From Startup to Wunderbrand

Episode•May 13, 2026•21 min

Why Email Is Your Most Powerful Brand-Building Channel in 2026

With 13+ years of experience, she reveals why buying lists destroys your brand reputation, how to create irresistible lead magnets that feel on-brand, and the smart automations and segmentation that make every subscriber feel personally known. From welcome series tailored to signup source to connecting email seamlessly with your wider brand strategy, this episode gives you the playbook to stop treating email as an afterthought and start using it as a core Wunderbrand asset. The Value Right Now Email still delivers a 35:1 ROI and is the quiet channel where real brand relationships are built and protected — especially when every other platform changes algorithms overnight. Guest Links Website: bylorengene.com LinkedIn: Lauren Luedeke Connect with me on: All my links Become a guest Sign up for Riverside Get Descript #DigitalMarketing #Branding #PersonalBranding #MarketingInsights #SocialMediaStrategy Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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Transcript

0:01

Welcome to another episode of From Startup to Wunderbrand with Nicholas Kuhner. So we've got Lauren Ludicke, Lauren Jean Ludicke, who is a email nerd actually. So what's really interesting is that emails are generally seen as the ugly duckling or the poor cousin in most marketing plans for those who don't know what they're doing. But, but we're going to be talking to Lauren today a little bit about why you should consider focusing a little bit more on your, on your email marketing campaigns. And I'm not going to say tips and tricks because that's so cliche, but we're going to do tips and tricks on email marketing as well. Lauren, welcome.

0:41

Yes, thanks for having me.

0:43

Now you've been doing emails for quite a while. So before did you start 13 years? So that's when pigeons were still carrying emails, right?

0:51

Yeah, that sounds about right.

0:54

And there's been a lot of changes in these 13 years. I talked to my, my class about BC when it comes to my marketing because that's before ChatGPT. Just amazing how things have changed in the last two years. So if we think back 13 years, there have been a tremendous amount of changes in how email marketing has proceeded. But I'd like to talk to you a little bit about engagement on emails today because I think that's an important thing because when we send emails out we don't generally see where they go. We don't generally get those direct responses ourselves. It's to another mailbox. Let's talk a little about a little bit about engagement and the starting off process. So imagine I'm a new business. I'm trying to build leads, I'm trying to build up my lists of emails. Where do I start?

1:47

That's a great question. And my perspective is going to come from more of an E commerce background and a lot of people like to go out and try to find lists, buy lists and all the things like that. And unfortunately that is not the route that I ever recommend just because there's so many things that come with deliverability issues and just the negative impact that it can make on your brand in general. So I like to start by offering some type of value and incentive very similar to what you would find what people are doing on websites now. They're giving out coupons or they're giving some type of value in terms of, you know, how to PDFs and things like that. But these days you really have to be creative because people are guarding their email addresses a little bit more often. Than they normally are. And depending on what it is, you really have to be guarded. What am I? Favorite ones that we did was actually last year for an E commerce and it was setting things up where they said we will tell you what the Black Friday sale is going to be so then you don't have to go out and buy this thing right now because you know it's going to be on sale. And that was one of our most productive and effective email campaigns that we did leading up to Black Friday Cyber Monday because it was something different that not many people were actually already expecting. So. So you have to think outside of the box and not in that aspect of I'm just going to give a 15% off coupon because they think they can find it someplace else, which most of the times they will. So that's where I would pretty much go if we're thinking about a standpoint where you're not in E Commerce. I have a lot of customers that will have people sign up for events and making sure that they're signing up for an event that is providing that value and being right up front like this is what we're doing right there. So I have a, a client who does more of a STEM studio. So they're teaching children stem, science, math, engineering, technology, all those things. And we're being really creative with those types of things and getting them to sign up for those types of events.

3:49

I want to just go back a little bit to you spoke about you shouldn't buy email lists now in the past and I got tons of emails saying hey, buy this, you can buy this. Email list has got 10, it's got 10,000 emails, et cetera. Tell me why that's a really bad idea.

4:07

First off, there's some very technical things that go with this, right? So if you get a list of, let's just say even 50,000 email addresses and you're going to go in and even if it's a brand new email service provider set up like you're going to go into Mailchimp, I got these 50,000 and you're going to start emailing them. If you get a bounce rate, mailchimp is going to be very mad at you because they're sharing IP addresses with many clients. Unless you are a big brand that has the money to do a dedicated IP address with your email sends, most email service providers like mailchimp constant contact, any of the other bigger ones, they're going to be really mad at you. So for instance, I even had a client who had an event and they had people hand write down their email addresses in exchange for some swag. Just some really not even probably that great of things. And then they entered the email addresses in the system, put it into mailchimp and it was like only maybe 250 contacts. And because 1 people gave fake email addresses and 2 there was probably typos or somebody couldn't read handwriting, they had a 25% bounce rate. Mailchimp, what I call put them in email jail. They were not allowed to add email addresses to their account for over six months until their deliverability all back aligned. And then also they had to remove everybody that they had just added. So first off, even if you're not talking about brand credibility and all the things you don't want to make your email service provider mad, obviously there's other ways where you could do the cold email and send it from your normal outlook or whatever it may be. But for my instance, you don't want to do it from something like an email service provider.

5:50

Yeah, and I've seen that before as well. I once had a mailing list that I had of my clients and I and was after a couple of years I hadn't cleaned out that list nicely and I think I got about a 20, 25% bounce rate. And yeah, not a happy story from HubSpot and that was that was using HubSpot and they're getting much more strict on protecting consumer privacy and also making sure that you're not spamming people. And that goes into our next point which should be okay, we're not buying email lists. Where am I going to get these emails from? You mentioned at an event, people writing it down. You have a couple of very n offers and I've seen and I've seen some good examples under your services tab. But I see under your website you've got a contact me call to action tab, you've got a free guide download maybe talk to us about for people starting out and wanting to get good quality leads or creating a good quality list. What are some of the like just let's start with some basics and then we can go into some more technical exciting one options for sure.

6:53

And I'm going to speak to a very valid point too that people know but sometimes important to say is that I have to also consider about the traffic that you're bringing to the website. Right. So I can have those forms and have them all ready to go. But if you're not bringing that traffic to the website, they're not going to work obviously. So that that has another role in itself. And I'll tell prospects or clients and things like that. My job is to convert the people that once they come to the website, not necessarily getting them to the website. So take with a grain of salt knowing that that's my background. I have a whole team that helps with SEO, PPC and all those things, but it's just not my specialty. But personally for me it's working on things like LinkedIn, proving to them who I am, that credibility like, and then hopefully driving them to the website from there and saying, here's that value. I have a free list cleanse guide that you can go download and it is full of value. It tells you step by step how to do certain things. So I took something that I am known for and what a lot of clients come to me for, which is cleaning lists, increasing deliverability rates and things like that, and I put it into an actual valuable document that somebody could say, hey, I can go take this on my own and do it at the same time. At the end it could be, if you don't want to do it yourself, obviously we can help you do this, especially when you're a bigger brand where you're dealing with hundreds of thousands of contacts that you want to clean out and things like that. So I think being particular about what you're good at and getting that lead value in there is really important. Now I have a sister who is actually an oncology dietitian and she's very specific. Right. So she's oncology and she is helping people with symptom management. So if they're in the middle of their chemotherapy, their radiation, she's doing something that's super valuable to them because they want to feel good now. How can I feel better now? And so she has symptom management PDF guides and things like that, and that's how she brings them into their, her ecosystem. At the same time, she loves that she can help somebody feel good right now. So that's another twist on what you can do in terms of getting people to kind of give that email in exchange.

9:09

Yeah, I think the idea of giving real value to customers is super important. They can actually probably find that information by themselves if they do enough work. But having it in a nicely prepared document written by somebody who's got some expertise is always good. And having that gateway just of an email doesn't cost them anything. And it's a, it's a way of them saying, thank you for this free content. I'm just going to be naughty now. Because I was on your website and I clicked. If you're wondering why you're not getting any traffic from your website to LinkedIn, it is because your LinkedIn button takes us to your portfolio page. So that is something your SEO guys probably should probably have a. Have a look at.

9:50

Perfect. Thank you for telling me.

9:52

Yeah, I have been talking to my class about the importance of when you're starting to create an email strategy, sometimes it can be quite daunting. Where do you start? Okay, I'm going to have some downloads. I'm going to. Am I going to send it once a week? Once a month. And one of the ideas that you put forward to them is that you've got your informational email. So this is just giving somebody who's just joined up or started out. So it's a lot of information and they can be directed from that email to various lists. The second one is going to be seasonal stuff. So we've got Halloween coming up, we've got winter coming up here in Norway. So you can come up with some fun brand related activities with your emails. And then there's obviously the promotional stuff which is sell, sell, sell. How do you start out clients building their, building email marketing into their marketing plan. So what is your process of doing that? How. Because they've all on TikTok, Instagram, LinkedIn, all of these things. How they, how do you work with them to make sure that the email aspect of that is linked to the rest of their marketing activities? Because it sometimes maybe is the. Like I said, the poor cousin.

11:03

And yeah, I love that question because my background actually comes from working with those other channels too. So I was gifted. I was gifted the chance to sit in an office of a digital marketing agency and learn from everybody. So the owner of the business that I worked on first owned the digital marketing agency and he's. You can sit on any meeting that you want. So I'm sitting on SEO meetings, PPC meetings, all the things, but they're for other clients, right? So I learned the importance of making sure that the email campaign is connected to the SEO some way and the website and the landing page and all the things. So what I love about that is because I can actually talk to clients. I'm like, I know how much money you're spending on radio, I know how much money you're spending on ppc. And this is why it's so important to. Let's connect dots, right? So connecting the dots with those pieces and I can make the most beautiful high converting email. But if it goes to a landing page or a system that is disconnected with poor experience. It's not gonna perform the way it should or the way that we would hope it would. Right. So making sure all those pieces are connected. So what I like to start with is thinking about the automations. I truly believe it's the most important. I think most email experts will tell you it's the most important is to truly start with that welcome series. And I like to do it based off of how they come to the website, if we can determine how their signup source was. So most of my clients, they actually have separate welcome series based off the source of their signup. So if it's E commerce and if we know they just made a transaction, they're getting a very different welcome series than somebody who just came in to put their email address in to learn more information. So it really depends on their process and their user journey and how they got there in the first place.

12:47

So I love that you spoke about the user journey because again, sending a welcome mail to somebody who's an existing customer or sending a sales message to somebody who's just joined is going to immediately turn them off or make them put you into their spam folder. You mentioned that understanding where the customer comes from and I think this is what people forget about email marketing is the importance of analytics and how deep, how much thinking actually goes into all of these email campaigns. And I was trying to go through today with a class and I was just thinking, oh, you can go into such a deep rabbit hole with email marketing because which landing page have they come from, which ad campaign have they come from? And if you're a smart marketer you will have written your email campaigns or your automations specifically for those target markets and you have to do that now, otherwise you're going to go somewhere else. Talk to me about analytics, how important analytics and list building how complicated that is. Maybe not going to too much detail how complicated or how involving that process is.

13:53

Yeah. And you can make it as complicated or as simple as you want really. I would say when it comes to the client, I'm wondering how long have they already been doing their emails? Right. If they're just starting out, let's find two sources that you're getting most people to sign up from. So in this case my one of my recent clients transactions and then they're coming from a source that somebody else is promoting them from their other newsletter. Right. So we're creating that welcome series where it's saying, hey, we know that you came from this source, and we value that source. And you wouldn't be coming that way unless this person recommended us. So we're going to keep our standards here and tell you that we are going to meet those expectations and truly go it from there. So we just start with the two sources, but then we can go to another client where we're doing giveaways with multiple brands. We're doing all these huge pieces. Right? You have to think through a lot of things before you just write the email. A lot of people think it's just, I'm gonna write the email and I'm just gonna go, no, I am asking all the questions. Where did these people come from? How long was the giveaway? All these questions, and I document all of it, and that's going to help me strategize. So there's one that we just did with a really big brand and they did a giveaway, but we also had to determine, okay, these people entered the giveaway, so we're going to give them a discount. But have they been on the list before? Did they enter other giveaways? Because the people who were on the list before and also entered a pass giveaway are getting a different email than the people who are brand new to the list and also who have been on the list but haven't entered a giveaway before. So it can get as complicated as you want. And you have to remember not to get too deep into the weeds and to always remember what is the end goal here? The end goal is we want to nurture them, but we also want them to make a purchase. Right. So what can we do and how are we going to do that? So if you're just starting out, start with the smallest two forms of signup source. If you're dealing with something more particular and you have tons of data, let's narrow it down and really think about what is the end goal here. Because I think people lose track of that. Even when I have other people working on the account. I'm like, but what's the. The end goal? Is this going to hurt or help the conversion rate or is it going to keep it the exact same? We think so. Does that answer your question about how it does it?

16:16

It's, it's, it's. I think it's important that people should realize how int. How deep you can go and how targeted you can go with an email campaign. I think that's sometimes forgotten. Oh, I'll just do three emails are welcome and this and then. And the third one. They're going to buy. That's not going to work. And this is where automation comes in. I've got two last questions for you. One is which platform do you love most? I see you work on Klaviyo HubSpot. Which is which one is the best platform, if one can say that.

16:46

Personally I really like Klaviyo and that is coming from a perspective of one I work with mostly E commerce. I like the option that all of the amazing features that it has comes out of like out of the box. Right. I'm not doing an add on. I know there's some email service providers that are amazing but you're paying for. Okay, I want to do this many automations or I want this much of advanced segmentation. I like Klaviyo because I can do advanced segmentation no matter if you have 10,000 contacts or if you have 100,000 or more million or whatever it is, obviously the data that comes with that is going to be different but I can still segment the same way. So I really love Klaviyo. I've been in the business long enough that I saw my favorite email service provider actually Rest in Peace Bronto. That was my favorite of all time. But maybe because it's how I started. But yeah, they were bought by Oracle in the end and then they were sunsetted. But I really like Klaviyo.

17:49

Okay, that's good. So that's for people in E commerce. Lauren is good at Klaviyo so make sure you chat to her about that. And then if I was an alien coming down from space and I had a choice of social media, all of these things, why should I consider email marketing? And I want you to talk about ROI if you can.

18:07

I don't know the exact statistic as of this day, but typically email has a return on investment at least 35 to 1. And I think that is just key, especially when you're thinking about how much money you're spending on all those other channels, right? So you're paying how many thousands of dollars a month on pay per click? Okay, so you're going to pay every time they click. But if they come to your website and if you can capture their email, you most likely do not need to spend that much money on pay per click on that customer. Again, all that time and effort of nurturing should be in that email progress. So it drives me wild when people forget about email when they're spending thousands on pay per click, when it's just like they're right there, they're just Right there.

18:52

It must be very annoying. But again I suppose we need to realize the point of social media again is that it's that top of the funnel, the awareness side, the consideration and purchase and all of them are going should be filtered down to getting that email address directly to the sale. And if you don't get the email address what are you doing? You're wasting your time.

19:10

And I would consider too people should consider about yeah, I'm going to do my social media ads, things like that but I do believe that it should be from the bottom. Okay, we're going to do social but what is it going to look like when they get to that website? Are we going to have all our automations in place and things like that? So if you're doing social and awareness obviously amazing, great. But once you actually capture them, do you have the other things in place? I'd say that should be in place before you're doing too much work on the other things.

19:39

Absolutely. And that's what separates the great marketers or the great marketing companies from the bums basically.

19:46

Yeah, there's so much time you can spend on social media too and it just not go anywhere if you're not doing it the right way.

19:52

Exactly. Especially if you're sending Happy Friday messages. That's never going to get somebody to sign up to your email mailing list. Now where can people get in touch with you if they realizing there are, there's some nice free stuff in your site. But actually I need somebody who knows what they're doing or can do a bit of consulting or can give me a bit of a start on making sure I do my emails correctly.

20:14

Yeah so my website is bylaurenjean.com so that's where you can do the contact form, things like that. But I'm Most active on LinkedIn so that is just my name, Lauren Ludeke. L U E D E K E and I'm right there. I answer all my messages on my own. I don't like to play the game of all the cold messages and all the things but I am there and that's where I love to do most of my connections.

20:39

Fantastic folks, you know where to go. Lauren, it's been marvelous chatting to you and thank you for giving us some interesting, interesting look under the hood of email marketing. Yes, thanks Nicholas, I really do appreciate your comments. So why not go and watch this live on YouTube or go to my website Kuna? No, that's K U H N E no for more information.

Why Email Is Your Most Powerful Brand-Building Channel in 2026

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