What is email marketing, and how do you improve open rates, click rates and deliverability?

Email remains the highest-return channel in most businesses because the list is an owned asset — no platform sits between you and the audience, and reaching them again costs nothing.

Deliverability comes first, because nothing else matters if the message lands in spam:

• Authenticate the domain with SPF, DKIM, and DMARC. Providers now effectively require this for bulk sending.
• Use permission-based lists only. Purchased lists produce complaints, which damage sender reputation for every future send.
• Clean the list regularly. Remove hard bounces immediately and prune long-term non-openers — sending to dead addresses signals poor list hygiene.
• Warm up new sending domains gradually.

Open rates are driven by the sender name, the subject line, and the preview text — in that order. A recognised sender matters more than clever wording. Note that Apple Mail Privacy Protection inflates opens, so opens are now a weak metric and click rate is the better measure.

Click rates come from relevance and a single clear action. Segmentation is the biggest lever — a targeted email to 2,000 people outperforms a generic one to 20,000. Behavioural triggers based on what someone did outperform scheduled broadcasts substantially.

Note: Measure unsubscribes and complaints alongside clicks. A campaign with high clicks and a spike in unsubscribes has borrowed from future performance.