Gary Vaynerchuk has been sending marketing emails every day since 2006. Not most days. Every day. For twenty years.
When I sat down with Gary at VeeCon to talk about email marketing, he didn't mince words: "I've been doing email marketing every day since 2006." He views email as "one of the core forms of marketing," not a legacy channel, not a backup plan, but a pillar. Right alongside social media, not beneath it.
And yet most marketers, creators, and founders are still treating email like an afterthought. They're spending 80% of their energy chasing algorithms on Instagram and TikTok while their email list sits untouched, collecting dust and losing engagement by the day.
Gary called this out directly: "People think email's outdated, but that's ridiculous."
He's right. And the data from the past two years has proven him right in ways even he might not have predicted.
Why Email Feels Harder (And Why That's Actually Good News)
One thing Gary said during our conversation stuck with me. He acknowledged that email marketing feels harder now than it did a decade ago. But his explanation was important: "It's just harder now because there's more supply. There's a ton of email marketers who ruined it with spammy, irrelevant content."
Read that again. Email isn't harder because it stopped working. It's harder because the bar went up. The inbox got crowded with low-effort blasts, and now the people who actually put thought into their emails stand out more than ever.
This is actually the best possible environment for marketers who are willing to do it right. When your competitors are sending generic newsletters that nobody opens, your well-crafted, personalized, value-driven emails become the signal in the noise.
GetResponse analyzed over one billion emails sent by U.S. marketers and found that personalized content achieved 32.21% open rates and 2.44% click-through rates. Those numbers are remarkable in a world where social media organic engagement sits below 1%.
The inbox rewards quality. Social media rewards frequency and luck.
The Rented Land Problem Gary Has Been Warning About
Gary has always understood the distinction between rented and owned channels, even if he doesn't always use that exact language. Social media platforms are someone else's property. You're building an audience on their terms, subject to their rules, dependent on their algorithm.
The TikTok situation made this painfully real. Creators who built their entire business on one platform watched it nearly disappear overnight. No warning, no transition plan, no way to contact the audience they'd spent years cultivating.
Email is the opposite. You own the list. You control the delivery. No algorithm decides whether your message gets seen. When someone subscribes to your email, they're giving you direct access. That relationship doesn't depend on a platform staying in business or keeping its policies consistent.
Gary put it simply: "Algorithms change. There's more competition than ever. Social media and YouTube are great, but your email list, that's your direct communication channel."
What Gary Gets Right That Most Marketers Miss
Gary's approach to email has always been about two things: consistency and value. He sends every day because he understands that showing up regularly builds trust. But he also makes sure every email delivers something worth opening.
This is where most businesses fall apart. They know email is important. They've heard the stats. They might even have a list. But they don't have a system that turns that list into revenue.
Here's what I've learned building email systems at SendFocus for 50+ clients: the gap is never awareness. Everyone knows email matters. The gap is execution. Specifically, five things that separate email programs that generate revenue from ones that just take up space:
1. Treat your list like your most valuable asset. Because it is. An email subscriber is worth approximately $35, according to Donald Miller. A social media follower might be worth zero. Act accordingly. Invest in your list the way you'd invest in any asset worth that much per unit.
2. Personalize beyond the first name. Inserting someone's name into a subject line isn't personalization. Real personalization means segmenting your list based on behavior, interests, and engagement level, then sending different messages to different segments. When we implement this for clients, open rates consistently jump 15-25%.
3. Balance value and promotion. Gary has always preached this. If every email is a sales pitch, people stop opening. If every email is pure content with no ask, you never convert. The ratio that works: deliver genuine value 3-4 times for every 1 promotional ask. Free resources, actionable insights, exclusive content. Then, when you do make the ask, people actually respond.
4. Use social media to build your list, not replace it. This is the integration Gary talks about. Social builds awareness. Email builds relationships. Every piece of social content should have an underlying goal: move people from rented land to owned land. A lead magnet, a free guide, an exclusive series. Give people a reason to give you their email address.
5. Build systems that work without you. Gary sends daily. You probably can't, and you don't need to. What you need are automated sequences that deliver the right message at the right time based on subscriber behavior. Welcome sequences, nurture flows, conversion series, re-engagement campaigns. These run 24/7 and generate revenue while you focus on creating content.
What This Looks Like When It's Working
At SendFocus, we've built these systems for creators, e-commerce brands, and SaaS companies. The results follow a consistent pattern:
One e-commerce brand went from $4,200/month to $14,500/month in email revenue within 90 days. Their unsubscribe rate dropped from 1.8% to 0.3%. The audience was the same. The automation system changed everything.
A SaaS company saw their trial-to-paid conversion jump from 3.2% to 11.8% in one quarter, generating $42,000 in new revenue and saving $18,000/year in reduced churn. All from email sequences.
These aren't companies with massive lists. They're companies with well-architected systems. That's the difference.
Gary Was Early. You Don't Have to Be Late.
Gary Vaynerchuk has been saying the same thing about email for twenty years. The difference now is that the data is overwhelming, the platform risks are undeniable, and the tools to build sophisticated email systems are more accessible than ever.
The question isn't whether Gary was right. He was. The question is what you're going to do about it.
If your email list exists but isn't generating predictable, growing revenue, the problem isn't the channel. The problem is the system. Or more accurately, the lack of one.
SendFocus exists to solve that exact problem. We take the principle Gary has been preaching for two decades and turn it into an engine that produces results.
Book a strategy call and let's build the system Gary's been telling you to build since 2006.
This post was inspired by a Creator Spotlight I originally wrote for the GetResponse blog. Gary's message hasn't changed. The urgency has.
