Email marketing
Newsletters, sequences and deliverability.
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Sending mail to people who agreed to hear from you: newsletters, automated sequences, transactional messages and the reporting that says whether any of it worked.
Products range from simple broadcast tools for a writer with a list, to platforms that segment on behaviour and trigger from events in another system. The gap between those two is mostly automation and data, not design.
Multi-channel campaigns spanning ads and web belong in marketing automation. Outbound sales sequences sit in sales engagement.
Deliverability is the whole business
A campaign that lands in a promotions tab or a spam folder had no design problem. It had an infrastructure and reputation problem.
Three things decide most of it. Authentication records published on your sending domain, so receiving servers can verify the mail is yours. List hygiene, meaning you send to people who signed up and stop sending to those who never open. Consistency, because volume that spikes from nothing looks exactly like a compromised account.
Ask any vendor what happens when a campaign generates complaints, whether you send from a shared pool or a dedicated address, and what tooling exists for authentication. Products that treat this as your problem entirely are cheaper for a reason.
Warm-up matters when moving between providers. Moving an entire list on day one is the standard way to arrive at a new provider with a damaged reputation.
Automation, and the sequences worth building
- Welcome series sent to new subscribers while interest is highest.
- Behavioural triggers fired by an action taken in your product or store.
- Recovery flows for baskets, trials and lapsed customers.
- Re-engagement aimed at quiet addresses, followed by removal when it fails.
- Date-based messages for renewals, anniversaries and anything on a calendar.
The first and the third earn most of the money in this category. Anything beyond them is refinement, and refinement without a working welcome message is wasted effort.
Check what triggers the product accepts. A sequence that can only start from a form submission is far less useful than one that can start from an event in your own application.
Segmentation and the data behind it
Segments are only as good as the fields feeding them.
Look at what the platform can store per contact, how it handles custom fields, and whether it can segment on behaviour rather than attributes alone. Then check how data arrives: a form, an import, an integration with your store, or an interface your developers can call.
Two-way synchronisation with a CRM deserves particular attention. One-way pushes leave you with two versions of the truth and an argument every quarter about which one is right.
Design, accessibility and the boring reality
Mail clients render inconsistently, and the ones your audience uses are the only ones that matter.
Test on a real phone rather than a preview panel. Keep a plain-text version that reads properly. Make sure the message still makes sense with images blocked, since a large share of recipients will never load them.
Dark mode has become the common failure: logos with white backgrounds, invisible borders and unreadable text appear only after sending. Check it during the trial.
How plans are metered
Contacts, sends, or a combination of both, with automation depth and reporting usually deciding the tier.
Read how contacts are counted. Unsubscribed and bounced addresses still count in several products, so a list you have already stopped mailing keeps costing money. Sending limits per day, extra charges for additional users, and paid access to certain integrations are the other lines to check.
Free tiers here are generous and end abruptly, often at the point where automation becomes available. The same shape of surprise across categories is set out in what pricing pages hide.
Before committing, export your list and re-import it. A platform that cannot give you back a clean file with consent dates attached is holding an asset that is legally yours.
What to send when the list is small
A few hundred subscribers is not a failure, and treating a small list like a large one is the usual mistake.
At that size the useful metric is replies rather than open rate, and a message that reads as though written by a person will produce them. Segmentation matters less than relevance, since you can still describe the audience in a sentence.
Send on a schedule you can keep. Monthly and reliable beats weekly for six weeks followed by silence, and the silence is what makes a list forget who you are.
Ask people why they subscribed and use the answers. That single question, sent in a welcome message, does more for the next year of writing than any tooling decision available in this category.
Questions people ask
- Why do my emails land in spam?
- Almost always authentication, list quality or engagement rather than the words. Set up the sending records for your domain, remove addresses that never open, and stop importing lists you did not collect yourself.
- Is a dedicated sending address worth it?
- Only above roughly a hundred thousand messages a month with steady volume. Below that, a shared pool with a good reputation outperforms a dedicated one you cannot keep warm.
- How is email marketing priced?
- By contacts, by sends, or by both. Contact pricing punishes large inactive lists, send pricing punishes frequency. Unsubscribed addresses still count towards the total in several products, which is worth checking.
- What open rate should I expect?
- Open figures became unreliable once mail clients started preloading images. Judge campaigns on clicks, replies and revenue instead, and use opens only as a rough trend on your own list.
- Do I need consent for every subscriber?
- In most markets covered by privacy law, yes, with a record of when and how it was given. Buying or scraping a list breaks both the law and your sending reputation, usually in that order.