AGS MAGAZINE: The revenue in your inbox

Sending emails successfully is one thing, but what happens after they reach the inbox is a whole other story. In this interview, Daniel Shnaider, Founder & CEO of Warmy.io, talks about how businesses can turn emails into revenue by uncovering hidden opportunities in lead monetisation.

The leads you already own

Shnaider was running an e-commerce business and trying to reach potential partners by email before building Warmy. Along the way, he discovered that having the right offer and the right leads means very little if your emails don’t reach your potential customers’ inboxes. Once Warmy was established, he and his team focused on the infrastructure behind email marketing. Then they had another challenge to solve: what happens after the email gets there?

“A lead has no value until you can successfully communicate with it,” says Shnaider.

This is a problem many companies also encounter. They spend enormous amounts of money acquiring leads but don’t fully monetise the database they’ve already built because acquiring something new feels more exciting than optimising something they already own.

That leaves plenty of value on the table. Maybe a customer didn’t convert six months ago but would today. Maybe they were shown the wrong offer or the timing was wrong. Worse, maybe the emails never reached them in the first place. So having 500,000 leads while your emails land in spam means sitting on a huge asset you can’t properly use.

The answer isn’t simply sending more emails. Good email monetisation is a combination of data quality, audience segmentation, timing, relevance, deliverability, reputation and the offer itself. In practice, it means understanding which potential customers should receive which offer, when they should receive it and how frequently you can communicate without damaging engagement or reputation. When done well, email is an extremely powerful revenue engine.

Knowing when not to send

Like other areas of digital marketing, AI is also changing how companies approach email. It makes content incredibly cheap to produce, but that also means the cost of creating bad communication is approaching zero. For Shnaider, the opportunity isn’t simply using AI to create more content or send more messages. Companies also need to understand what is relevant and when it makes sense to communicate.

At Warmy, Shnaider says they see AI as intelligence around email: analysing signals, identifying deliverability problems, understanding reputation and helping businesses make better decisions. In his view, AI should make communication more relevant, not simply more frequent.

This matters more than ever as AI-driven outreach continues to scale and major email providers like Gmail and Outlook tighten their rules. “The inbox is becoming more intelligent every year,” says Shnaider. For affiliates and lead-generation businesses, the old approach of sending first and fixing deliverability when something breaks no longer works. Instead, companies need to build the infrastructure correctly before increasing volume.

If left unsolved, a deliverability problem can quickly become a revenue problem. For an e-commerce company, fewer inbox placements can mean fewer purchases. For an affiliate business, it means fewer conversions. For a SaaS company, it can mean fewer demos, activations or renewals.

Email is not dead

For over a decade, marketers have considered email “dead”, but it keeps coming back as a serious revenue channel. This doesn’t surprise Shnaider:

“Email is one of the few digital identities that has survived almost every generation of the internet.”

Social networks and algorithms change, advertising platforms become more expensive, and new channels emerge and disappear. What remains constant is that almost everyone still has an email address. More importantly, unlike social platforms, which decide whether your audience sees your message, email creates a direct relationship between a company and its audience.

In three to five years, Shnaider sees lead monetisation moving towards autonomous communication systems. Instead of someone manually deciding, “Let’s send campaign X to segment Y on Tuesday”, AI systems will continuously analyse thousands of signals to decide who should receive a message, what should be communicated, through which channel and when.

Businesses will set the objective, whether that’s acquiring a customer, reactivating a lead, booking a meeting or increasing customer lifetime value. At the same time, intelligent systems determine the best way to get there.

“Email will still be extremely important, but it will become one part of a broader intelligent communication layer.”

This article was originally published in AGS Magazine. Explore the latest issue for more in-depth interviews, straightforward analysis and informed perspectives from across the affiliate and performance marketing industry.