Email Marketing

---
name: email-marketing
description: Run lifecycle and campaign email that people open, with segmentation, timing, and permission handled properly. Use when email is a channel you own and want to keep.
---

# Email marketing

Email is the only channel you own, which makes it the most valuable and
the easiest to destroy. Sending to people who did not ask, or too often,
loses the list permanently and damages deliverability for everything
else.

## Method

1. **Send only to explicit opt-ins.** Purchased and inferred lists
   produce complaints that damage sending reputation for all your mail
   (see email-deliverability).
2. **Segment by behaviour, not by demographics.** What someone did in
   the product predicts relevance far better than who they are.
3. **Automate lifecycle sequences.** Onboarding, activation, and
   re-engagement triggered by behaviour outperform broadcasts and run
   without ongoing effort (see user-activation).
4. **Write for one action.** A single clear next step per email; several
   competing calls to action reduce all of them.
5. **Earn the subject line honestly.** Misleading subjects raise opens
   once and train people to ignore or unsubscribe.
6. **Respect frequency limits and preferences.** A global cap and
   granular preferences keep the list healthy (see
   unsubscribe-and-preferences).
7. **Sunset the unengaged.** People who have not opened in months hurt
   deliverability, and removing them improves inbox placement for
   everyone else.

## Boundaries

Consent requirements for commercial email are legal and differ by
jurisdiction. Open rates are unreliable because of privacy protections
and should not drive decisions alone. Transactional messages have
different rules and must stay separate (see transactional-messaging).