Tips
Ten email marketing tips that survive contact with a real list
Ten things that hold on a real list, starting with the one that decides everything else: whether the message arrives in the inbox at all.
Correction, 23 September 2026: a sending subdomain does not guarantee reputation isolation. Subscriber reviews now use more than open counts.
Start with deliverability. Check whether messages reach the intended inbox before interpreting low engagement as a problem with the copy.
1. Authenticate the domain properly
SPF, DKIM and DMARC. All three, on the sending domain, verified by sending a test to an address you control and reading the headers.
Google’s sender requirements and Yahoo’s requirements specify authentication for bulk senders. Check the applicable volume and message type before configuring your sending domain.
2. Send from a subdomain
Use something like mail.yourdomain.com for marketing sends and keep your main domain for the mail humans type. A separate subdomain helps organise sending and diagnosis. It does not guarantee that reputation problems stay isolated from the parent domain.
3. Warm a new sending domain
Increase sending volume gradually and watch for delivery errors or reputation changes. Google’s linked sender guidance recommends a consistent rate and gradual increases. Follow your provider’s limits and pause increases when delivery degrades.
4. Review inactive subscribers
Use several engagement signals before deciding a subscriber is inactive. Missing opens alone do not establish that someone stopped reading. Honour explicit opt-outs immediately.
5. Make unsubscribing easy and instant
A visible link, and the one-click headers that Gmail and Yahoo now expect on bulk mail. Honour it immediately.
Someone who cannot find the unsubscribe marks the message as spam, which costs you far more than the subscriber did.
6. Write a subject line that describes the contents
Curiosity gaps and fake urgency get opened once and trained against. The subject should let someone decide correctly whether to read.
Test them if you have the volume for it to mean anything. Set the required sample from the expected event rate and the effect you need to detect.
7. Send one message about one thing
A newsletter with six sections and six links produces clicks spread across six things and a reader who acts on none. Pick the one thing.
8. Put the call to action in text, early
Image-based buttons break when images are blocked, which is a default in several clients. A text link works everywhere.
Put it where someone who has already decided can act without scrolling, and again at the end for someone who needed convincing.
9. Write it as though to one person
Personalisation tokens are not personalisation. “Hi [first name]” with generic body copy reads worse than no name at all.
The version that works is segmenting enough that the message is genuinely relevant to everyone receiving it.
10. Measure replies and revenue, not opens
Apple documents background loading with Mail Privacy Protection. That makes an image load an unreliable sign that a person opened the message. Treat it as a directional signal.
Clicks are better. Replies are better still. Revenue attributed to the send is the number that matters, and it is the one worth the setup time.
The tip underneath the ten
Send less, to people who asked, about things they care about.
Authentication, warming and suppression are all real remedies, and they are all downstream of one decision. A domain gets into trouble by sending more often to a list that stopped asking, and no amount of technical work outruns that.