6 Steps to Do to Start With Email Marketing

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Idealetter

#29

21 April 2025, Mon

Written by Jyothiikaa M D

6 Things you need to do to start with email marketing

Alright! So, you have decided to give email marketing a shot.

You have a great campaign idea and have even created an email template for it.

But wait!

Before you jump right in and send your email, you'll need to do some essential groundwork to ensure your campaign runs smoothly and achieves its goals.

In this edition, we will discuss the basic setup you require to send out marketing emails so that you don't have to pay the price of poor deliverability and lost opportunities.

Foundational elements to set up for email marketing

Here are some of the most important elements you need to have to get started with your email marketing journey:

#1: Get your list ready

Only send emails to contacts who've explicitly consented to hear from you. Cold emailing contacts without consent can hurt your domain reputation if they mark you as spam.

If you haven't been collecting consent, add a checkbox where leads can consent to receive emails when they sign up on your website. Apart from this, there are some best practices you can do:

- Clean your list: Identify and remove invalid email IDs from your list using tools like NeverBounce. This ensures you only send to valid email IDs, which will help reduce bounce rates and protect your sender reputation.

- Segment your list: Identify and segment the contacts you need to send a specific campaign to. For example, a post-webinar email should go only to webinar registrants. This helps you be more targeted, which improves engagement and conversions.

If you're just getting started and don't have any contacts, check out our guide on how to build your email list from scratch.

#2: Get a subdomain to send your emails

You must set up a separate subdomain dedicated to marketing emails, like marketing.yourcompany.com, m.companyname.com, etc. Your emails should be sent using an email address from this new subdomain you've set up, e.g., hello@marketing.yourcompany.com.

For instance, take a look at Canva's email address for marketing emails:

Having a separate subdomain like the above helps safeguard the reputation of your main domain (in this case, canva.com) and makes troubleshooting easier.

For instance, if your marketing emails receive too many spam complaints, your main domain can be blacklisted, and that can affect all your emails, including essential internal or transactional emails like password resets, order confirmations, or customer service replies.

With a dedicated subdomain, you can independently troubleshoot your sending practices without affecting other important emails.

#3: Set up email authentication

Email authentication helps verify the legitimacy of an email to ensure that the email is coming from the claimed sender and has not been tampered with during transit. It uses protocols to protect against phishing, spoofing, and other email frauds.

The main email authentication protocols you need to set up are SPF (Sender Policy Framework), DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail), and DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance).

To learn more about these protocols, check out our guide on email authentication.

#4: Warm up your domain

Warming up your sender email address is crucial before sending bulk marketing emails, as this will prevent your emails from landing in the spam folder.

For example, you have created a brand new subdomain (marketing.companyname.com) and immediately used it to send emails to all 10,000 contacts in your list.

Spam filters of email clients will now flag this as suspicious behavior, as this sudden blast is something spammers usually do. And email clients will now send those emails directly to the spam folder, which damages your domain reputation. So, now your emails will not reach your target audience unless they check the spam folder.

To counter this, you must warm up your domain by starting with a small set of contacts and gradually increasing the number of emails you send every time. To learn more, check out our detailed guide to help you warm up your domain.

#5: Test your campaign

Once you have done the above setup, it is also important to test your campaign to ensure everything works as intended.

You will need to test multiple aspects, such as the email content, design, personalization, responsiveness, etc. Check out our detailed email QA checklist to ensure you cover all bases while testing your campaign.

You can conduct your testing either through your ESP or manually by sending the campaign to yourself.

#6: Determine and track your KPIs

Now that you have covered all bases, you can start sending your campaign. But how do you know if your campaign is successful?

Regularly measuring your progress is important to determine if your efforts are paying off. Here are some useful metrics to keep track of:

- Open rate to understand how many contacts opened your emails. This may help you understand the effectiveness of your subject lines and deliverability health.

- Click-through open rate (CTOR) to understand how many contacts engage with your email by clicking on the links, such as your blog posts, product pages, event sign-ups, etc.

- Link visits/Conversion rate to help you understand how many contacts are going to the page and buying things or signing up. You can track this using UTMs in the links you put in the emails.

You can further check out our State of Email 2025 report to gain an in-depth understanding of the metrics you need to focus on for your industry.

Tracking KPIs can help you avoid shooting in the dark and tweak your email marketing strategy based on what is going wrong.

Email marketing is more than just creating and sending emails, so make sure you complete all the steps mentioned above, and you will be off to a great start!

In the next edition, we will discuss foundational email flows that you must set up at the beginning stages to nurture your leads.

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That's all, folks! I'll see you next month with more tips and ideas. If there is something we can do better for you, please let me know by replying to this email.