E-mail marketing

What it means

E-mail marketing is direct communication with your own contact list: a newsletter, product announcements, automated sequences after sign-up or purchase. Unlike advertising you do not pay per click but for keeping the list and for content worth opening.

You measure deliverability, open rate, CTR and ultimately conversion rate. That last number decides whether the channel earns its place - a high open rate with no sales is just a well-written subject line.

Transactional e-mails - an order confirmation, an invoice, a dispatch notice - are not marketing and need no consent, because they belong to performing the contract. Once an online store slips an offer of other products into the order confirmation, though, that part of the message is judged as advertising.

How it works in practice

The list is built from your own leads and customers, not bought. Contacts belong in the CRM together with the source, the date and the way consent was obtained - without that the legal basis cannot be demonstrated in an inspection.

Technically it starts with the domain: SPF, DKIM and DMARC in DNS, or messages land in spam whatever they say. A working unsubscribe link in every message matters just as much.

The sending tool is often a service from a foreign provider that invoices without VAT. When processing those invoices we make sure the client declares the tax by self-assessment; a monthly subscription is easy to overlook, and because the amount is small every month, the error builds up over the whole year.

What to watch out for

Sending without a legal basis breaches GDPR and the e-privacy rules, and small companies get fined too. You may write to an existing customer about similar products, but always with a way to object - and with a record of when and how the contact was obtained.

An unsubscribed contact must not return to the list through an import of an old spreadsheet or a move to another tool. On a request for erasure the data has to be removed from everywhere it sits, including exports on a shared drive; a single message to such an address is enough for a complaint.