05/2026

How to Build an Email Marketing Strategy

Can we all just agree that most email "strategies" are content calendars with a send plan? A lovely list of campaigns someone intends to send, a vague sense that email should be generating more, and a dashboard full of open rates that nobody quite knows what to do with.

That is not a strategy! But you have had it handed down to you, so it's not your fault.

A real email marketing strategy is a decision system. It tells you what email is for, who it is for, what data it needs to work, what technology it needs to run, what deliverability it needs to land, and how you will know whether it is working. It covers the full picture — from how people get onto your list to what happens years into the relationship.

I have written before about what an email strategy needs to include at a high level. This blog goes deeper — into the specific components, the practical tips, the questions to ask, and the decisions to make. It is designed to be worked through, not just read.

Use it as a build guide if you are starting from scratch. Use it as an audit if you have a programme that is not performing. Use it as a benchmark if you want to check what you might be missing.

RE:markable is the weekly email about emails. Dropping the latest email marketing news, updates, insights, free resources, upcoming masterclasses, webinars, and of course, a little inbox mischief.

Foundation 1: Goals and role

Before you build anything, get clear on what email is supposed to do

The single most important thing to establish before you build anything in email is the answer to this question: what role does email play in this business?

Not "what do we send?" That is an output question.

The role question is: what commercial and relationship outcomes is email responsible for helping create?The answer will be different for every business.

The kinds of roles that are real and measurable:

Acquisition support — email nurtures leads who are not yet ready to buy, keeping the brand present until intent emerges
Conversion — email moves engaged prospects toward a specific commercial action: purchase, trial, booking, inquiry
Retention — email maintains relationships with existing customers, reduces churn, and drives repeat purchase

Expansion — email deepens customer relationships, drives upsell, cross-sell, and increases lifetime value
Community and advocacy — email builds the kind of relationship that turns customers into referrers and advocates

Deliverability foundation — email maintains sender reputation by keeping a warm, engaged audience flowing through the programme

Most email programmes need to serve more than one of these roles. But they need to be prioritised — because the email that works for acquisition looks completely different from the email that works for retention, and trying to do all of them in the same send to the same list is how you end up doing none of them well.

Top tips for goal-setting:

✓ Write one sentence that describes what email exists to do in your business. If you cannot write it in one sentence, it is not clear enough yet.

✓ Separate your email roles by audience segment. Leads, customers, lapsed customers, and advocates all need different things from your email programme.

✓ Set email goals that connect to commercial outcomes — not email metrics. "Increase email-influenced pipeline by 20%" is a goal. "Increase open rate to 35%" is an activity.

✓ Decide what email is NOT responsible for. Knowing the limits stops email from becoming everyone's dumping ground.

Foundation 2: Audience analysis

The four audience questions every email strategy needs to answer

Most email programmes are built on assumptions about the audience. The assumption that subscribers signed up because they want the content. The assumption that customers are all at the same lifecycle stage. The assumption that the engaged segment is representative of the whole list. These assumptions are almost always wrong. And they are expensive to get wrong, because every strategic decision downstream flows from your understanding of who you are emailing.

1. How did they get onto the list — intentional or consequential?

This is the most important audience question in email strategy, and it is the one most businesses have never asked.
An intentional opt-in is someone who chose the inbox relationship. They signed up because they wanted your content, your newsletter, your course, your community. The email relationship was their primary intention.

A consequential opt-in is someone who ended up on your list as a by-product of doing something else. They purchased a product. They filled in a form. They attended an event. The email was incidental to the action they were actually taking.

These two groups have fundamentally different starting positions, different levels of tolerance, different engagement expectations, and different risk profiles for deliverability.
Most databases are predominantly consequential opt-ins. Most email programmes treat them all the same. That mismatch is the root cause of more underperformance than anything else I see.

Map every acquisition source onto a simple two-column list: intentional or consequential. The proportion of each tells you immediately why your engagement rates look the way they do.
Build different orientation flows for intentional and consequential opt-ins. An intentional subscriber needs their choice confirmed. A consequential subscriber needs the relationship earned from scratch.
Track engagement separately for each group. If you blend them, your averages will mislead you in both directions.

2. What do they know, and what do they not know yet?

Where is this person in their awareness of the problem you solve? Are they actively looking for what you offer, or have they never considered that the problem exists? Are they comparing you to competitors, or are they still figuring out whether they even need the category?

Awareness stage determines the content, the tone, and the ask. An email selling to someone who has not yet understood the problem will always underperform, not because the email is bad, but because it is arriving too early in the decision process.

3. What are they thinking, feeling, doing, and saying across their journeys?

This is the TFDS framework applied to your audience segments. For each major segment, map what their mental and emotional context looks like at the moment your email arrives.

A new subscriber who signed up for a lead magnet is thinking: "I hope this resource is useful." A customer who just had a poor delivery experience is thinking: "I'm annoyed and considering not ordering again." A lead who has been on your list for six months and never purchased is thinking: nothing specific — you are ambient background noise.

Each of those people needs a completely different email. The TFDS exercise makes that obvious.

Do not build email content from the question "what do we want to say?" Build it from the question "what does this person need to hear right now, given where they are?"
Use actual customer language in your emails. The words people use to describe their own problems in support tickets, sales calls, and social comments are your best subject line material and your best copy.
Review your TFDS mapping every six months. Audience context changes. An email journey that was perfectly aligned eighteen months ago may be speaking to a different person than the one actually receiving it now.

4. What is their actual relationship with the brand & can we track it?

This is the hardest question to answer honestly. Marketing teams often have an optimistic view of how well-known and well-loved the brand is among subscribers. The reality is usually more modest.

A subscriber who joined eighteen months ago and has not opened an email in nine months has a very different relationship with you than a subscriber who reads every issue and occasionally replies. The email they each need is completely different. Treating them identically is one of the most common and most expensive mistakes in email strategy.

Segment your list by relationship depth: new subscribers (last 30-60 days), active subscribers (opened or took a meaningful action in the last 90-180 days), passive subscribers (no engagement or meaningful actions in over 200 days or whatever is relevant for your audience), lapsed (this is very much dependable on your audience). Look at the proportion in each bucket. If the majority of your list is in the passive or lapsed category, your acquisition strategy is outpacing your retention strategy - but you must get clear on what each bucket means for your audience first!

Foundation 3: Signals and intent

Why intent is more important than personalisation

The email industry has been obsessed with personalisation for years. First name tokens. Dynamic content. Behaviour-based product recommendations. All of it has a place, but it has been prioritised over something far more important: intent.

Intent is the signal that tells you whether someone is ready for a conversation, ready to buy, ready to learn, or simply not ready for anything right now. Personalisation without intent is putting the right name on the wrong email at the wrong time. It feels relevant on the surface and misses the mark completely.
Intent signals come in two categories

Active intent signals: someone is doing something

Visiting a pricing page — indicates commercial consideration, not just browsing
Downloading a mid-to-late funnel resource — an implementation guide, a comparison tool, a case study
Attending a specific webinar — particularly a product-focused or solution-focused one
Opening multiple emails in a short period after a quiet spell — something has shifted
Clicking a specific topic or category within an email — they have just told you what they care about
Submitting an inquiry form or booking a consultation — the clearest active intent signal available
Returning to the website after a long absence, their circumstances may have changed

Passive intent signals: the absence of action tells you something too

Not opening any emails for a period of time despite being on an active list - fading from engagement
Opening emails but never clicking, reading but not acting; consider whether the ask is right
Clicking but not converting repeatedly — interested but something is stopping them; this is an objection to identify and address
Unsubscribing shortly after signing up — expectation mismatch at the point of sign-up
Not completing a key action in a product trial — stuck, not disengaged; needs a different kind of help

Top tips for working with intent signals:

Build intent buckets into your segmentation. Active intent, passive intent, and negative intent all need different email responses.
Stop triggering emails based on time elapsed and start triggering them based on what someone has actually done. A trigger from a pricing page visit is worth more than a trigger from "day seven of the nurture sequence."
When someone shows active intent — a pricing page visit, a demo request, a specific content download — respond within the same day if possible. Intent windows are short. A competitor email arriving first can close the opportunity.
Use the absence of an expected action as a trigger. If someone signs up for a free trial and has not logged back in within 48 hours, that non-action is a signal worth responding to.
Review your trigger logic quarterly. Intent patterns change as your product, audience, and market evolve. Triggers built twelve months ago may be firing at the wrong moments today.

Foundation 4: Data strategy

Email is only as good as the data behind it

The most sophisticated email strategy in the world produces generic, irrelevant emails if the data powering it is incomplete, incorrect, or disconnected.

Data strategy for email covers four things: what data you collect, how you collect it, where it lives, and how it flows into the email system.

What data to collect and when

The most valuable data for email strategy falls into a few clear categories:

Acquisition source and motivation — how did they get onto the list, and why? This data shapes the entire downstream journey.
Lifecycle stage — where is this person in their relationship with you? Lead, prospect, customer, lapsed customer, advocate?
Behavioural data — what have they done or not done? Website pages visited, content downloaded, products purchased, emails opened, events attended.
Declared preferences — what have they told you they want or don't want? Content topics, communication frequency, format preferences
Purchase and product data — what have they bought, when, how often, what did they pay, are they using it?
Negative signals — what have they not done that we expected them to? What have they told us they do not want?

Top tips for data collection:

✓ Collect data at the point of entry. The sign-up form is the cheapest moment to gather motivation and preference data. One well-chosen question at sign-up can transform the relevance of the entire downstream journey.

✓ Use progressive profiling. Do not ask for everything at once. Collect basic data at sign-up, then add depth over time through subsequent interactions, preference centres, survey links, behavioural inference.

✓ Prefer behavioural data over declared data where possible. What someone does is a more reliable signal than what they say they will do. Use both, but weight behavioural data more heavily when the two conflict.

✓ Connect your email system to your CRM, your website, and — where applicable — your product. Data siloed in separate systems cannot power relevant email. If these systems do not talk to each other, that is your first infrastructure investment.

✓ Keep your data clean. Validate email addresses at the point of entry. Clean your list regularly. Remove hard bounces promptly. Bad data is not just an email problem — it is a deliverability risk.

The data playbook

A data strategy for email should define:

What data fields do you capture for each subscriber and customer
Where that data lives and who is responsible for it
How it flows from your website, product, and CRM into your email system
What data do you use to trigger specific emails and journeys
How you handle data decay — what happens when data goes stale, when contacts change jobs, when email addresses become invalid
How long you retain data and when you suppress or delete

Foundation 5: Technology

The tools that make strategy possible

Technology is the infrastructure that determines what your email strategy is capable of. I call the limits of your technology the email glass ceiling — the point beyond which no amount of strategic thinking can take you, because the tools will not allow it.

The core technology stack for a functional email programme:

Your Email Service Provider (ESP)

The platform you use to build, send, and track emails. Choose an ESP based on what your strategy needs, not based on what is cheapest or what the previous person used.

Key capabilities to evaluate:

Segmentation and list management — can you build the segments your strategy requires, including complex exclusion logic?
Automation and journey building — can you build multi-step, conditional journeys that branch based on behaviour?
Trigger capability — can you trigger emails based on external events, not just time or list membership?
Personalisation — can you personalise content dynamically based on subscriber data?
Reporting — can you see what you need to see, at the segment and journey level, not just per campaign?
Integration — does it connect properly to your CRM, your website, and your product?

Do not switch ESPs unless you have a clear strategic reason — the cost and disruption is significant. But do audit your current ESP against these criteria annually. Many teams are working around limitations that would disappear with a configuration change or a native integration they have not activated.

Your CRM

If your ESP and your CRM are not connected, you are missing the single most important data integration in email marketing. Your CRM holds the full picture of the customer relationship, purchase history, sales touchpoints, support interactions, lifecycle stage. Without it feeding into your email system, your emails are built on partial information.

The minimum viable CRM-to-ESP integration: lifecycle stage syncs, purchase history syncs, contact record updates trigger email actions. If you have only these three, your programme will function significantly better than one with no integration at all.

Email address validation

Real-time email address validation at the point of form submission is one of the highest-ROI technology investments in email marketing. It prevents invalid addresses from entering your list, catches typos before they become bounces, and protects your sender reputation from the damage that bad data causes.

Implement validation on every form that collects email addresses. The cost of a validation tool is minimal compared to the cost of a bounce spike to your deliverability.

Inbox placement monitoring

Your ESP's delivery rate tells you how many emails the receiving server accepted. It does not tell you where those emails landed. Inbox placement monitoring tools, GlockApps, Warmy, Zerobounce Validity, Mail Tester — show you whether you are landing in the inbox or the spam folder across the major providers.

Even if you only run an inbox placement test quarterly, the data will tell you things about your programme that your dashboard never will. Build this into your regular reporting rhythm.

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Foundation 6: Deliverability

Deliverability is not a technical problem, it's always a strategic one

Deliverability is the ability to land in the inbox. Not to be accepted by the server — that is delivery, and it is a different thing. Deliverability is inbox placement: did the email land where the subscriber can see it?

Most teams treat deliverability as a technical concern — something IT or the ESP manages. It is not. Deliverability is determined primarily by sender reputation, and sender reputation is determined primarily by how your audience behaves when your emails arrive. That is a strategy question, not a technical one.

What builds sender reputation

Positive signals and events — opens, clicks, replies, emails moved from spam to inbox, content filed to folders for later reading. These tell Gmail, Microsoft, and Yahoo that your emails are wanted.
Consistent sending patterns — regular, predictable sending volume. Sudden spikes look like spammer behaviour regardless of intent.
Clean list hygiene — low bounce rates, suppressed unsubscribes, validated addresses. High bounce rates are one of the fastest ways to damage reputation.
Intentional opt-ins — a continuous stream of subscribers who actively chose your emails and engage with your first sends. These warm new subscribers are your most important deliverability asset.
Authentication — SPF, DKIM, DMARC properly configured.

What damages sender reputation

Spam complaints, the most damaging signal available. One complaint is manageable. A complaint rate above 0.1% requires immediate investigation.
Bounce spikes, sending to stale or unvalidated data causes a surge of bounces that damages reputation rapidly.
Volume spikes, dramatically increasing send volume overnight triggers provider scrutiny.
Sustained low engagement, consistently low engagement from a large portion of your list tells providers your emails are not wanted.
Cold data, adding purchased, scraped, or unverified data to your marketing programme is one of the highest-risk actions in email.

Deliverability tips:

✓ Never mix cold outreach with your main marketing domain. Cold emails should always come from a separate domain to protect your primary sender reputation.

✓ Build a stream of intentional opt-ins into your programme year-round. Even 50-100 warm new subscribers a month keeps your sender reputation healthy through quiet periods.

✓ Monitor your complaint rate in Google Postmaster Tools directly — not through your ESP, which may show a different figure. Google's number is what matters to Google.

✓ Before any large send to a segment that has not been emailed recently, run the list through a validation tool. A bounce spike on a major campaign can take months to recover from.

✓ If you are a seasonal or infrequent sender, maintain your sender reputation through quiet periods with a domain warming tool. You cannot build three decades of reputation in four weeks before your peak season.

✓ Check your DMARC policy. If it is still set to p=none, you are not protected from domain spoofing. Move to p=quarantine at a minimum, p=reject if your programme is mature enough.

Foundation 7: Journeys, triggers and automation

Moving from campaigns to a connected email ecosystem

A campaign is a one-to-many send. Something happened in the business, a new product, a sale, a piece of content, and you want to tell people about it. Campaigns have their place. They are not the backbone of a strategy.
A journey is a connected sequence of emails that responds to a subscriber's behaviour and intent over time. Journeys are what make email genuinely personalised, not in the "dear first name" sense, but in the "this email knows where I am and what I need right now" sense.

A complete email strategy needs both. But the journeys are what compound. They are what build the relationship. They are what generate value in the background while the campaign calendar is focused on immediate commercial goals.

The journeys every programme needs

Orientation journey: for new subscribers, regardless of how they arrived. Not a welcome. An induction. What they will receive, why it is worth their time, what to expect. Tailored by acquisition source.
Nurture journey: for leads who are not yet ready to buy. Value-led, educational, intent-triggered. Designed to maintain presence and build trust until the moment of readiness arrives.
Conversion journey: for leads showing active intent signals. Specific, commercial, timed to the moment. Removes friction from the path to a decision.
Onboarding journey: for new customers. Makes them successful with their purchase as quickly as possible. Reduces churn. Increases satisfaction and advocacy.
Retention journey: for existing customers. Maintains engagement, drives repeat purchase, catches early signs of disengagement before they become churn.
Re-engagement journey: for subscribers who have gone quiet. Not a blast to the whole disengaged list. A thoughtful, segmented series designed to either reactivate genuine interest or facilitate a clean exit.
Win-back journey: for lapsed customers specifically. Different from re-engagement. These people bought. They left. The question is why, and whether the conditions that caused them to leave have changed.

Journey and trigger tips:

✓ Build journeys in order of commercial priority, not in order of ease. The most impactful journey for your specific business may not be the welcome flow — it might be a re-engagement journey for a database full of lapsed leads.

✓ Every journey should have an exit condition. What causes someone to leave the journey? A purchase, a specific action, a time limit, a non-engagement threshold? Define it before you build.

✓ Audit your existing journeys once a quarter. Email journeys go stale. Content that was relevant twelve months ago may now be outdated, mis-timed, or speaking to a different version of your audience.

✓ Include exclusion logic in every journey. Who should never enter this journey? An existing customer in a lead nurture sequence is a common, expensive mistake. Define the exclusions before you build the inclusion criteria.

Foundation 8: Measurement

Know what you're actually measuring and what it means

Opens and clicks are indicators, they are not performance metrics., they tell you something may have happened. They do not tell you whether your email programme is working!!

A strategy measurement framework has three layers:

Layer 1: Health indicators (monitor, do not celebrate or panic)

Open rate by email type — use as a baseline detector for unusual changes, not as a success metric
Click-to-open rate — a better ratio for understanding content engagement among openers
Unsubscribe rate — track by segment and send type, not as a blended average
Spam complaint rate — the number that actually matters for deliverability; keep below 0.1%

Bounce rate — monitor for spikes; hard bounces suppress immediately

Layer 2: Engagement quality (measure this regularly)

Meaningful action rate — what proportion of subscribers took a meaningful action (website visit, content download, event registration, inquiry, purchase) in a given period
Journey completion rate — for key journeys, what percentage of entrants reach the intended outcome
Segment growth and decay — are your key segments growing or shrinking over time?
Reply rate — for journeys designed to invite conversation, track this separately from automated reply monitoring

Layer 3: Commercial contribution (this is what leadership cares about)

Email-influenced pipeline or revenue — contacts who were active in the email programme and subsequently converted commercially
Conversion timeline comparison — do email-active contacts convert faster than non-email contacts?
Retention rate comparison — do email subscribers churn at lower rates than non-subscribers?
Customer lifetime value by email engagement level — do highly engaged email subscribers have higher LTV?

Measurement tips:

✓ Report on a 90-day rolling basis, not per campaign. Individual campaign performance is too noisy to tell you anything useful about programme health.

✓ Split your reporting by audience type. Leads and customers should never be in the same engagement report. Their expected behaviour is completely different.

✓ Build one dashboard that shows your meaningful action rate, complaint rate, and commercial contribution. Those three numbers tell you more about programme health than any open rate report.

✓ When open rates drop significantly — 7%+ from baseline — investigate before you react. The cause could be deliverability, content, seasonality, or list composition changes. Diagnose first!!

The strategy order - pulling it all together

If you are building or rebuilding your email strategy, here is the order that works:

1. Goals first — define what email is responsible for before you build anything
2. Audience analysis — understand who is on your list, how they got there, and what they need
3. Data strategy — identify what data you have, what you need, and how it flows
4. Technology audit — check whether your current tools can support the strategy you want to build
5. Deliverability foundation — ensure the infrastructure is healthy before scaling anything
6. Intent and signals mapping — define the signals you will act on and how
7. Journey architecture — build the journeys in order of commercial priority
·8. Measurement framework — define what you will track and how you will report it

Everything else, the subject lines, the design, the copy, comes last. And it works significantly better when the foundations are solid.

GO SMASH IT!

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I help marketers and businesses globally improve, design and fix their email, CRM, and HubSpot ecosystems, from strategy through to execution.

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If you’re looking for experienced external support (and lots of enjoyment along the way), this is where to start.

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Email Marketing, Marketing Strategy