Email Marketing
Email marketing is the practice of sending targeted commercial messages to a permission-based list to drive activation, retention, repeat purchase, or referral. Recipients are typically subscribers, customers, or prospects, and the channel is typically managed through an email service provider (ESP) such as Klaviyo, Customer.io, Mailchimp, ActiveCampaign, or HubSpot. It is the highest-ROI direct-response channel for most stages of the funnel because the cost per send is negligible and the list is an owned asset rather than rented attention.
The channel operates on three layers: broadcast (one-to-many newsletters and announcements), lifecycle (automated sequences triggered by customer behavior, like onboarding drips, abandoned-cart, win-back), and transactional (account-driven messages like receipts and password resets that often have the highest open rates). Industry benchmarks vary by sector and audience, but a healthy SaaS list typically sees open rates in the 20 to 35 percent range and click-through rates between 2 and 5 percent (Mailchimp, Klaviyo public benchmarks). E-commerce automated flows (welcome, abandoned cart, post-purchase) routinely drive 25 to 40 percent of total email revenue while sending under 10 percent of total volume. The 2024 Gmail and Yahoo bulk-sender requirements (DMARC, one-click unsubscribe, low spam-rate thresholds) raised the deliverability bar significantly; lists with poor hygiene now get filtered or blocked outright, not just deprioritized.
Ryan's Take
Email is the only growth channel you own. Search, social, paid, all of it can change the rules overnight. Your email list cannot. That makes list quality the single most under-appreciated asset in a startup. A 5,000-person list of people who actually want to hear from you outperforms a 50,000-person list scraped from trade shows and bought leads, every time. The founders who beg for email signups with a discount code and then send three promotional blasts a week are not doing email marketing. They are renting attention from themselves until the list burns out.
What founders get wrong: Optimizing for list size instead of list engagement. A growing list with declining open rates is a list dying in slow motion. Senders with low engagement get downranked by the major inbox providers (Gmail, Outlook, Apple Mail), which then hurts deliverability for everyone on the list, including the engaged subset. Prune ruthlessly. The unsubscribers are doing you a favor.
Related: Lifecycle Marketing · Drip Campaign · Marketing Automation · Retention · Conversion Rate
FAQ
What is email marketing?
The practice of sending targeted commercial messages to a permission-based list to drive activation, retention, repeat purchase, or revenue. Typically managed through an email service provider (ESP) like Klaviyo, Customer.io, Mailchimp, ActiveCampaign, or HubSpot.
What is a good email open rate?
For SaaS, a healthy open rate sits in the 20 to 35 percent range, with click-through rates between 2 and 5 percent. E-commerce lifecycle flows (welcome, abandoned cart, post-purchase) often see higher engagement and drive 25 to 40 percent of total email revenue.
Do I need to worry about email deliverability?
Yes. The 2024 Gmail and Yahoo bulk-sender requirements (DMARC alignment, one-click unsubscribe, spam-rate thresholds under 0.3%) now block or filter senders that fail them. Authentication, list hygiene, and engagement signals are required, not optional.
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