Email marketing strategy: from a list you may email to an email that arrives

An email marketing strategy answers seven questions: what the email has to achieve, who you may email, how you split those people up, what you send them, how often, with which setup, and how you measure whether it works. Put those seven on one page and you have a plan you can explain to a colleague in an hour.

The difference with other channels: your list is yours. No algorithm decides who sees your message. The flip side is that the rules are stricter than on social media. EU law asks for consent per address, and Gmail and Yahoo have refused email that is not set up properly since 2024. A strategy that does not start there ends in the spam folder.

Seven parts on one page

The installer is an example; the questions are the same for any small business.

Start with a list you may use

In Belgium, article XII.13 of the Code of Economic Law puts it briefly: whoever sends advertising by email needs the prior consent of the recipient. That consent is free, specific and informed, and you must be able to prove it. A pre-ticked box or a purchased list does not count. Other EU countries follow the same ePrivacy rule. What double opt-in means and how to keep the proof is in our glossary.

A Belgian royal decree of 4 April 2003 makes two exceptions. The first is for existing customers: you got their address directly during a sale, you email only about similar products or services of your own, and you offered a free and easy way to refuse when you collected it. The second is for impersonal business addresses such as info@ or sales@. An address with a name in it is a person, even on a company domain.

The Belgian data protection authority adds a practical demand in its checklist: unsubscribing must be easy, and a sentence in your privacy policy is not enough as a way to object. Hold your forms against our GDPR website checklist and you quickly see what is missing. The wider rules for your site are in a GDPR-compliant website.

What Gmail and Yahoo have asked since 2024

Consent is one half. The other half is setup. Since 1 February 2024, Google has rules for every sender to a Gmail address, and stricter rules for anyone sending more than 5,000 emails a day. Yahoo asks for much the same.

Never send 5,000 emails a day? Set up DMARC anyway. It is one line in your DNS and it protects your domain against spoofing. Our DMARC checker shows in ten seconds whether SPF, DKIM and DMARC are right, and what the three do is explained under SPF, DKIM and DMARC. Already landing in spam? Read why emails go to spam.

Segments: who gets what

A list is rarely one group. A customer who bought last week wants to read something else than a prospect who downloaded a guide. Start with two or three segments, not ten: customers and prospects, or consumers and businesses, or one per language. A segment you cannot fill with its own content every month is better merged.

Content worth opening

The question is not what you want to say, but why the reader would open the email. A tip that saves time or money, an answer to a question customers often ask, a look behind the scenes, an invitation. An email with one subject and one ask works better than a round-up of five pieces of news. How to build such an email is in how to write a newsletter. Plan your topics a quarter ahead with the content calendar template and you reuse the same topics on LinkedIn and Instagram.

The subject line decides whether someone opens. On a phone, Gmail shows about 37 characters and Apple Mail around 48. Test yours in our subject line tester, which shows how the line and the preview text appear in four inboxes.

Rhythm: pick what you can keep up

The best rhythm is the one you keep up for a year. A monthly newsletter that goes out every month does more than a weekly one that stops after six weeks. Fix the day it goes out and who writes it. When your audience reads differs per sector; the logic of the best time to post on social media holds here too: test two moments and watch what happens.

Automated flows do most of the work

A flow starts the moment someone does something: signs up, buys, asks for a quote. Three flows cover most of what a small business needs:

1. A welcome flow of three emails for new subscribers: who you are, what to expect, a first useful piece.
2. An email after a purchase or an appointment: what happens next, who to call, a request for a review.
3. A reminder at the right moment: a service after a year, a renewal, a product that runs out.

You write flows well once and let them run. What sits behind them is explained under marketing automation. Connect your forms to your CRM and you also know which subscriber became a customer; see what a CRM does.

Measuring without staring at opens

Since Apple Mail started loading images in advance, the open rate says little: part of the opens are not people. Look at what the reader does.

Which tool you need

Mailchimp, Brevo, MailerLite, Flexmail and Klaviyo can all send a newsletter and a flow. The difference is price, language, server location and links to your webshop. What Mailchimp costs today is in Mailchimp pricing. Starting with a small list? Read how to create a newsletter for free and which of the Mailchimp alternatives suits you.

Do it yourself or hand it over

A strategy on one page is something you can carry out yourself. Want someone to set up the domain, the template and the flows? Look at our email marketing services. For Park & Wash, the fleet form for businesses runs on VBS Mail, our own email service on Amazon SES; that is how we know how an email leaves your own domain and arrives. If your sign-up sits on a form on your site, we build it along with website design, and flows that go beyond email fall under AI and automation. Prefer to talk first? Get in touch.