Systems

Your tech stack is your engine room. It includes your CRM, ESP, website (especially if it collects behavioural or transactional data), any third-party tools, form builders, data pools - all of it.

These systems are how you operationalise your email strategy. They’re how you collect, connect, activate, and automate your data.

But too often, systems are either:

• Not integrated properly

• Not scalable or futureproofed

• Full of workarounds and “duct-tape” fixes

• Holding you back instead of unlocking progress

You need to ask:

• Is our CRM or ESP actually fit for what we need?

• Are our tools talking to each other, or are we flying blind?

• Are we stuck because our systems can’t do what we need them to do?

When your systems are right, they unlock automation, enable personalisation, and make your team’s job easier, not harder. When they’re wrong? They create bottlenecks, bad data, and burnt-out marketers.

This is the tech that powers your strategy. Get it right before you even think about your next campaign.

Strategy

You’d be shocked how many businesses are running email with no actual strategy. Maybe there’s a content calendar, a few automations, and a dashboard. But that’s not a strategy.

Strategy is your email’s reason for existing, it’s the plan that aligns your activity with your business goals. It includes:

• Your perceptions of email (is it just a sales tool? just newsletters?)

• Your mindset around the channel (are you investing in it or treating it like a free-for-all?)

• Your approach to engagement, deliverability, growth, and performance

• Alignment with wider business goals, other marketing channels, and the customer journey

• The knowledge, skills, and internal resource you have to actually deliver on the vision

Strategy is also how you align internally, across sales, marketing, service, ops, so you’re not duplicating or contradicting messages. If your teams aren’t aligned on email, the customer experience will reflect that confusion.

Without strategy, you don’t just risk underperformance — you risk total irrelevance in the inbox.

Data

Your data is your biggest asset — and your biggest risk if you don’t manage it well.

Data isn’t just a list of names. It’s what you’re collecting, why you’re collecting it, who it’s coming from, and when you’re capturing it. You need to look at:

• Data quality – Is it clean, current, and accurate?

• Data structure – Is it categorised or a total mess?

• Data collection – Is there a strategy behind how, where, and why you collect data? Or is it random?

• Manual entry points – Are these creating inconsistencies or errors?

• Type of data – Are you capturing behavioural signals, preferences, engagement metrics, or just email addresses?

You can’t segment if you don’t know what data you have.
You can’t personalise if your fields are blank.
You can’t make decisions if you don’t trust your source of truth.

Data is the foundation of everything in email. Without strong, structured, and strategic data, even the best campaigns won’t land.

Why the pillars matter

This is the stuff that sits beneath the flashy email design or clever subject line. It’s the stuff no one sees but everyone feels the impact of.

These pillars bring operational alignment and visibility to the full picture — which is why we always start with them first.

No amount of creative, testing, or tactics will work if these three areas aren’t in place.

Fix the foundations, and your entire email ecosystem becomes easier, smarter, and a hell of a lot more effective.

If the Pillars are your foundations, the Pyramid is your structure, this is where strategy becomes operations.

It’s the only logical way I could explain the ecosystem of email. Every time I looked at how businesses approach “just getting an email out,” it felt backwards. Like trying to build a house by starting with the wallpaper.

So I built this: the Inverted Email Pyramid.

Just like Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, this framework shows us that you can’t focus on the top (or in this case, the bottom point) until the foundational layers are sorted.

But most marketers? Most businesses? They’re focusing right at the tip of the pyramid - subject lines, preheaders, design tweaks — without addressing any of the core structural layers above.

And that’s why email fails. Not because you didn’t write the perfect CTA. But because the system underneath it is broken.

How the Email Pyramid Works

You work top-down, one layer at a time. If one layer is unstable, it compromises everything underneath.

Here’s the flow:

Pillars
The foundations — systems, strategy, and data. No point moving forward without them.

Deliverability & Health
If your emails aren’t getting into inboxes, nothing else matters.
This is your reputation, infrastructure, spam traps, bounce rates - the health of your email engine.

Data Capture & Entry Points
Where is your data coming from? Are your forms set up correctly? Are you capturing the right fields at the right time?
If these are messy, your data (and your segments) will be too.

Compliance & Preferences
Are you respecting consent, offering choice, and storing preferences correctly?
Non-compliance isn’t just risky - it breaks trust with your audience.

Automation
Your automations should be strategic and supportive, not just plug-and-play tools.
Think: welcome flows, re-engagement journeys, nurture tracks, triggered comms - all aligned with lifecycle or sales cycles and intent.

Lifecycle Journeys
Are you mapping the customer/client journey, or just sending email after email?
This layer looks at how people move through your ecosystem: from new subscriber to loyal advocate. If this is disconnected, you lose people mid-flow.

Alignment Across Teams
Sales saying one thing, marketing sending another, and service completely out of the loop? Yeah - we’ve seen it. And your customers feel it. Email needs to sit across departments with shared goals, insights, and communication strategy.

Then all the campaign stuffCopy, content, design, accessiblity, branding, tone, subject line, structure, length, readability, usability etc - these are all the parts of your email that make it an email.  

The Pyramid uncovers systemic gaps, not just “why your campaign failed,” but why the system isn’t delivering. You audit each layer to find breakdowns.

This is the area most teams jump to right off the bat, surface-level execution.

“What’s our subject line?”
“Should we send at 9am or 2pm?”
“Can we just use that Canva template again?”

But let’s be honest: if you’re diving into these decisions before sorting your systems, strategy, and structure (your Pillars and Pyramid), you’re building on sand.

Once those foundational layers are in place though, this stuff still matters, a lot. These are your campaign-level levers, the tangible inbox experience. The stuff that either earns a click or gets you sent straight to trash.

Here’s what we’re talking about:

• Subject line

• Preheader

• From name

• Copy (actual words, not fluff)

• Design

• Layout and structure

• Content experience

• Accessibility

• Alt text

• Mobile optimisation

• Brand tone and consistency

• Send time

• Frequency

• CTA clarity

• Overall inbox presence

If these things are off, even the best strategy won’t help. But if you’re relying on “best practice” to guide you here… good luck.

“Best practice” is mostly BS.

And I say that with love.

The email industry has this habit of recycling outdated advice and dressing it up like hard-and-fast truth. I’ve even been guilty of repeating it (shoutout to my early double opt-in rants — we’ve all been there).

But the truth is: there’s no universal playbook. What worked for someone’s skincare brand in 2021 isn’t guaranteed to work for your SaaS company today.

Instead of chasing “what worked once,” I created Guiding Principles.

So what are Guiding Principles?

They’re flexible, experience-driven benchmarks I’ve built after years of doing this. Not rules. Not gospel. But guidance that actually adapts to your brand, your audience, and your business goals.

They’re here to help you:

• Avoid common (and costly) mistakes

• Make smarter decisions, faster

• Know what to test, tweak, or ditch entirely

• Build email experiences people actually want

Some are non-negotiables, like nailing your alt text or not ignoring deliverability. Others, like send time or layout structure, are adaptive, meant to be tested and refined.

Soon, I’ll publish a full breakdown of the guiding principles I use for every email strategy and audit, covering everything from creative to compliance, but for now:

Guiding Principles > “Best Practice”

They’re the difference between “just sending another email” and building a high-performing, brand-aligned ecosystem that gets real results.

A strategy isn’t worth the doc it’s written on unless it actually leads to execution.

This is where the Plan phase kicks in — and it’s the bit that often gets skipped. Everyone’s excited about the ideas, the audits, the “big picture thinking”… but what happens when it’s time to actually do the thing?

Put simply: Plan = how you're going to fix it, build it, or scale it.

But here’s the thing most people miss - this phase isn’t static.

It interchanges depending on what you’re trying to achieve. Sometimes we’re planning a full transformation. Sometimes it’s an optimisation sprint. Sometimes it’s mapping out the umbrella of automations your business desperately needs (but hasn’t had the time or skillset to build).

So what’s included in “The Plan”?

It’s everything that translates your audit or strategy into action. That means:

• Quick Wins: Easy fixes you can implement right now to stop the bleeding and improve performance.

• Transformation Roadmap: The big, bold steps that’ll shift email from “meh” to “mission-critical” inside your business.

• Impact Forecasting: What it’s costing you to ignore these problems (because that’s usually the wake-up call leaders need).

• Testing Plans: A clear and structured way to test, tweak, and optimise without guessing.

• Automation Blueprints: Mapping out flows, triggers, and lifecycle comms that support scale, not just sales.

• Content & Email Calendar Planning: Building out actual campaigns, comms strategies, and umbrella themes.

• Execution Milestones: Who’s doing what, when, and how it ties back to your goals.

This might be a single-phase plan, or a three-stage approach broken out across teams and quarters. Either way, it’s written, structured, and ready to be actioned.

The mindset shift:

❌ You stop randomly sending just because “something has to go out.”
✅ You start building an email function, one that aligns with your business, your goals, and your team’s capacity.

When we use the PPPP™ framework for an audit or a project, this is where it all comes together.

It’s not just what’s broken, it’s how we’re going to fix it. It’s not just “what you should be doing” - it’s the actual map to get there.

In the end, Plan is the thing that turns all your email ideas, frustrations, and half-started strategies into a clear, executable path.

It gives you confidenc