Ep 165 – How Melanie Balke Turns Email Into a Retention Engine for E-Commerce

Featuring: Melanie Balke. The Email Marketers

In episode 165, I sit down with Melanie Balke, founder and CEO of The Email Marketers, an outsourced email marketing department that helps e-commerce brands build deeper customer relationships and grow revenue.

We talk about how her business evolved from freelance work into a full agency built around pods of specialists, and how the scope of retention marketing has expanded well beyond email into SMS, subscriptions, loyalty, and referral programs. Melanie breaks down the real difference between underutilizing email and underoptimizing it, and why SMS engagement often beats email even though it comes with a lot less room for error.

Agency owners will walk away with a sharper view of how to use AI for deeper customer research instead of just faster output, why a simple monthly newsletter can keep you top of mind with B2B prospects, and why protecting a slow morning might matter more than an early one.

Key Bytes

• Underutilized and underoptimized are not the same problem — one means you aren't sending email at all, the other means you're sending it without a strategy behind it.

• SMS can hit open rates near 90%, but that trust is more fragile, so every text either earns the next one or costs you a subscriber.

• Between 2023 and 2024, Melanie's team had to send double the emails to hit the same revenue for the same client with the same offer.

• AI isn't replacing the creative work at The Email Marketers — it's replacing the research that used to be too time-consuming, like mining Reddit and testimonials for the exact language customers use.

• A referral program you set up once and never touch again isn't a referral program, it's a checkbox.

• Most B2B agencies are still underutilizing their own email list, when a simple monthly newsletter is often enough to stay top of mind.

• Melanie doesn't take a call before 11am, and protecting that slow morning is part of how she runs the business, not a luxury she fits in around it.

• If you're on the fence about texting your customers, the real question isn't whether you like getting texts — it's whether you like money.

Chapters

00:00 Welcome and introducing Melanie Balke

01:16 From freelancing to building The Email Marketers

02:41 How the pod system runs strategy, copy, design, and delivery

04:19 Why retention now means more than just email

07:18 The real difference between underutilized and underoptimized email

09:10 Email versus SMS: engagement, risk, and where each one wins

15:12 How The Email Marketers uses AI for research and creative

19:58 Melanie's shift from freelancer to founder and her day to day

22:03 What B2B agencies get wrong about their own email marketing

27:01 Rapid fire: books, debunked advice, and protecting a slow morning

This week, my guest is Melanie Balke, Founder & CEO of The Email Marketers, an outsourced email marketing department helping e-commerce brands build deeper customer relationships and grow revenue. Before launching her agency, she led email marketing for one of LA's fastest-growing agencies, was the first marketing hire at Apt2B, and consulted for brands like Mercedes-Benz and SMART.

Melanie Balke is the Founder & CEO of The Email Marketers: Your outsourced email department helping e-commerce brands to build deep relationships with their customers and grow their revenue. Before she started The Email Marketers, she was the Head of Email Marketing for one of LA's fastest-growing agencies and the first marketing hire for Apt2B (acquired), as well as a marketing consultant for conglomerate brands such as Mercedes-Benz and SMART before that.

Contact Melanie on their website or on LinkedIn.