Definition
Email marketing is the practice of using email — newsletters, transactional emails, promotional sends, and lifecycle automation — to nurture an opted-in audience toward purchase, retention, and advocacy.
Email is the most-owned channel. Every other platform — social, search, marketplaces — rents you the audience and can change the rules overnight. Email is yours, the audience is yours, and the relationship persists. That's why email programmes consistently produce 20–40% of total revenue at mature direct-to-consumer and SaaS businesses.
The craft is segmentation and lifecycle. Blast emails to your full list at low frequency. Behaviour-triggered emails (cart abandonment, post-purchase, re-engagement) at high relevance. Lifecycle stages with their own messaging (new subscriber, first purchase, repeat buyer, lapsed). Generic email programmes plateau quickly; segmented, lifecycle-driven programmes compound.
Origin
The first commercial email blast (Gary Thuerk, DEC, 1978) generated $13M in sales — and the first spam complaints. Modern email marketing emerged in the 1990s with platforms like Constant Contact (1995); marketing automation (HubSpot, Marketo) added behavioural triggers in the 2000s.
How it works
- Build a list through opted-in signup (newsletter, lead magnet, purchase).
- Segment by behaviour, demographics, lifecycle stage.
- Build lifecycle automations — welcome series, abandonment, post-purchase, winback.
- Layer broadcast sends — newsletters, promotions, launches.
- Test subject lines, send times, and copy systematically.
- Measure revenue per email, per segment; iterate on what's working.
When to use it
Use when
- Any business with repeat purchase, high LTV, or content-driven nurture.
- Especially e-commerce, SaaS, content businesses, and B2B with long sales cycles.
Skip when
- On purchased or scraped lists — spam laws aside, performance is terrible.
- Without consent. Permission-based email outperforms cold list email by 10–100×.
Key metrics
- Open rate (less reliable post-Apple Privacy).
- Click rate (more reliable than open).
- Conversion rate per send.
- Revenue per recipient / email.
- List growth and unsubscribe rate.
Examples
- Our email marketing produced 28% of total revenue last quarter at near-zero variable cost.
- Email is the most-owned channel — every other platform rents you the audience.
- Behavioural automation produces 70% of email revenue; broadcasts produce 30%.
In practice at Makreate
Makreate Email Outreach Automation builds the systems — segmentation, automation, copywriting — so email becomes a compounding revenue channel. A recent ecommerce client had only a basic newsletter producing 4% of revenue. We shipped 7 lifecycle automations (welcome, abandoned cart, post-purchase, replenishment, winback, VIP, browse-abandonment) and a segmented broadcast schedule. Within five months, email contributed 31% of revenue — and the list was paying for the cost of every other channel.
Email Outreach Automation →Common mistakes
- Treating email as broadcast only. Behaviour-triggered email outperforms blasts.
- Sending too often. Frequency burnout produces unsubscribes that compound.
- Sending too rarely. Audiences forget you between sends.
- Generic content with no segmentation.
- Optimising open rate (unreliable) instead of click and conversion (reliable).
Frequently asked
How often should I email my list?
Depends on the audience. Daily is reasonable for content businesses with engaged readers. Weekly is the floor for most ecommerce. B2B SaaS often does well with 1–2 per month. Test, watch unsubscribes, adjust.
Best email platform?
Klaviyo for ecommerce. HubSpot or ActiveCampaign for B2B and SaaS. Beehiiv or Substack for content/newsletter businesses. Pick by use case, not feature checklist.
Are open rates dead?
Inflated, not dead. Apple Privacy and Google's image proxies pre-load images, marking emails as "opened" without user action. Open rates are now directional only — click and conversion are the trustworthy metrics.