2025.

The Breakdown:

1. Links Drive More Interactions, Not Less - Despite long-standing advice to avoid outbound links, posts with links received 13.57% more interactions and 4.90% more views than linkless posts. With click-throughs up 28.13% YoY, LinkedIn proves to be a stronger traffic channel than expected.

2. Carousels, Polls, and Videos Outperform Other Formats - Carousels led engagement with a 45.85% rate, and polls, despite their rarity, earned 206.33% more reach than the average post. Video content grew 53%, with engagement up 87.32%, showing LinkedIn is rewarding interactive and visual formats.

3. Smaller Industries and Realistic Growth Matter More - Industries like manufacturing and utilities outperformed larger sectors in engagement per post, proving follower count isn’t everything. Also, only 17.68% of pages grew their audience in 2024, so consistent value matters more than vanity metrics.

The data challenges outdated tactics and highlights that high-engagement LinkedIn strategies now favor external links, rich media formats, and quality content over follower count. Testing old beliefs is no longer optional, it’s essential for 2025 growth.

🚀 Quick Hits

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🎗️ Meta has introduced AI-powered tools in Horizon Worlds, allowing creators to design virtual environments using simple prompts. The Mesh and Texture Generation features reduce the need for coding, streamlining VR development and opening new possibilities for interactive and monetizable experiences.

🪄 xAI has introduced Grok Studio, a collaborative tool that lets users generate and edit documents, code, and games using Grok’s AI. It supports Google Drive files and live previews, offering a streamlined workspace for multimodal content creation across platforms.

🛍️ Threads has hit 320M monthly users and continues growing fast, adding 200M in the past year compared to X’s 50M. X still leads with 600M users, but Threads may overtake it by late 2025 if momentum holds.

📽️ Apple has renamed “Search Ads” to “Apple Ads” to better represent its broader advertising reach across the App Store. The rebrand signals Apple’s growing focus on ad-driven services, with possible future expansions into platforms like Maps or Podcasts.

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