Email Marketing
Email campaigns and newsletters that get read
A good email campaign gives people a reason to open it: something useful, a real offer, news worth knowing. We plan, write, design and send your campaigns and newsletters, and measure them on revenue, not just opens.
Who it is for: Businesses with a list they rarely email, or who send regularly but see engagement and revenue flat because every email is a sales pitch.
Everything in this service
- A campaign calendar planned around your business
- Copy written in your voice, subject lines tested
- Design that renders correctly in every major inbox
- Segmented sends so relevance stays high
- Reporting on clicks, revenue and list health, not vanity opens
What to expect
- A list that opens because your emails are worth opening
- Campaign revenue you can attribute send by send
- A rhythm your audience comes to expect
How email campaigns actually works
List quality beats list size, every time
A list of two thousand people who chose to hear from you outperforms a list of twenty thousand who were added, imported, scraped or bought. That is true commercially, because engaged people buy, and it is true mechanically, because inbox providers decide where your mail goes largely on how people respond to it.
The habits that build a good list are unfashionable. Ask for a signup in exchange for something genuinely worth having rather than a discount that attracts people who only want the discount. Be explicit about what you will send and how often, then keep to it. Use a confirmation step where it suits the market, since it costs you some signups and removes most of the bad addresses. Never add people because they bought once and never opted in to marketing. And never buy a list, which damages deliverability for everything you send afterwards.
Pruning matters as much as growing. Subscribers who have not opened anything in six months are not a dormant asset. They are a drag on inbox placement, and they hide your real engagement rate behind a bigger denominator. Run a re-engagement attempt, then remove the people who do not respond. Watching a list shrink is uncomfortable and it usually improves both placement and revenue.
- Offer something worth an address, not a discount magnet
- State frequency and content at signup, then honour it
- Never buy or scrape addresses, the damage outlasts the campaign
- Re-engage inactive subscribers, then remove the ones who do not respond
- A smaller engaged list usually earns more than a large stale one
Deliverability: getting into the inbox at all
None of the copy matters if the email lands in spam. Deliverability rests on three things: proving you are who you say you are, being wanted by the people you send to, and not being complained about.
Authentication is the technical part and it is not optional. Your sending domain needs the standard records in place so receiving servers can verify that mail claiming to come from you actually did, and a policy telling them what to do when it does not. Major providers now expect this from anyone sending in volume, and getting it wrong is a common reason a previously fine sender suddenly stops arriving. Alongside it, send from your own domain rather than a free address, use a subdomain for marketing so it is separated from your business mail, and warm a new sending domain gradually rather than starting with a large blast.
The behavioural part is bigger than most people expect. Opens, clicks, replies, moving mail out of spam and adding you to contacts all say wanted. Deletions without opening, ignoring, and above all marking as spam say the opposite. Because of that, the fastest way to fix deliverability is usually to send less mail to fewer people who want it more. Make unsubscribing easy and obvious, because a hidden unsubscribe link converts people who would have left quietly into people who report you.
- Set up domain authentication properly and keep it current
- Send marketing from a subdomain, separate from business mail
- Warm new sending domains gradually
- Engagement signals drive placement more than content does
- Make unsubscribing easy, complaints hurt far more than opt-outs
Designing for the inbox preview, not the design tool
The first decision a reader makes happens before your email opens, based on three things: who it is from, the subject line, and the preview text. That preview line is the most wasted space in email marketing. Left alone it shows whatever text comes first, which is frequently a view in browser link or an image description, and that is a wasted opportunity on every send.
Once opened, the constraints are practical. Most people read on a phone, so a single column, generous text size and tappable buttons are the baseline. Images are frequently blocked by default, so an email that is one large image is an email that says nothing. Dark mode changes backgrounds and can make logos and text disappear. And email rendering remains inconsistent across clients, so anything clever is a risk while anything simple works everywhere.
The structural rules that hold up: one clear purpose per email, the main message and call to action visible without scrolling, a button that reads as a button, alt text on every image, and a plain-text version that makes sense on its own. Test on a real phone before every send, not only in a preview tool, and check the dark mode version, because that is where most surprises show up.
- Set preview text deliberately on every send
- Design single column for phones first
- Never rely on images loading, alt text everywhere
- Check dark mode, logos and text disappear there
- One purpose and one main call to action per email
Segmentation that is worth the effort
Sending everything to everyone is the main reason email underperforms. It forces the copy to be general, it annoys the people it does not apply to, and it teaches the whole list that your emails are usually irrelevant. Segmentation fixes that, but only if the segments correspond to something real.
The divisions that usually earn their keep are few. Engagement, so your most active subscribers can hear from you more often and your least active hear from you less. Customer status, because a message to someone who has never bought and a message to a repeat customer are not the same message. What someone bought or looked at, which is the basis of any relevant recommendation. Where they came from, since a subscriber from a guide and a subscriber from a checkout expect different things. And lifecycle stage, meaning new, established, or going quiet.
Beyond that, complexity starts to cost more than it returns. Twenty segments that each need their own copy will not be maintained, and the version that gets sent will be the generic one because there was no time. Start with three or four segments that change what you actually say, prove they perform better, and add more only when the difference justifies the work.
- Segment on engagement, customer status, interest and source
- Segments must change the message, otherwise they are decoration
- Send more to the engaged and less to the inactive
- Start with three or four segments and prove them
- Complexity you cannot maintain becomes a generic send
Testing subject lines and everything after them
Subject line testing is the most common email test and the most misread. It tells you which line got more opens, which is useful, but opens have become a rough measure since some inbox providers load images automatically and inflate the count. Treat open differences as directional, and judge subject lines on what happened downstream: clicks, and revenue.
A test also needs enough people to mean anything. On a small list, a difference of a few percentage points is noise, and acting on it is how teams end up with a folder of contradictory conclusions. Test the things with enough room to move: the offer itself, the length and structure of the email, whether the call to action is a button or a link, the sender name, and send timing. Change one thing at a time or you will not know what caused the difference.
Keep a record. A shared document of what was tested, on which segment, with what result, is worth more after a year than any single test. Without it, teams re-test the same question annually and slowly forget what they learned. With it, you build an actual understanding of what your particular audience responds to, which is the point of testing in the first place.
- Judge subject lines on clicks and revenue, not opens alone
- Small lists cannot resolve small differences, do not chase noise
- Test offers, structure, sender name and timing, not just wording
- Change one variable per test
- Keep a written archive of results, including the ones that did nothing
What to measure, and what to stop measuring
Open rate has been the headline email metric for years and it deserves demotion. Automatic image loading by some providers inflates it, and it measures a decision made before anyone read a word. It is still useful as a trend on a like-for-like comparison and useless as a target.
The numbers that reward attention are click rate on the audience that received the mail, revenue or enquiries per email sent, unsubscribe and complaint rates, and list health over time. Revenue per email sent is the one that keeps decisions honest, because it penalises sending more mail to more people for a smaller return, which is the direction most programmes drift in. Complaint rate deserves its own line because it is the number that quietly destroys deliverability, and it should be watched per send rather than reviewed quarterly.
Attribution deserves care too. Email platforms report generously, and a purchase that would have happened anyway will often be credited to the last email the customer opened. That is fine for comparing campaigns against each other and misleading as a measure of what email added. Where it matters, compare a holdout group who did not receive a campaign against those who did. It is the only straightforward way to see what the send actually caused.
- Demote open rate to a trend, never a target
- Track revenue or enquiries per email sent
- Watch complaint rate per send, it drives placement
- Platform attribution is generous, treat it as comparative
- Use a holdout group when you need to know what a send caused
Building a calendar you can sustain
The most common email failure is not a bad email. It is silence, followed by a burst of activity when sales are down, which arrives to a list that has forgotten who you are and complains. Consistency is what makes the channel work, and consistency is a planning problem rather than a creative one.
A workable calendar starts from what you genuinely have to say across a year: seasons, product cycles, events, the questions customers ask repeatedly, the things your team knows that customers do not. Map those to a frequency you can maintain in a busy month, which is usually less than the frequency you can imagine in a planning meeting. Weekly is excellent if it is sustainable and damaging if it produces three good emails and one filler every month.
Balance matters as much as rhythm. A list that receives only offers becomes a list that only opens for offers, and eventually only for large ones. Mixing useful content with promotion keeps the relationship intact and makes the promotional sends land better. And every send should have a reason someone would want it, which is a low bar that a surprising amount of email marketing fails to clear.
- Silence followed by a sales burst is the classic failure
- Plan frequency for your busiest month, not your calmest
- Mix useful content with promotion, or you train the list to ignore you
- Build the calendar from seasons, cycles and real customer questions
- Every send needs a reason the reader would want it
A clear path, step by step
- 01
Plan the calendar
Sends mapped to your offers, seasons and audience, with a value-to-pitch balance set.
- 02
Write and design
Every email written for the reader, designed to render in every inbox.
- 03
Send smart
Segmented sends, tested subject lines and timing based on your list’s data.
- 04
Measure on revenue
What each campaign returned, what to repeat and what to drop, reported plainly.
Why choose us for this
We write for the reader first, and it shows in the click rates
Deliverability watched constantly, because inbox placement is everything
Reported on revenue, not opens
Common questions
How often should we email our list?
As often as you have something worth saying, which for most businesses is weekly to fortnightly. Consistency beats frequency: a reliable rhythm of useful emails outperforms sporadic blasts every time.
Our open rates are fine but nobody buys. Why?
Opens measure subject lines; revenue comes from the offer, the copy and where the click lands. Usually the fix is clearer offers, one call to action per email, and landing pages that continue the email’s promise.
Explore related work
Want this for your business?
Book a free visibility call and I will tell you honestly whether I can help.
How this is delivered
One person leads every project. Where a job genuinely needs a specialist, I bring in people I have worked with before and manage them, so you get one point of contact and one invoice rather than three suppliers blaming each other.
- You talk to the person responsible for the work, not an account manager
- Specialists are briefed and managed by me, and their work is checked before it reaches you
- One contract, one invoice, one place to chase