Ten email marketing tips that survive contact with a real list

Start with deliverability. Every other tip on this list assumes the message arrives. A message in the spam folder converts at zero, however well it is written.

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 and Yahoo both require authentication for bulk senders. Sending without it is not a slow decline, it is a wall.

2. Send from a subdomain

Use something like mail.yourdomain.com for marketing sends and keep your main domain for the mail humans type. If a campaign damages reputation, it damages the subdomain, and your staff email keeps working.

3. Warm a new sending domain

A new domain sending fifty thousand messages on day one looks exactly like a compromised one. Start small, increase over a few weeks, and watch the bounce rate as you go.

4. Remove people who do not open

A list where a third of addresses never open drags the whole domain’s reputation down. Suppress the addresses with no engagement in six months. The list gets smaller and the results get better, which reads as a paradox and is not.

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. Under a few thousand recipients, a split test tells you noise.

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

Open rate stopped being reliable when Apple started preloading images for Mail Privacy Protection. 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.