E-mail marketing: doing it properly without burning your domain

E-mail is still the channel that returns most per unit of money spent — and also the one where it is easiest to ruin everything at once. A badly run campaign does not merely fail to sell: it damages your domain's reputation, and after that even ordinary e-mail stops arriving.

The first rule, and the most ignored

Do not send campaigns from your own mailbox. It is the mistake that does the most damage. Sending five hundred messages from hello@yourdomain.com through Outlook or webmail makes the domain behave like a spam sender — and from then on Gmail and Outlook.com distrust everything you send, including the invoice you mailed a customer. Recovering reputation takes months. See how to write an e-mail that does not land in spam.

Campaigns go out through a sending platform, which handles reputation, lists, removals and reporting. It is not a luxury: it is what separates a campaign from a problem.

The technical base: without this it is not worth starting

Before the first campaign, the domain has to be authenticated. Three records, and without them the messages go to spam by default — however good the offer:

Record What it proves
SPF That the sending server is authorised to send in your name.
DKIM That the message really left you and nobody altered it on the way.
DMARC What to do when someone fails the first two. It starts by observing, and is tightened later.

How to set them up and confirm them is in SPF, DKIM and DMARC. If you use a sending platform, it has to go into the SPF — and there is only one SPF record per domain, so it is merged into the existing one rather than added as a second.

The list: where campaigns are won or lost

1 Only people who asked. A bought list, or one scraped off a website, guarantees two things: complaints and a burned reputation. There is no undoing it.
2 Confirm the address at sign-up. A confirmation e-mail filters out typos and sign-ups made by other people.
3 Clear out the bounces. Addresses that no longer exist and stay on the list are among the signals that count most against you.
4 One-click unsubscribe, always visible. Someone who leaves without friction does not complain — and the complaint is what costs you.
5 Keep the proof of consent: when, where and how the person signed up. See personal data protection.

Writing so it arrives

Do Avoid
A sender with a person's name and the company's noreply@ addresses, which nobody answers and many filter.
A clear subject, written as a sentence CAPITALS, exclamation marks and «FREE». It is the vocabulary filters know by heart.
Real text, with an image or two The campaign that is one single image. With no text it looks like spam — and it cannot be read with images off.
Few links, all to your own domain Link shorteners. They hide the destination, and filters know it.
A predictable sending rhythm Months of silence and then two thousand e-mails in one afternoon.

What can be measured, and what matters

A sending platform shows how many opened, clicked, bounced and unsubscribed. Two honest notes: the open rate is far less reliable than it used to be, because several services open messages by themselves for security; and the metric that counts is the last in the chain — how many bought. To connect the campaign to what happens on the site, see being found on Google and measuring visits.

Need to send and would rather not deal with this?

We can handle the sending for you. We do bulk e-mail sending for Mozambique and Angola, with the domain properly authenticated, the list handled and delivery reporting — without putting your domain's reputation or your everyday e-mail at risk.

It is not an off-the-shelf product with a price tag: it depends on volume, frequency and what you want to send. Open a ticket telling us how many contacts you have, how often you want to send and to which countries, and we will come back with a concrete proposal.

If you would rather do it yourself, we still help. The part that is ours — SPF, DKIM, DMARC and the DNS records for whichever platform you choose — we handle, and it is the part where most campaigns fail before they begin. See how far our support goes.

And if your ordinary messages are already landing in spam, fix that first: why your e-mail is not sending or receiving and an IP on a blocklist.

Got a list and want to send without burning the domain?

Talk to us
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