Jimmy KimCEO & Founder, Commerce Roundtable · Marketer of 17+ Years, 4x Founder. Former DTC/Retailer & SaaS Founder. Newsletter. Host of ASOM & Send it! Podcast. DTC Event: Commerce Roundtable

The 80/20 Rule of Email: Focus on What Actually Drives Revenue

3 Nov 2025 · 1 min

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1:12

In this video, Jimmy Kim and a guest discuss how email marketers often overlook the 80/20 principle, mistakenly treating it as vague business theory. By examining real email data, they reveal that a small number of email flows and audience segments generate the vast majority of revenue—often three key flows out of dozens. They break down which flows and segments truly move the needle, advise marketers to concentrate limited weekly email time (e.g., five hours) on these high‑impact areas, and recommend stopping work on low‑ROI flows that only bring $100‑$300 a month. The conversation promises that by cutting half of the non‑revenue‑generating effort, teams can dramatically boost, even double, their email‑derived revenue.

I remember growing up hearing about it a little bit through, I think, high school and college, and I thought it was just some woo-hoo kind of business theory. But then I actually started looking at email data and it was interesting.
Like you said, you have 47 flows running and sending 4 emails a week and your team is grinding and you pull the revenue report and realize there's like 3 things doing all your heavy lifting.
Dude, it's wild. They're not applying this 80/20 principle where they're optimizing a flow that makes I don't know, $100 to $300 a month while they're ignoring the ones that are making or could be making tens of thousands of dollars plus, right?
We're gonna break down the actual 80/20 rule of, of email revenue. What flows really make you money, which segments really matter, and what you should kind of stop doing right now. Because if you only had 5 hours a week for email, and honestly a lot of you do, you need to know where to focus.
This episode is gonna basically make it so that you're gonna delete half the work that you're doing. Don't actually delete any of the work you've done, but it's moving forward gonna allow you to stop working on the things that just don't make money and don't make sense. And you probably will be able to significantly increase, maybe even double your revenue as a result.