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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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?
✓ 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.
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
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
✓ 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.
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!!
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!!
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!