Email Marketing That Actually Gets Opened
Email keeps being declared dead and keeps returning more per pound spent than anything else. The reason is simple: the people on your list already chose to hear from you, and no algorithm sits between you and them. What has changed is the margin for error. A list treated carelessly stops arriving in inboxes at all.
Getting delivered comes before getting opened
None of the clever stuff matters if the message lands in spam. Three things dominate deliverability: sending only to people who genuinely opted in, authenticating your domain properly (your provider will walk you through SPF, DKIM and DMARC — do it, it is a one-off afternoon), and removing people who never open. That last one feels wrong, because the list gets smaller. It is the highest-impact action available to most senders: mailbox providers judge you on engagement, so a dormant third of your list is actively harming the rest.
Subject lines: specific beats clever
Curiosity gaps and clickbait work once and train people to distrust you. What holds up over years is specificity — a subject line that tells the reader exactly what they get. "Your invoice template (and the three fields people forget)" outperforms "You won't believe this" every time, and keeps outperforming it on the twentieth send.
The preview text is the second half of the subject line and is routinely wasted on "View this email in your browser". Write it deliberately.
One email, one job
The most common structural mistake is an email that tries to announce a product, share a blog post, promote an event and ask for a review. Readers resolve that ambiguity by doing nothing. Decide the single action you want, and let everything in the message point at it.
The sequences worth building first
- Welcome. Three to five emails triggered by signup. This is when attention is highest and it is almost always the best-performing sequence a business owns.
- Abandoned intent. Someone looked and did not buy. A single helpful reminder, not four escalating ones.
- Re-engagement. One honest message to the dormant — "still want these?" — then remove the people who do not reply. It protects everything else.
Automated sequences keep working while you do other things, which is why they are worth building before the next campaign.
What to measure
Open rates have become unreliable thanks to privacy features that pre-load images, so treat them as a rough signal at best. Clicks, replies, unsubscribes and revenue per email are the honest numbers. Watch unsubscribes as a quality signal rather than a failure: a small steady rate is healthy, a spike tells you something specific went wrong.
Frequently asked questions
How often should I email?
Consistently, at a frequency you can sustain and that you told people to expect. Monthly done well beats weekly abandoned after six weeks.
Is buying a list ever acceptable?
No. It breaches UK GDPR and PECR consent expectations, wrecks your sender reputation, and performs badly regardless.
B2B and B2C — is the approach different?
The mechanics are shared; timing, tone and cycle length differ substantially, and B2B usually needs to serve several people in one buying decision.
Go deeper with Email Marketing for B2B and B2C or browse Marketing courses.
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