Email marketing and automation

An email that doesn't reach the inbox can't be improved with better copy.

1. Day 1–2

   Diagnostic

   Which channels you have active, what size and shape the list has, and which flows justify existing for your type of business. This sets the order of everything else.

2. Day 2–3

   Deliverability

   Configuration and verification of SPF, DKIM and DMARC on your domain. Nothing gets sent until this is resolved, even if the platform is ready.

3. Day 3–4

   Integration

   Connection to your store or your CRM so email knows who bought, who abandoned and who only looked.

4. Week 2

   List & segmentation

   Cleaning of duplicates, bounces and inactive contacts, plus list and tag structure. It usually shrinks the database, and that's good news.

5. Week 3–4

   First automations

   The critical flows for your case get switched on. They're the ones that start performing without anyone having to sit down and write every week.

6. Every month

   Campaigns & reporting

   The period's sends, active tests and a report with attributed revenue by flow and by campaign, against your starting point.

• How do I know if my emails are landing in spam?

  You can check it yourself in twenty minutes, and it's the check that surprises us most when a client does it for the first time. Many accounts have spent years sending to a folder nobody opens, with the platform reporting normal deliveries.

  Three checks

  • Send yourself an email from the platform, to a Gmail account that isn't the company's. Look at it on your phone, the way your customer would. If it shows up in Promotions that's fine; if it shows up in Spam, there's your answer.
  • Open that email and look for the option to view the original or the sender details. It should say authentication passed. If you see any warning about the sender, the domain isn't configured properly.
  • Compare your open rate with your click rate. If many people open and almost nobody clicks, it might be the content — but it might also be that the opens are fake, preloaded by the email client, and the actual send is landing worse than it looks.

  What causes an email to land in spam

  Almost always one of three things. The first is incomplete authentication: the records that tell the world that email really came from your domain are missing. The second is damaged reputation from continuing to write to contacts who never open, bounce or mark as junk. The third is sending all at once to a cold list: a domain that doesn't send and suddenly pushes out thousands of emails looks exactly like what the filters are looking for.

  Why this comes before anything else

  Because nothing that comes after matters if the email doesn't land. You can write the best sequence, segment precisely and test subject lines for months: if the domain doesn't authenticate, all that work ends up in a folder.

  It's also the part of the project that shines least in a presentation and changes the numbers the most. That's why it's in the rules and not in the fine print.

• Which automations are worth it, and in what order?

  It depends on the business, but the order matters more than it seems. Almost every account rushes to set up ten flows at once, and ends up with ten half-built automations nobody maintains.

  The ones that almost always go first

  • Welcome. It's the moment of highest attention in the whole relationship: someone just gave you their email voluntarily. It's usually the best-converting flow of all and the one most often left unbuilt.
  • Post-purchase. Confirms, guides and prepares the next purchase. It lowers questions to the support team and raises the likelihood they come back.

  With those two, most accounts already have a channel that works without daily intervention. Adding more before these two work well is spreading attention thin.

  The ones that come next

  • Abandoned cart, if you sell online. It's among the highest direct-return flows and there's no point building it if the store integration isn't resolved first.
  • Nurture. For people who downloaded something or requested information but haven't bought yet. This is where the long cycle lives.
  • Win-back for inactive contacts. A last attempt with people who haven't opened in months, and a clean removal if they don't respond. It sounds like losing contacts and it actually protects your deliverability.

  The ones that are almost never worth it at first

  Cross-sell flows and sequences that depend on detailed purchase history need data volume to work. Building them on a small base produces odd emails that speak to behaviors that have barely happened twice.

  How many get switched on in your case

  That's defined in the day-one diagnostic, based on your type of business and the size of your list. We'd rather start with fewer well-built flows than with the full catalog running half-way — and when someone offers you ten automations from month one, it's worth asking who's going to maintain them.

• Why do I pay for the sending platform?

  Because it isn't our work, it's your tool. Klaviyo, Mailchimp, Brevo or whichever fits gets contracted in your name, you're billed for it, and the price depends on your contact volume. We charge for operating it.

  It's the same principle we apply in advertising by separating the fee from ad spend: when the vendor resells you the tool, you stop knowing how much you pay for the software and how much for the work, and that makes it impossible to evaluate whether the service is worth it.

  What having it in your name gives you

  • You see the real price. You know exactly what the platform costs and can change plans or providers when your volume justifies it.
  • The account doesn't leave when we do. It stays with you: the contacts, the flows that were built, the templates and the send history.
  • Nobody can hold your access hostage. It's the email equivalent of having the domain in your name.

  Which one suits you

  That comes out of the diagnostic, not from a preference of ours. If you sell online with volume and want fine-grained attribution, the answer is different than if you have a medium-sized professional services list. What we will tell you is when you're paying for a plan you don't need — it happens often, because prices scale by contacts and lists fill up with inactive people nobody cleans out.

  What if I already have one

  We work on it. Migrating platforms is a project in itself and rarely justified by technical preference alone; if your current tool can do what you need, the right answer is to stay.

• Can I buy a contact list?

  You can, but not with us. It's the only thing in the whole catalog we say no to without nuance, and it's worth explaining why instead of citing a principle.

  What happens when you write to a purchased list

  • They mark it as junk in bulk. Nobody remembers giving you their email, because they didn't. A handful of spam marks is enough for providers to start filtering everything that leaves your domain.
  • The damage reaches your real customers. Reputation belongs to the domain, not the campaign. Once it's burned, the emails your customers were actually expecting stop arriving too.
  • Recovery takes months. And sometimes it means changing the sending domain, which is starting from zero.

  There's also a legal issue that gets overlooked frequently: in Mexico, personal data law requires a consent that a purchased list, by definition, doesn't have — and most jurisdictions have an equivalent rule.

  What to do if your list is small

  The boring answer is the one that works: capture. And it almost always means touching the site, because the bottleneck usually isn't email but the fact that there's nowhere for someone to leave theirs in exchange for something worthwhile.

  If that's your case, we'll tell you on the call. Sometimes the recommendation is to start there and leave email for when there's someone to write to — it's a recommendation that costs us a retainer, and we make it anyway because building automations on a list of two hundred cold contacts doesn't serve anyone.

  The exception that does exist

  Your own historical customers, the ones who already bought from you and are in your billing system or your CRM without ever having gone through a mailing list. Those aren't a purchased list: they're yours. Winning them back with a well-built sequence is usually the fastest win of the whole project.

• How much does email actually sell?

  More than most people think and less than promised by whoever quotes industry return statistics. Those round numbers that circulate come from averages of large stores with huge lists and say nothing about your case.

  What it really depends on

  • Whether your product gets bought again. This outweighs any technique. With repeat purchase, email is one of the most profitable channels there is; without it, it's one more acquisition channel and it competes at a disadvantage.
  • The size and warmth of your list. A thousand contacts who know you perform better than twenty thousand who signed up for a giveaway three years ago.
  • Whether there are automations. Flows usually generate most of the channel's revenue with a fraction of the send volume, because they arrive at the right moment instead of on the day someone had time.
  • How much you can attribute. Without the integration with your store or your CRM, email is going to look like it sells little simply because nobody is counting.

  How we measure it

  With attributed revenue by flow and by campaign, connected to your system. It's a less flattering number than the open rate and it's the only one that's useful for deciding whether the channel is worth what it costs.

  And it's worth saying: email attribution is never perfect. Someone reads the email on their phone and buys the next day from their computer, and that path gets lost in any model. The reasonable thing is to always measure the same way and compare against the same criterion every month, instead of changing how you count when you don't like the number.

  What to expect in the first months

  Month one goes into building: deliverability, integration, cleaning and the first flows. Revenue arrives when the automations have been running for weeks and have seen enough contacts pass through. If someone promises you email results in the first month, either your list was already badly underused — which happens — or they're telling you what you want to hear.