What is the purpose of content in email marketing?

Content serves three masters simultaneously: subscriber value, business goals, and deliverability signals. Great email content delights recipients (value), drives actions you care about (business), and generates the engagement signals that keep you in the inbox (deliverability). Neglect any one, and the others eventually suffer.

For subscribers, content is why they opened. It must deliver on the promise of your subject line and provide something worth their time—information, entertainment, offers, utility. For your business, content drives conversions, builds relationships, and supports brand goals. For deliverability, content generates the opens, clicks, replies, and forwards that signal to mailbox providers your mail is wanted.

Content is the value exchange that makes email marketing sustainable. Subscribers give you attention; you give them something worthwhile. Break this exchange—send content that wastes their time—and they stop engaging. Stop engaging enough, and mailbox providers stop delivering. Content quality isn't just nice to have; it's infrastructure.