Email marketing

Email marketing is sending commercial messages to people who have agreed to receive them. That agreement is the entire difference between marketing and spam, and it is also why the channel behaves unlike any other one you use. The list belongs to you. It moves with you between providers. No decision made in another company’s office can halve it while you sleep.

In short

• Permission is the definition, not a formality on the way to sending.
• The list is an asset you own outright, unlike a social following.
• Campaigns go out on a date. Flows go out on a trigger.
• Long silences do more damage than modest frequency ever does.

Owned, borrowed and rented attention

The reason email survives is ownership, and it is worth being precise about what that means.

Attention comes in three forms. Borrowed attention is paid for and stops the moment the payment stops. Rented attention is your social following, which feels like yours until the platform changes what it shows and reaches a fraction of the people who chose to follow you. Owned attention is your website and your email list, and only the second of those arrives uninvited in front of somebody.

The practical test is what happens on a bad day. If a network changes its ranking tomorrow, your organic social reach changes tomorrow and there is no appeal. If your email provider disappoints you, you export a file and take the same audience somewhere else. The audience does not notice and does not shrink.

Words you will hear

• List. Everyone who has agreed to hear from you, held in one place.
• Segment. A slice of that list defined by something you know, such as people who have bought in the last ninety days.
• Campaign. One message sent to a chosen group on a chosen date.
• Flow. A message that sends itself when somebody does something.
• Sender name. The name in the inbox, which is read before the subject line and decides most of what happens next.
• Suppression. Addresses deliberately excluded from sending, including everyone who has unsubscribed.
• Double opt-in. Confirming the address by making the person click a link in a first email before anything else is sent.

Campaigns and flows do different jobs

Most businesses run only campaigns and then conclude that email is exhausting.

A campaign is written once and sent to a group on a date you choose. A stock arrival, a holiday offer, a monthly note about what the business has been doing. Campaigns are a calendar problem: somebody has to decide what goes out and when, every single time, forever.

An email flow is written once and sends itself whenever a particular thing happens, whether that is a first purchase, a sign-up, or a basket left behind. Flows are a plumbing problem rather than a calendar one. The work is front-loaded and then it runs.

A business doing both usually finds the flows carry more of the result, because they arrive at the moment a person was already thinking about you rather than on the second Tuesday of the month. Both are aimed at the same thing, which is a second order from somebody who already bought, and that is what customer lifetime value measures.

Where the list actually comes from

Almost every shop is already sitting on the beginning of a list and not collecting it.

• Checkout. The largest source most businesses own. An unticked box asking plainly whether they would like offers is enough, and it must not be pre-ticked.
• The website. A sign-up form that offers a reason, such as knowing first when something is back in stock. A form offering nothing but a newsletter collects almost nobody.
• In person. Anyone who inquires, visits the shop, or books a service, asked directly rather than added quietly.

The Philippine Data Privacy Act treats consent as something that has to be freely given, specific and informed, which rules out both the pre-ticked box and the address collected for one purpose and used for another. That is also just good practice. A list built from people who remember agreeing is a list that opens things.

What email is genuinely bad at

It is worth saying where the channel does not help, because it is sold as though it helps everywhere, and because two of its limits explain most of the disappointment people report with it.

Email cannot create demand among strangers. Reaching somebody who has never heard of your business is what search and paid channels are for, and content marketing is what earns the sign-up in the first place. Email starts working after that introduction, not before it.

It is also slow at the start. A list of forty takes months to become a list of four hundred, and there is no honest shortcut, only the dishonest one that deliverability punishes within a day or two.

And it is unforgiving about neglect. An address collected two years ago and never written to belongs to somebody who has forgotten you exist. Writing to them after that silence is one of the fastest ways to be reported as spam by people who did ask to hear from you.

None of which is visible in the report your email platform shows you afterwards. The headline number on that report is the open rate, and it has not measured what its name suggests for several years now, so judging any of the above by it will mislead you in both directions.