Email Marketing Frequently Asked Questions

Email marketing is using email to communicate with your leads, customers, and subscribers about your products and services. We usually break that into three categories:

1. Opt-In Email Marketing

Also called permission-based email marketing, this refers to email subscribers who specifically signed up to hear from you through your website, online store, or at an in-person event. Often (but not always), these sign-ups are incentivized by a discount, free gift, or other value offer that matters to your subscribers.

2. Transactional Email

These emails consist of updates and trigger-based sends that are started by your customer's interaction with you. Emails like order confirmations, shipping updates, account login, and password updates are all examples of transactional emails. Contacts do not have to be opted-in subscribers to receive transactional emails.

3. Cold Email Marketing

Sending emails to contacts you've received through your regular business activities, from their website, or other publicly accessible source. The dos and don'ts of cold email are governed by different laws in each country (and some states), so knowing the technical details of what is and is not allowed is important here!

There is potential for email marketing to help any business—but here are the types we see getting the greatest ROI with email marketing:

• Ecommerce Businesses - If you're selling products online, email (especially when paired with an SMS marketing strategy) can be one of your most powerful channels.
• Service Businesses - Essential home services, like lawn and garden, electricians, plumbing, and HVAC companies, can see average email performance 20-30% higher than ecommerce email. Why? Staying top of mind is key, and email is a cost-effective way to do it.
• SaaS (Software as a Service) - Especially for complex software, email makes a powerful tool for onboarding new users, increasing overall product satisfaction and leading to greater renewal rates.

There is no single best platform—but there will be a platform that is best suited to your needs! To select the best platform for you, we look at:

• Your business and email goals
• Your products and services
• Your current software stack and any needed email integrations
• Your automation and triggered email needs
• Your sending volume
• Your other marketing goals

We work in every email platform, with experience across Klaviyo, Drip, Mailchimp, Brevo, Omnisend, Constant Contact, AWeber, ActiveCampaign and more.

We start with the advice, "send only when you have something important to say." And there's a caveat to that—what you have to say needs to be important to your subscribers, not just your brand. Of course, you always think your brand’s news matters 😉 but consider whether your customer would care about this, and why—what is the benefit of each email, to them?

The trick is to balance "only send what matters," with the fact that you need to stay consistent with your email marketing to keep your deliverability healthy. Sending consistently is important for healthy email engagement.

Evaluate your past sends to see how the engagement is compared to industry benchmarks, and whether your audience has responded better when you send more or less often.

If you don't have that data, start A/B testing to get answers.

We understand that not everyone has the bandwidth or budget to take that on, so here is some very general advice for how often to send:

🗓 Send 1x Monthly, for smaller brands. Pick the top 3-5 most important things you want to talk about, and include them all. If the email is getting too long, link out to blogs or social posts to convey more info and keep email length manageable.

⌛ Send 1x Weekly, for mid-size brands with a lot going on and the ability to segment the audience into multiple groups. Everyone on your entire email list probably doesn't need receive every email, so again, think through the columns of your email outline (Date, Topic, Why, Goal, Who) when you build segments.

⌚ Send Daily, SEGMENTED Emails for mid-to-large brands with advanced audience segmentation and robust automations that can trigger behavior-based emails (like an Abandoned Browse email with Similar Products to What You Were Looking At).

Troubleshooting email deliverability problems can be tricky, but the good news is that the first three troubleshooting steps are pretty easy.

1. Gather as much information as you can about when it happened, and what happened. Did the email that landed in spam send from your marketing platform, or your work account? Have you emailed that contact successfully before? How did you learn that an email went to spam?
2. Re-training Inboxes: If certain recipients aren’t receiving your emails, they may need to "tell" their inboxes to accept your messages. Regardless of the original reason you landed in spam, having them explicitly label you as safe will help.
3. DMARC Policy & Domain Authentication - Make sure that your email sending domains are fully authenticated and that you have a DMARC policy enabled. Need more detail? Here's our comprehensive guide »

All of them!

• Platform selection and setup
• Email strategy and calendar planning
• List cleaning and hygiene
• Tagging and segmentation
• Template and email design & copywriting
• Automated flows
• Individual email campaigns
• Email account audits
• Deliverability and spam troubleshooting
• Account and domain authentication

Because of all that complexity, there is no single price for an email design. The usual price range for an email marketing agency is $200 to $1,500 per email, according to Flowium's research.

We can provide a custom quote for your email design at no charge - just contact us with the details!

Absolutely! On-brand email templates are a great way to ensure consistency across your email sends while keeping your design costs affordable. Here are a few email templates that are great to have on hand:

Of course! Take a look at past email designs we've created here »

It all depends on your business goals and needs. Here are a few scenarios where email really shines:

• Hands-free automation for tasks your team is doing manually, like following up with new web contacts or explaining your products and services to new customers.
• Education and mid-to-long-form content - text messaging and social media are both great for quick, in-the-moment communications, but email is hard to beat when you need to share a lot of detailed information with multiple images and links.
• Increasing product sales - with the right data, email becomes more than a way to advertise discounts to your full list. Leverage specific subscriber actions, like website browse data and last purchase information, to increase repeat purchases and convert 1-time buyers into auto-ship subscribers.

Want to talk details? Book a free 30-minute call »