What Happened:
In an interview with Lifecycle Letter, email strategist Dela Quist argued that Amazon is an ESP away from unlocking a data advantage no other platform can match.
He explained that Amazon sees everything happening inside its retail ecosystem but loses visibility the moment a brand sends an email through another provider.
He said AI shifts, rising attribution pressure, and Google’s ecosystem lock-in create a narrow window where Amazon has both the incentive and the infrastructure to enter email.
More Insight:
Quist noted that because email is still viewed as a commodity, the industry has overlooked the strategic gap Amazon is uniquely aligned with. The inbox is the only place where a brand has a time-stamped, permission-based signal that can be tied to downstream behavior for months. That signal is what fuels accurate attribution, and it’s the one dataset Amazon doesn’t currently have.
“Email is the only first-party data with permission baked into it and it’s instantly withdrawable. Nothing else in digital works like that.”
He explained that every delivered email acts like a long-term fishing line: opens, delayed opens, multiple site visits, abandoned browse triggers, conversions all flow from one event the sender controls. Amazon already has unmatched infrastructure and commerce data; layering inbox-level signals on top would give them a visibility advantage only Google has ever enjoyed.
Quist noted that AI is the accelerant. Training attribution models without inbox signals puts Amazon at a permanent disadvantage. With those signals, they could optimize ad spend across Amazon, Google, and a brand’s own channels in ways current ESPs can’t touch.
“If Amazon can see what happens after you send an email, not just what happens on Amazon, the whole attribution game changes.”
He added that this wouldn’t resemble a typical ESP acquisition. Amazon would integrate email directly into its cloud and ads ecosystem, collapsing data ingestion, identity, attribution, and activation into one system. That puts real pressure on Salesforce, Adobe, Shopify, and CDPs whose value props rely on stitching together disparate tools.
In Quist’s view, the story isn’t “Amazon launches an ESP.” It’s “Amazon unlocks the dataset that ties the whole ecosystem together.”