r/email

Hey all, looking for some advice here. My customer base has grown to a decent size now, and I’ve been collecting emails through my signup form for a while, but I’ve actually never sent a single marketing/update email to them yet, kind of embarrassing, I know 😅

Now I’m finally ready to start doing real email marketing, and I’m stuck on a decision: should I build my own email sending system, or just go with an established third-party ESP (like Mailchimp, SendGrid, etc.)?

Part of me wants to self-host, mainly because I like the idea of owning all my data and not being dependent on (or losing data to) a third party. But I have a feeling self-hosting email at this stage could open up a can of worms deliverability, IP reputation, spam filters, etc.

For someone still early-ish in scaling email ops, what would you recommend? What are the real tradeoffs between building it myself vs just using a third-party platform for now? Would love to hear from people who’ve been through this decision.

Thanks in advance!

I'll start: mine hit the thousands before I finally did something about it. I'm convinced there are two types of people — inbox-zero people, and "I have 60,000 unread and I've made peace with it" people. No judgment either way 😅

Drop your number 👇 — and if it's a wild one, how did it get that bad?

As email programs grow, managing consistent communication and monitoring performance can become challenging. Sequenzy helps streamline email automation by allowing teams to create automated sequences, set triggers and conditions, and send relevant emails based on user actions.

I think combining this type of automation with regular deliverability monitoring can make it easier to maintain consistent campaigns while identifying potential issues early.

For larger email programs, which metrics do you consider the most important, and how often do you review them?

As the title says, for weeks I have been running a few mailboxes on a good-performing campaign, getting positive replies, booking calls, same list-building steps, bounce rates around 1.5-0.5%, and then out of nowhere, in a few hours today, all the mailboxes on the campaign tank in warm up reputation, not my by much (from 100% for weeks to 89% in a few hours).

That might look like a good sign because of how small the drop is, but from my experience it's usually the beginning of the end for the fleet. What I want to find out is what could have caused this. Have you guys run into similar situations?

I use InboxKit for domains and mailboxes with their InfraGuard (which coincidentally I bought today, which is the same day the mailboxes tanked, but idk how it would be responsible), Smartlead for sending, Sales Nav, and Bouncer for leads and email validation

When sending emails at scale, getting messages into the inbox consistently can be challenging. Sender reputation, email authentication, content quality, engagement, bounce rates, and list hygiene can all influence whether an email reaches the inbox or ends up in spam.

For example, Sequenzy can help teams keep workflows organized and manage communication more efficiently, which can be useful when handling large volumes of email-related tasks and processes.

For people working with email systems, which factor do you think matters most for maintaining strong deliverability? Is it sender reputation, authentication, engagement, or keeping email lists clean?

My marketing email platform doesn’t allow me to send ‘service’ emails to all my customers. How do you guys send privacy policy or terms of service type emails to all of your clients? Thanks for your advice.

what email provider should I use for my own domain? I have a domain but I don’t have an email hoster I want decent privacy but it doesn’t have to be like fully encrypted or whatever. I just want a cheap email hoster

i don’t need that much storage either, i also don’t want to spend muc

Hello all!

I recently got a Kit free account and launched my first newsletter that I've been procrastinating on. I run a local-based Instagram page (@dcspot) and I started a newsletter to share things to do in the Northern VA/DC area. It went out to 314 subscribers and had a 62.4% open rate and a 7.3% click rate. Is this good?

Also, I was curious about the A/B testing. If I set it for 60 minutes, does it send out a few for the first hour to see which subject line does best, then select a winner and send the rest out to the rest of my subscribers? So if I send the emails out at 6pm will most of them not be sent until 7pm?

I had one email bounce. Should I unsubscribe that email? What can I do to improve my open rate? Any tips would be helpful, especially when it comes to a Kit email marketing account. Thank you in advance!

What tools do you guys use for testing inbox placement with your emails? 

I’ve used Mail Reach in the past for sending a live email to their seed list, and we use Warmy for our domain warm up and they have a template placement testing tool. 

But I always get wildly different results between these two and what our live performance data suggests is happening. And I think it’s due to the limited size of their seed list. 

Previously used Litmus placement testing before they became Validity and priced us out massively. So, I’m looking for a good alternative that allows for inbox placement testing over a larger seed list at a reasonable price. Any additional info/support the tool gives would also be fab - suggestions on how to improve placement or the like. 

Does an email tracking tool track more than just inboxes? What exactly can it do? What would be some examples of metrics that it can track? I'm constantly communicating with prospects, leads, clients, and business partners so using this type of tool could be really beneficial for me.

Lots of promotional emails come to my inbox. I never open any of those. Gets less attention among large number of emails.

So is email marketing still effective in the world of whatsapp, DMs etc. Please share your thoughts. If Yes, how?

Hello Everyone, I am a solo developer building a form backend service that sends you styled email from the users, from your website without writing any backend code.

This service supports any kind of framework.

Where it's at right now: static landing page + blog are live, backend is what I'm building right now.

Would you use such service for your website or app ????

so i recently installed mailcow dockerized and its all good, but gmail puts my emails sent from that mail server/account to spam. how to fix this? i am very new to self hosting my own mail server, but i have quite the experience in linux and sysops