r/Emailmarketing

Hey... so it's been a while since I joined this community. I often read posts, and I help and give advice if I can.

One thing I noticed here a lot is....

(FIRST, LET ME MAKE IT CLEAR THAT THIS IS NOT A PROMOTIONAL POST)

Lol, making it clear is very important, or this post will be removed.

Anyways, moving forward with what I was saying, I see so many solo entrepreneurs coming here and asking for advice on how to improve their email marketing. Which is not wrong, obviously...

But what concerns me is that most of the time, they are doing everything. They are running their business, spending time on their business, and then they also want to write emails on their own... again, there's nothing wrong with it.

So why did I bring up this topic?

You see, I help businesses with their email list. I have people come to me to help them.

Some of them were those who tried to do everything on their own.

They had a huge email list, which they wanted to reactivate. They took advice from YouTube, Reddit, and other places, and they ended up hurting their email list.

Look, the technical part is easy. You watch a few tutorials, and you can set up DNS, make segments, and clean a list on your own. But writing emails? You need practice for that. You need to learn the fundamentals, different types of emails, like control beating emails, onboarding emails, cross-sell emails, and testimonial emails. Just like that, there are so many different types of emails you've probably never heard of, and all of them are written differently, with different psychologies and avatars in mind.

You can't possibly write all these just from some tutorials. You need a good amount of practice and guidance.

So many business owners underestimate this thinking, "it's just an email, why hire someone when I can write it myself"

And because of this, they never make good money from their list.

So all I want to say is, if you've never written emails, never got coached, and had your emails criticised by a professional, then you should just hire a professional to write your emails. For you, it might just be words, but those words play a very deep role to bring sale.

And big brands understand this; that's why they hire junior and senior copywriters.

I know not everyone has the budget to hire someone, so I'd advise learning it. Buy some courses, get a coach. If you don't treat email marketing as an asset of your business, you'll never know the potential of your email list.

I've been working on email campaigns for a while now and lately I've caught myself going down a rabbit hole with every little detail.

I'll spend ages comparing two subject line wondering if I should move a button higher, change one sentence or send at a different time before I know it I've spent an hour tweaking things that probably won't make a huge difference on their own.

The other evening I took a break and was scrolling on my phone reading different discussions about email marketing and it made me realize everyone seems to have a completely different opinion on what matters most some people swear by subject lines, others say deliverability is everything and some think the offer itself is all that really matters.

At some point I started wondering if I was using optimization as a way to avoid just hitting send.

I'm curious where everyone else draws the line what's the one thing you've found consistently has the biggest impact on your campaigns and what do you think people spend way too much time overthinking?

I have a list of about 6,000 engaged subscribers from my Substack newsletter. I'm counting anyone with "Activity Level 1" or above as an engaged subscriber and won't be reaching out to the people who aren't on this list.

I've just purchased a couple domains/mailboxes to connect to Beehiiv so I can send email blasts to this engaged list about offers and free webinars I'm hosting.

I'm wondering what type of warmup is needed for this activity. I come from a cold automated outbound school but I understand this is somewhat different.

My plan was to start by only reaching out to Activity Level 5 (the most engaged subscribers) the first week and send no more than 25 messages or so per day the first week, and to not include any links or pictures in the blast. And then gradually increase the sending volume and start including Activity Level 4, and so on over a few weeks.

How does this plan sound? Thanks for your help.

I run a newsletter, just over 1,000 subscribers.

For months, nearly everything I sent landed in Promotions, and my open rates were rough because of it. I'd done all the "obvious" stuff and nothing shifted.

So I stopped guessing and spent a good few months genuinely testing and studying how Gmail decides where an email lands.

It's made a real difference. My open rates are up noticeably per campaign, I'm landing in the primary inbox far more often, and the biggest surprise has been the jump in replies and engagement, people are actually seeing me now.

Here's what moved it, and what didn't.

What didn't help much:

- Stripping emails down to plain text. I went as minimal as possible and still landed in Promotions. Format mattered far less than I thought.

- Chasing "spam trigger words" in subject lines. Barely moved anything.

What actually worked:

1. I stopped emailing the whole list at once.

Gmail watches how engaged your recipients are. I started sending to my most recently engaged readers first, then widened out slowly. This was the single biggest lever, nothing else came close.

2. I cut the tracking links.

Redirect and click-tracking links hurt more than images ever did. Trimming them helped more than any design change.

3. I made the emails feel like a person sent them.

Real reply-to address, conversational tone, and a genuine question at the end so people actually reply. The replies turned out to matter a lot, and they snowballed.

4. I got consistent.

Random bursts looked campaign-y. A steady rhythm helped Gmail read me as a normal sender, not a broadcaster.

5. I seed-test before every send now.

I see where an email will land before my list does, instead of finding out from a flat open rate the next morning.

The real shift was mental. I'd been treating this as a design problem when it's a reputation and engagement one. Once I optimised for that, the numbers followed.

And yeah, before the "Promotions IS the inbox" point comes up 😄 fair, it's technically delivered. But no notifications, and people have to actively open their app and switch tabs to see you, which naturally drags opens down. Delivered and actually seen aren't the same thing.

Don't mind helping folks with this if anyone is interested in some advice.

If you had to strip it back to the bare essentials, the only software stack and credentials truly needed to start, what would make that shortlist

Hello guys, I am a begineer who uses generic tools and I want to switch up my email marketing so I can get better results for clients.

I was told aws is good but I am not sure if that's the best option. Can you suggest me some? I use mailgun and dont get desirable results. It struggles when I go for HTML designs and it's horrible for outlook and brothers.

Gmail is fine, but their IP pooling is shit.

any idea on a bit more technical setup? I am more than happy to go for aws if I get more hands on control I am just wondering if there is something better or DIY (borderline, total DIY can be a disaster).

Any help will be highly appreciated.

Hey everyone,

We're a team based out of Hyderabad selling productivity tools, recruitment services and IT Consulting. we're looking for suggestions with managing and running our email marketing campaigns.

What we have :

Data : Is verified.

Infrastructure Setup: We already have a MailWizz account hosted on DigitalOcean. We need suggestions to properly configuring it and deciding on the best SMTP platform to pair it with.

Share your thoughts!!

Thanks!

how did you find that client, or how did that client find you?

My company currently uses Stensul to build the emails and then pushes them to Marketo for deployment and lead management to Salesforce. I have a hard time believing all of the new features in Marketos new email designer as they have over sold and under delivered in the past. Our email marketing spans multiple brands and countries so the ability to easily toggle on/off features in Stensul is a big perk. Also their UI is great and we're easily able to update or build new modules as needed. Another feature is he QA process native in Stensul, but Marketo is saying they will soon have that as well. Has anyone used the new Email Designer in Marketo to speak on their functionality and features? Good? Bad?

I run a rewards management company and so I often send out emails notifying users of my client about promotions.

Curious if anyone has thoughts on using the clients domain for sending or using my own companies.

On one hand, if I use my own, I can have more certainty in my domain reputation and deliverability. But I risk also having a bad domain reputation due to the volume of emails being sent across all my clients. This could have a cascading effect across all my clients.

But if I use the clients domain, I am relying on the deliverability of their domain. It instills more trust when users receive an email from the company they recognize but I worry about having to warm up and manage the reputation of my clients domains.

Does anyone have any thoughts or recommendations?

My background is text-based email, and the advice everywhere is to keep it lean and avoid heavy HTML/images for deliverability. But I keep seeing gorgeous, clearly Figma-designed promotional emails from DTC brands that land fine.

What I want to understand from people who run these at scale: is it mostly that they're sending from a warm, opted-in list on a high-reputation domain, so they can get away with the design? Are they accepting the Promotions tab as the target instead of Primary? Or is there more to how they keep image-heavy email inboxing consistently?

Trying to reconcile the "stay lean" deliverability advice with what the big designed senders clearly do. Thanks.

I've operated a blog related to anime and JAV for nearly 30 years. Recently I've been paying more attention to my email numbers, how many go out, how many get opened, how many customers clicked. The number seem pretty steady, unless I get really lucky with a blog post idea. I've kind of switched to product focused posts and product reviews, but for years I would also bring people posts about what anime was buzzing this week, or what anime I personally liked, even if no one else did. But those posts got terrible numbers and I'm really done wasting my time with anything that won't help my business.

https://preview.redd.it/yyvceuoag5ah1.jpg?width=2748&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=13ecb5564f0adc1f36208a7c5a14ab481c2c3606

I'm looking for advice on the best angle for reaching out to my network about consulting opportunities in email marketing.

My background isn't really in email marketing itself. It's in designing online experiments using statistics and programming. For example, I design A/B tests that not only reach statistically sound conclusions, but are also optimized to reduce the sample size and testing time required. I've also worked on behavioral segmentation using clustering, recommendation systems, churn prediction, forecasting, and other data-driven optimization problems.

The part I'm less experienced with is the creative side: copywriting, campaign strategy, and email production. My interest in email marketing comes from the fact that it's one of the few marketing channels where experimentation can have a direct and measurable impact on revenue. Compared with paid ads, the data tends to be cleaner and more reliable, so it feels like a better place for me to leverage my existing skill set before expanding into other channels.

I'd like to reach out to founders of consumer brands and people on marketing teams to let them know we could work together. The problem is that I don't think my message clearly communicates the value I bring. It can easily be interpreted as "I'm an email marketer" (which many companies already have) or "I'm a performance marketer" (which is also a very different role).

What I really want to communicate is that I help companies improve the performance of their existing email program through better experimentation, smarter segmentation, and data-driven optimization, not by writing emails, but by helping identify what works faster and more reliably.

Many of the people in my network are founders at companies that have recently raised funding or are actively trying to grow, so I'd like the message to feel relevant to their current priorities without making it too long or technical.

If you were in my position, how would you position yourself? Have you seen people successfully market this type of skill set? More specifically:

* How would you explain this value proposition in one or two sentences?

* How would you avoid being confused with a traditional email marketer or performance marketer?

* Would you position yourself as an email optimization specialist, an experimentation consultant, a lifecycle marketing analyst, or something else entirely?

I feel like I've tried them all or freaking close to them all. I currently use Flodesk, which yea, it's beauuutiful. And they have really been so active on adding new features lately, features we've all been asking for. So props to Flodesk. But unfortunately I need more than what they have at this very moment.

I've done three trials of Beehiiv but can't wrap my head around why if I already have a blog on my website then wtf do I need something like Beehiiv, Substack or Ghost for? Just seems excessive and like it would confuse my audience.

One fav of my past was Klaviyo. Omnisend is great too. Didn't like Kit, clunky. IDK ANYMORE PLEASE HELP.

So, tell me what your favorite is and why, or at least put one of your fav features from the platform. Thanks! <3

One example for me is a browse abandonment automation I tried in the past. On paper, it makes sense. Someone looks at a product, does not buy, then gets a reminder later. But I found out later on that it's way less effective than I thought, especially when the person was just casually browsing or had only click around for two seconds.

Same thing with some winback emails. The concept makes sense because I'm reaching out to customers who already had some interest in my brand before. But sometimes it feels like I'm just emailing people who have already mentally moved on, and the workflow just creates more unsubscribes than actual revenue.

I'm not saying these automations never work. I know they can. I'm more interested in the ones people built or added to their stack because everyone kept saying "you need this", then later realized it was not worth keeping.

I don't know a damn thing about email marketing. I feel I am just throwing out high-quality
(in terms of writing) and long-form emails but those two things don't matter if they're not really what the reader needs. So I have two questions:

1. Can you create segmentations based on what people's goals are? Like if one person who signed up to my list had a goal of making money and another had a goal of growing their followers, could you segment that?

2. Are there any good courses out there for free or cheap that help you with email marketing? My three things are what type of emails to send people, automations, and segmentations.

Curious how people here handle this in practice — not the theory, but what you actually do when a campaign underperforms and you're trying to figure out why.

I've been helping a few senders work through deliverability issues, and it almost always comes down to sitting with the data manually — complaint rates, bounce composition, DNS records, send history — and building a picture from pieces that don't talk to each other. It works but it's slow, and the insight often comes too late (after two or three bad sends, not before the first one).

A few things I'm genuinely uncertain about and would love to hear how others handle:

- Do you tend to catch problems proactively, or almost always reactively after a bad campaign?

- How much of your diagnosis relies on what the ESP surfaces vs. tools vs. external checks like Postmaster or MXToolbox?

- If you've tried any dedicated deliverability tools (GlockApps seems to come up a lot), what's actually useful vs. noise?

Not looking to sell anything — genuinely trying to understand whether the manual-analysis approach I'm using is standard, or whether there are smarter workflows I'm missing.