Some marketing channels burn bright and fade. Others quietly compound over time.
This month marks my 10-year business anniversary with Joy Joya. Instead of writing a highlight reel, I want to share what actually lasts, what I’d do differently, and why I still believe email marketing is one of the most underrated investments a brand can make.
The Honest Version of a 10-Year Business Anniversary
In May 2016, I officially started Joy Joya. I had just moved to Los Angeles from the East Coast and was trying to refresh my career and lean more into marketing. I’d been dabbling in different gigs and part-time roles for years, but I also knew I had always been entrepreneurial. So I started freelancing on the side under the name Joy Joya, primarily serving the jewelry industry.
It was not full-time. It was not some grand vision. It was a beginning.
And for years, that’s what it was: a jewelry marketing agency. That was my niche, my identity, my professional network. Everything I built, I built around that world.
If you want the deeper backstory on that early chapter, I go into it in episode #287.
How Email Marketing Became the Foundation (Without a Big Announcement)
There’s a pivot story people like to tell, where someone has a lightning-bolt moment and everything instantly clicks into place. My experience was slower than that.
One of my earliest Klaviyo clients is still the moment I think about when something shifted. We were figuring it out together: unlocking flows, building a consistent send calendar, and connecting emails to seasons and production schedules. Even before we had everything dialed in, the attributed revenue jumped.
That was the moment I stopped seeing email marketing as one service among many and started seeing it as the thing I wanted to build around.
Why Email Marketing Was Different From Everything Else I Was Doing
For years, Joy Joya was a full-service marketing agency. I supported clients with organic social, SEO, content strategy, and more. I had happy clients and strong, long-term working relationships.
But I also had a frustration underneath all of it.
With a lot of marketing channels, it’s genuinely hard to make a compelling case study. It’s hard to sit down with a client and say, “Here’s exactly what we did, and here’s what it produced.” Brand awareness, organic growth, and content marketing: the ROI can be real, but it’s diffuse. It’s hard to isolate.
Email marketing is different.
It isn’t a sexy term. But I kept coming back to the clarity. You can actually see what changed and what happened next. Not in a vague, “brand awareness is up” way. In a real, revenue-attributed, here’s-what-moved way.
That clarity became very hard to walk away from.
Going Narrower in What We Offer and Broader in Whom We Serve
Over time, email became the center of what we do. Not because I planned it that way from day one, but because the results were undeniable and we were genuinely good at it. My team was built to support it. Klaviyo became a deep specialization. And at some point it stopped feeling like one service among many and started feeling like the foundation.
We officially rebranded around email marketing in 2025. We updated the website and restructured our sales process. But the truth is we’d been an email-first agency for a few years before that. The rebrand just made the outside match the inside.
At the same time, I did something that probably looked counterintuitive from the outside. I expanded who we serve.
From basically the beginning, Joy Joya had been laser-focused on the jewelry industry. That was my niche. I knew it deeply. My network was built around it.
And in 2025, I opened that up to women-focused ecommerce product brands more broadly, not just jewelry.
So at the exact moment I went narrower in what we offer, I went broader in whom we serve.
Here’s the logic: depth creates stability.
When you have a real specialization, when you understand something inside and out, and you can prove results, it becomes solid ground. It gives you the confidence to expand into less familiar territory because you are not leaping into nothing. You are moving from a foundation.
What I Got Wrong (And What I’d Tell My Past Self)
Here’s one thing I’ll say clearly: I should have officially niched into email sooner.
Not because I regret learning the other things. I don’t. Those years made me a better strategist, and they taught me how all the pieces work together.
But if you are building a business, clarity compounds, too. The sooner you are honest about what you want to be known for, the sooner your marketing, your service delivery, your team, and your client experience can line up behind that focus.
That’s also where the “pivot story” gets complicated. I’m not going to go into every detail, but I will say this: the decision to evolve Joy Joya wasn’t made from a place of total comfort. There were real external pressures that made staying exactly where I was feel increasingly untenable.
In that moment, I had a choice: contract around what I knew or move toward what I believed in.
Email wasn’t a consolation prize. It wasn’t, “Well, this is all that’s left.” It was something I had been intentionally building expertise in for years. It was a foundation. That distinction matters.
Why Email Marketing Lasts When Platforms Rise and Fall
I’ve been in marketing in some form since around 2009. That’s over 15 years of watching the industry shift: the rise of social media, the algorithm era, SEO changing constantly, entire platforms becoming irrelevant, and new ones replacing them.
What kept pulling me back to email wasn’t nostalgia. It was durability.
Most channels have a shelf life. Algorithms change. Platforms rise and fall. Tactics stop working. Email has outlasted almost everything.
Not because it’s glamorous. It isn’t. But because it’s built on something that does not go away: a direct relationship between a brand and a person who asked to hear from them.
Email has evolved a lot. But the core hasn’t moved:
- A person opts in.
- A brand shows up.
- A relationship either forms or it doesn’t.
That staying power is structural. It’s not a trend.
The Shift That Separates “Sending Emails” From Building a Real Email Program
Over the years, I’ve seen what separates the brands whose email programs grow from the ones that just maintain. It almost always comes down to the same thing.
A lot of brands treat email marketing like a broadcast tool: send to everyone, say the same thing, and hope it lands.
The brands that win stop thinking about email as a channel and start thinking about it as a relationship.
And relationships require consistency, intention, and actually knowing who you are talking to.
That mindset changes everything:
- You stop chasing a “perfect” campaign schedule and start building a system you can maintain.
- You stop treating segmentation like an optional add-on and start using it to earn trust.
- You stop relying on adrenaline launches and start investing in flows and lifecycle touchpoints that compound.
- You stop aiming for “more emails” and start aiming for better timing, better relevance, and clearer offers.
The Next 10 Years: What I’m Building Toward
After 10 years building a business, “rare” starts to mean everything.
I’ve been cautiously excited about plenty of shiny things in marketing over the years. I’m not a bandwagon person. I’m curious, I watch, I wait to see what sticks.
And what I keep coming back to is email marketing. At the end of the day, it’s owned, it’s measurable, and it compounds. The longer you invest in it, the more it gives back.
That’s what I want to keep building. That’s what feels worth the next 10 years.
I’m genuinely curious about where email goes from here, especially how it adapts with AI and how the practice of marketing keeps evolving. I don’t think anyone has all the answers right now.
But I still believe, deeply, in that one-to-one connection between a brand and the person who chose to hear from them. I don’t see that going away. And I don’t see myself walking away from it anytime soon.
Here’s to 10 years. And to whatever comes next.
