Email Marketing Do's and Don'ts That Actually Move the Needle

Email is still one of the highest-return channels available to a small business, and also one of the easiest to quietly ruin without realising it. A handful of habits separate lists that perform from lists that slowly die in spam folders.

Do: warm up a new sending domain slowly

If you're setting up email marketing for the first time, don't blast your entire list on day one. Start with a smaller, more engaged segment and build volume over a couple of weeks. Mailbox providers judge a new sender partly on how it behaves early on, and a sudden spike in volume from an unfamiliar domain is a classic spam signal.

Don't: buy a list, ever

Purchased lists almost always perform badly and often breach data protection rules, since the people on them never actually consented to hear from you specifically. Beyond the legal risk, a high bounce and complaint rate from a bought list can damage your sender reputation for months, affecting emails to people who genuinely did sign up.

Do: make unsubscribing easy

Counterintuitive, but true: a visible, one-click unsubscribe link improves deliverability. People who can't easily leave your list mark you as spam instead, which hurts you with every mailbox provider far more than a clean unsubscribe ever would.

Don't: send from a "noreply" address

It signals you don't want to hear back, and it quietly tells mailbox providers the same thing. A real, monitored address (even a generic one) improves both trust and reply rates, and replies are one of the strongest positive signals for future deliverability.

Do: segment before you send

A single email to your entire list, regardless of what they've bought or clicked before, is the single biggest reason open rates plateau. Even basic segmentation — new subscribers vs existing customers, for instance — usually lifts performance noticeably with very little extra setup work.

Don't: obsess over subject line length

There's a lot of outdated advice floating around about exact character counts. Modern inboxes render subject lines differently across devices anyway, so the more useful question is simply: does it sound like a person wrote it, or like a marketing template? Specificity beats cleverness almost every time.

Email isn't the only channel worth getting right — if you're also weighing up organic vs paid social media, it's worth a read before you split your budget.

Good email marketing is mostly consistency and hygiene, not a single clever trick. If you want a hand setting up a system that actually gets read rather than deleted, that's something I build — get in touch to talk through it.