Email And SMS Teams Reach Full Revenue Potential By Moving Beyond Basic Segmentation

Email and SMS teams are leaving significant revenue on the table, and the reason has less to do with effort than with the absence of a shared roadmap for the discipline. There is no canon for CRM marketing, no standard a practitioner can measure their program against, and no help doc that explains what comes after the basics. Most teams merely follow the guidance their email platform hands them, and as a result, growth flatlines. When programs inevitably hit a wall, the standard corporate reflex is to buy another SaaS tool, but throwing technology at a plateau overlooks the real solution: rethinking data collection and investing in team enablement.

Jason Donapel is the Founder of The Email Experience, a retention marketing agency. He's spent more than 20 years building email and SMS programs that have generated over $200 million in revenue for clients ranging from mid-market to enterprise. His current work centers on program audits, which have given him a wide view of how CRM programs actually perform across sizes and industries, and where they consistently break down. He says the best-performing programs are the ones that build a data collection layer at the very beginning before they ever expect segmentation, personalization, or testing to produce results.

"If you don't build your data collection layer first, then by the time you're trying to segment, you're already too late," he says. "You have to build that layer first, then on top of that you'll be able to eventually personalize your campaigns effectively." The absence of that foundation is the thread running through nearly every audit he conducts.

Hard work following the wrong map

The programs Donapel audits are high-effort operations run by people putting in real work, following the rules they believe exist, often executing exactly what their email service provider recommends. The problem is that the guidance itself caps them. "These are people logging in and hitting it hard. They're doing the work of segmenting, doing everything they think is right. That's the problem. They're following all the rules that they think exist," he says.

The rules come from ESP help docs, which produce the same engagement-based segmentation everywhere: opened in 30 days, clicked in 90, engaged versus unengaged. Everyone runs the same playbook because there's nowhere else to learn, and the playbook never evolves because there's no documented path beyond it. "Nobody's telling you that the deliverability metrics are nonsense, and what you actually have to do is your own independent testing. Unless you're a deliverability nerd, you're just not going to know that," he shares.

The result is programs following ESP guidance that still show spam rates around 20% when Donapel audits them, because the platform's own metrics obscured the problem.

The blind spots baked into standard segmentation

The most common structural flaw Donapel finds is a segmentation blind spot that grows every month. He recommends a simple diagnostic any marketer can run immediately. "Open up a segment and say, show me anybody eligible to receive email, who I've emailed at least once since they signed up, and who has received nothing in the last 60 days. See what percentage of your active list shows up there."

The standard engagement segments, like opened in 30 days and didn't open in 90, leave massive gaps. Anyone who doesn't fit neatly into one of those recycled segments often falls out and stops receiving anything at all. The list of unreached but active profiles grows silently, month after month.

Donapel says the fix is to build the program from step one so the gap never forms in the first place. He compares the work to software development, where a marketer often has to build their own infrastructure inside the platform to collect the data they want to segment and personalize on. "Nobody's going to do that for you. If you don't do it, you'll never be able to segment or personalize. And if you never segment and personalize, you'll never be able to split test effectively," he asserts.

CRM as the communication arm of the business

Part of what elevates the stakes is that CRM isn't just another marketing channel. It's the communication arm of the entire business, the mechanism a company uses to talk to its customers about anything: loyalty programs, referrals, store openings, product announcements, and more. "Sure, you're pushing marketing messages, but it's how you reach out to talk to your customers about anything you have going on," Donapel points out.

That framing repositions CRM as foundational rather than downstream. Donapel argues it should be the kernel of a digital marketing strategy, feeding data back to the paid, SEO, and social teams that only the CRM channel can generate, which is also how a CRM leader earns a larger seat at the table.

The four-phase maturity model

Donapel measures programs across four phases, and the model gives teams the ascension roadmap the industry otherwise lacks. Phase one is a brand-new program still spinning up its flows. Phase two, where roughly 90% of his audits land, is architecture: all the expected triggers and automations are firing, campaigns go out regularly, and segmentation is entirely engagement-based. A phase two program can be layered 15 different ways and still be phase two, because complexity is not the same as evolution.

Phase three is personalization, defined strictly. "Personalization is actively collecting first-party, zero-party data with the sole intent to impact content, and it is impacting the next message that goes out. If it doesn't meet those two criteria, it's not personalization."

Phase four is split testing, which only becomes possible once personalized data splits exist. Donapel's examples make the progression concrete. For a boot brand, the welcome series split first-time buyers from experienced ones so the team could test which product features resonated with someone new to the category versus someone who knew the vertical. For a used bookstore, the recommended split started at fiction versus nonfiction, with the option to branch nonfiction into biographies through two-way SMS.

At phase four, CRM stops being valued only for the revenue it generates directly. The data it collects becomes a KPI in its own right, and the insights feed every other channel. Donapel illustrates using the boot brand. "People who've never bought boots before responded well to this feature list. If you're targeting them with ads or running a TV spot in a market where people don't know about cowboy boots yet, lean into these talking points. Now the CRM is worth more than just the revenue you're generating."

Invest in people before tools

For leadership conversations, Donapel anchors on a single ratio: messages sent multiplied by revenue per recipient. It lets a CRM leader translate a top-down revenue goal into a grounded, honest conversation about what's actually achievable, and to push back when a target would require sending an impossible volume of messages.

That grounding leads to his core investment argument. Most companies are underinvesting in CRM specialists and overinvesting in add-on tools, buying a new third-party ID resolution product or integration to solve a problem that better staffing and training would fix. "It's not a skill gap, it's a knowledge gap," he says. "Adding two people to that team and squeezing 20 or 30 percent more out of your welcome series or abandons is a really good investment."

Because email and SMS aren't just line items in a marketing budget but part of how a company serves its customers, Donapel argues that investing in the channel is rarely a pure ROI calculation. Some of it is simply the cost of serving customers well.