Key points
- This session wrapped up TMM’s four-week School of Email series, recapping key takeaways before opening to live Q&A
- Email delivers roughly £36 back for every £1 spent, and over 40% of small businesses expect it to be their single most valuable channel this year, but a high-performing email is never accidental, every element (subject line, preheader, design, copy, CTA) has to earn its place
- Email lists degrade by around 23% a year through natural attrition, so consistent list growth (via QR codes, social bios, and event sign-ups) matters as much as what you send
- Deliverability comes first: aim for a spam complaint rate under 0.1%, never buy a list, and authenticate your domain (SPF, DKIM, DMARC)
- Automated emails generate 320% more revenue than manual campaigns despite making up just 2% of total email volume, welcome series, onboarding, and abandoned cart sequences are the highest-impact places to start
- Segmentation beats generic blasts: even a simple split (new vs. existing contacts, engaged vs. unengaged) can lift open rates by up to 50%
- Click rate is the most reliable single metric, it requires genuine intent, unlike opens, which can be inflated by privacy features like Apple Mail’s preloading
- Rules of thumb throughout the Q&A: aim for at least twice a month to stay consistent, review unengaged contacts around the six-month mark (with at least one re-engagement attempt before suppressing), and let your own data override generic best practice where the two conflict
Table of Contents
- Week one: the fundamentals
- Week two: getting out of the spam folder
- Week three: writing copy that gets read
- Week four: strategy, segmentation, and metrics
- Live Q&A highlights
Berit Block and Patrick Costa both work at Constant Contact, Berit generalist marketing background across Meta and WeTransfer, Patrick a solutions engineer with 13 years at the company. This session recapped TMM’s four-week School of Email series before taking live questions.
Week one: the fundamentals
Email remains the highest-ROI digital channel available, roughly £36 back for every £1 spent, with global usage projected to reach 4.73 billion people by year-end. But that return depends on getting the basics right: subject lines under seven words (47% of people decide whether to open based on the subject line alone), a preheader that adds a genuine reason to click rather than repeating the subject line, one strong image rather than several competing ones, readable font sizes (21pt headers, 14pt body), and a single, specific call to action.
Week two: getting out of the spam folder
Spam isn’t really about breaking technical rules, it’s about whether the recipient wanted the email in the first place. The two numbers worth remembering: a target spam complaint rate of 0.1% (one complaint per thousand contacts), and a hard ceiling of 0.3%, beyond which an entire sending domain risks being blocked. The fix is straightforward: explicit permission, never a bought list, and proper domain authentication (SPF, DKIM, DMARC).
Once in the inbox, subject lines get roughly six seconds to earn an open. Mobile-first, four to seven words, genuine personalisation beyond a first name, and one or two emojis at most, five is where deliverability starts to suffer. The preheader, sender name, and send time were flagged as an under-used 20% of the email doing outsized work: 42% of people prioritise sender name over subject line when deciding whether to open, and using a real human name can lift opens by over 20%.
Week three: writing copy that gets read
97% of marketing teams already use AI in some capacity, useful for beating a blank page or generating subject line variations, but not for brand voice, nuance, or facts, since it can hallucinate statistics with confidence. The suggested approach: treat AI like an enthusiastic junior copywriter, give it specific prompts, and never send without an editorial pass.
For body copy, the BLUF principle (bottom line up front) means answering “what’s in this for me” in the first line, focused on the benefit rather than the feature. People scan rather than read, so short paragraphs, bullet points, and a single call to action all matter, confusing people with multiple asks tends to result in no click at all.
Automated emails generate 320% more revenue than manual campaigns despite making up only 2% of total email volume, largely because timing and relevance beat volume. The three automations recommended as a starting point: a welcome series, an onboarding series, and (for e-commerce) an abandoned cart series.
Week four: strategy, segmentation, and metrics
Segmentation was framed with a coffee shop analogy: a barista who knows your usual order but hands you a random discount voucher instead has proven they don’t actually know you, which is what a generic email blast feels like to a subscriber. Segmented emails can drive up to 50% higher open rates, and the simplest starting segments are new versus existing contacts, and engaged versus unengaged.
Four metrics matter most: click rate (the truest signal of genuine interest, since it requires active intent), list growth rate (to offset the roughly 23% annual list decay), conversions (defined specifically for your own goals), and unsubscribe rate, which is a neutral, self-cleaning signal rather than a negative one. Open rate remains useful as a directional indicator, but Apple Mail’s privacy protections can inflate it artificially, so it shouldn’t be treated as gospel.
Reading metrics together tells a story: low open, high click means the content works but the subject line or send time needs attention; high open, low click means the opposite, the subject line is doing its job but the body or CTA isn’t converting.
The closing self-audit, in priority order: fix deliverability first, since nothing else matters if the email doesn’t land; set up a welcome series, the single highest-impact automation; then build at least one segment to start sending more targeted content.
Live Q&A highlights
On send times: Berit cited a recent internal analysis showing Sunday evenings around 10pm can perform surprisingly well, alongside the more conventional Tuesday-to-Thursday window. Her core advice: start with published benchmarks, but treat your own data as the real answer, since B2B and retail audiences behave differently.
On tone versus brevity: Both speakers were clear these aren’t in tension. An email should still sound like the sender, short sentences, plain English, one idea per sentence, but formatted for scanning first and reading second. Consistent formatting across sends also helps recipients recognise and trust an email at a glance.
On how many calls to action is too many: Patrick noted that with limited existing data, including a few different links early on is actually a useful way to learn what an audience is interested in via click behaviour, which can then inform future segmentation, click activity itself is one of his favourite segmentation signals.
On design and white space: High contrast matters most for accessibility (colour blindness, visual impairment), more than any specific colour scheme. On mobile especially, a large image before any text risks pushing the key message below the fold before a reader even scrolls.
On suppressing unengaged contacts: Roughly six months was offered as a starting benchmark, adjusted for how often a brand actually sends. Patrick explained why this matters beyond list hygiene: unopened emails train inbox providers like Gmail to treat future sends as less relevant, which can hurt deliverability for engaged subscribers too. His recommendation: attempt one or two re-engagement campaigns before suppressing a contact for good.
On measuring clicks accurately: Automated security scanners can trigger false-positive clicks by checking links for malware, but this is far less common than with opens (which can be inflated by image pre-loading). A cluster of clicks arriving within seconds of send is a reliable sign of bot activity; clicks spread naturally over time are far more likely to be genuine.
On email frequency: No universal number exists, since automated, triggered emails (welcome series, milestone confirmations) don’t count the same way as manual sends. As a floor, Patrick suggested aiming for at least twice a month to maintain consistency, with the ceiling depending entirely on subscriber intent, active buyers may want daily updates, passive ones may only want a weekly touch.