Maggie Rose Stover’s email playbook: From a relationship-first strategy to smarter personalization

Regardless of how much email marketing has changed over the past decade, winning brands continue to maintain their positions by building genuine relationships rather than simply chasing clicks. This approach requires a thoughtful strategy, quality data, and a clear understanding of what truly drives engagement.

In this interview, Maggie Rose Stover, Senior Marketing Project Manager at Stitch, shares her approach to developing email marketing strategies with Stripo. Drawing on over 13 years of experience in industries ranging from CPG to quick service, she explains why email is a learning channel. She also shares how we can approach personalization without overcomplicating it and how we can design test environments that increase engagement rather than drain teams.

Key takeaways

1. Email works best as a relationship channel, not a transactional one. Long-term engagement comes from delivering consistent value, not just pushing conversions.
2. Personalization doesn’t have to be complex to be effective. Using a few meaningful data points can make emails feel relevant while still scaling across large audiences.
3. Meaningful testing starts with the right metrics. Focusing on engagement and program health, rather than open leads, yields insights that actually improve performance.

Maggie Rose Stover is a Senior Marketing Project Manager at Stitch, a marketing services company that helps enterprise B2C brands drive better CRM performance through Braze. With experience spanning both in-house and agency roles, Maggie has successfully led high-impact email and lifecycle marketing programs across various industries, including CPG, financial services, healthcare and pharmaceuticals, travel and hospitality, nonprofits, and quick service. Her work sits at the intersection of strategy, data, and execution, enabling complex organizations to improve their engagement, retention, and ROIs through smarter automation and CRM-driven personalization.

Beyond hands-on program leadership, Maggie is deeply involved in the email marketing community. She has been an active member of Women of Email since 2019 and has been an Association of National Advertisers Email Excellence Center board member. Maggie is passionate about mentoring and supporting women in marketing, regularly sharing practical insights and hard-earned lessons to help elevate individual careers and the email channel as a whole.

What keeps email marketing exciting and why representation still matters

Stripo: What first drew you to email marketing, and what inspires your work in this channel after more than a decade in the field?

Maggie: I started my career in traditional marketing in the financial services industry. In 2015, I was impacted by a company-wide layoff, which pushed me to explore opportunities in digital marketing. I knew that this was necessary to remain relevant and for my long term career growth. I was drawn to email because it blended creativity, strategy, and analytics at a time when the channel was just emerging as a true career path.

Even though I had no prior experience, my manager took a chance on me. I learned by watching, doing, and building campaigns and audience segments in Mailchimp and Salesforce Marketing Cloud. That’s why I resonated so much with the theme that email is really a career of apprenticeship, one of the topics at this year’s UnSpam Conference. You grow by learning from others, experimenting, and continuously sharpening your skills, and that’s exactly how I discovered how much I love email.

What continues to inspire me more than a decade later is the constant evolution of the channel. The email of 2015 is not the same as the email of today: Technology, customer expectations, and cultural relevance are always evolving. This means that I’m always learning, adapting, and finding new ways to connect brands with their audiences.

Stripo: As a longtime member of Women of Email (WoE) and an experienced mentor, how do you see the role of women evolving in the email marketing industry? Where do we still need to push for more visibility and leadership?

Maggie: I’ve been a member of WoE since 2019, and I can honestly say that I wouldn’t be where I am in my career today without the connections I made through WoE. The role of women in our industry continues to evolve, and we’ve made real progress. Email marketing, as a field, has a strong presence of women across strategy, operations, and leadership.

That said, there are still areas where representation lags, particularly in data architecture and engineering, where men still dominate. There are barriers to break through, and one of them is around risk-taking.

The encouraging part is that there are so many outstanding women leaders paving the way: Genna Matson, Jennifer Hoth, Jenn Horner, Guilda Hilaire, Natalie Jackson, Naomi West, Jen Capstraw, Skyler, April Mullen, Kelly Haggard, and more. Their visibility and influence are shaping the future of our industry, and I’m proud to be part of a community that supports and amplifies women’s voices.

What works everywhere: Relationship-first email and personalization that actually scales

Stripo: You’ve worked across industries from CPG to finance to healthcare. What strategies or lessons have proven to be universally effective in email, regardless of the vertical?

Maggie: There are two important aspects to make email marketing more effective:

1. First, stop thinking of email as purely transactional. It’s not just about driving a purchase; it’s about building relationships with customers. When you treat email as a channel for listening, engaging, and delivering value, you build loyalty that keeps customers coming back again and again.
2. Second, personalization is key, and it doesn’t have to be complicated. Personalization isn’t just “Hi [First Name].” It’s about using the data you already have, such as last purchase, product affinities, and engagement history, to make the content more relevant. That could mean swapping a hero image, adjusting a secondary content block, or surfacing a recommendation that aligns with what you know about them. Even small touches can make a big impact on [customer] engagement and long-term loyalty.

Stripo: With personalization becoming increasingly complex, how do you strike a balance between scalable automation and true 1:1 relevance in lifecycle email programs?

Maggie: Balancing scalable automation with true 1:1 relevance starts with focusing on the data points that matter most. At Amex, I partnered with marketing strategists to understand their campaign objectives and end goals for each email, then translated those requirements to Product, IT, and Data Analytics partners. Together, we integrated new fields from Databricks into Salesforce CRM and SFMC, which enabled us to personalize [content] based on meaningful behaviors, such as BLOC usage or BCA deposits, rather than overcomplicate things with dozens of micro-segments.

At ETS, the focus was different. We built email campaigns in HubSpot that segmented subscribers by region, test scores, and key journey milestones, nudging account creators to register and then following up with test prep for those who had scheduled an exam. These weren’t “big-lift” personalization efforts, but they felt timely and relevant while remaining scalable.

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Beyond vanity metrics: How to design email tests that actually drive engagement

Stripo: Many brands struggle with testing fatigue or poorly structured A/B tests. What’s your framework for creating meaningful and actionable experimentation in email?

Maggie: For me, meaningful experimentation starts with the overall health of the email program. Before running any A/B tests, I look at foundational engagement metrics, such as click rate, CTOR, bounces, and unsubscribes. Opens have become increasingly unreliable, and while I joke that the continued focus on them makes me want to slam my head into a wall, too many marketers still cling to them. I treat open rates as a directional metric rather than a primary signal of success.  

Clean data [must] come first. Platforms like HubSpot and Braze help filter out known bot activity, giving us — email marketers — a clearer picture of performance and allowing us to focus on testing real customer engagement. 

Then, I assess email content: Where are customers clicking within the email? What types of content are piquing their interest? What is not resonating with them? I also consider seasonality, customer maturity, and external factors that could be influencing customer behavior before considering a testing opportunity. 

There are many potential areas to test in email marketing, and it’s easy to try to do too much at once. To avoid that, I take a phased approach, focusing on one well-defined hypothesis at a time and using real customer behavior — not vanity metrics — to guide each testing opportunity. When done well, testing and learning aren’t just about improving inbox performance; it’s about maintaining relevance, building trust, and fostering long-term customer loyalty. 

My framework (and why it isn’t overwhelming):

• assess program health;
• pick the highest-impact variable;
• test cleanly against meaningful KPIs;
• build on wins, step by step.

It doesn’t have to be complex. Just take one piece at a time and make each test actionable.

Stripo: Can you share a memorable email marketing moment — whether it was funny, successful, a mistake you learned from, or a new approach that changed how you work?

Maggie: In my first email marketing operations role, I launched a campaign earlier than intended. The email was correct and had been fully QA’d. I had the business owner’s approval, but I accidentally scheduled the wrong version. [This] meant [that] an email promoted a sale that wasn’t yet live.

I caught the mistake before anyone else did. I went straight to my manager, explained what happened, took full ownership, and outlined how I would fix the situation and prevent a similar mistake in the future. I spoke directly with the business owner and shared the immediate remediation plan and the steps I would be putting in place to ensure that this type of mistake wouldn’t happen again.

Later, my marketing director pulled me aside and gave me feedback that stuck with me and shaped how I handled other mistakes. She shared how she appreciated how calmly and professionally I handled the situation, how I owned the mistake, and how quickly I focused on the solution rather than blaming or making excuses. 

That experience fundamentally shaped how I work and lead today. In fast-paced working environments, perfection isn’t realistic, but accountability is. What matters most is how you respond, how you communicate, and how you learn from the mistake. Another leader of mine once reminded me, “We’re not saving lives.” While mistakes can feel huge in the moment, at the end of the day, we’re sending emails and other customer communications, and every misstep is a learning opportunity to improve processes, build trust, and grow. 

Wrapping up

We thank Maggie Rose Stover for sharing her insights, experiences, and thoughtful perspectives with the Stripo blog readers. This conversation serves as a valuable reminder that effective email marketing is about building relationships, using data intentionally, and continually learning as the channel evolves. By focusing on relevance, meaningful metrics, and scalable personalization, email marketers can create programs that perform today and stay resilient tomorrow.