From list building and segmentation to sequences, testing, and reporting — the AI-assisted workflow that runs my email channel.
Email is still the highest-ROI channel in most marketing programmes. The research has been consistent for years — Campaign Monitor, Litmus, and HubSpot all put email ROI at somewhere between £35–42 for every £1 spent. But those numbers assume you're doing email right. Most programmes aren't.
The gap between good and great email marketing isn't usually creative or strategic. It's operational. Writing sequences, testing variations, segmenting properly, refreshing templates, and reporting clearly — these are time-consuming tasks that eat the hours that should go toward strategy. AI closes that gap.
Here's the 10-skill workflow I use to run a full email marketing operation — from list building through to performance reporting.
If your emails don't reach the inbox, nothing else matters. The key deliverability factors: sender reputation (your domain's history of sending legitimate email), authentication (SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records configured correctly), list hygiene (regularly removing hard bounces and inactive contacts), and engagement rate (ISPs use open and click rates to assess whether recipients want your mail). Fix these before you worry about subject lines.
Open rate: % of delivered emails opened (industry average ~20–25%, varies significantly by sector). Click-through rate (CTR): % of delivered emails that generated a click (~2–5% is typical). Click-to-open rate (CTOR): clicks as a % of opens — measures how compelling your email body is once someone has opened. Unsubscribe rate: above 0.5% per send is a warning sign. Conversion rate: % who completed the desired action after clicking.
Since 2021, Apple Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) pre-fetches email content including tracking pixels — inflating open rates for Apple Mail users. Industry-wide open rates are artificially elevated as a result. Treat open rate as a directional metric, not a precise one. Click-through rate and conversion rate are now the more reliable performance indicators.
CAN-SPAM (US) requires a physical address, a clear unsubscribe mechanism, and no deceptive subject lines. GDPR (UK/EU) requires explicit consent for marketing emails and the right to erasure. CASL (Canada) is among the strictest — requiring express or implied consent with specific criteria. Non-compliance carries significant fines. Know which laws apply to your audience and build compliance in from the start.
A list of 2,000 highly relevant subscribers outperforms a list of 20,000 disengaged contacts every time — in deliverability, engagement, and conversion. apollo:prospect helps build targeted lists of decision-makers matching your ICP for B2B email programmes: job title, company size, industry, technology signals, and geography, all with verified email addresses.
For B2C programmes, the approach is different — list growth comes from lead magnets, content upgrades, and sign-up incentives. Claude can design those too.
Never buy email lists. Purchased lists have high bounce rates, low engagement, and high spam complaint rates — all of which damage your sender reputation and can get your domain blacklisted. Build your list through consent-based methods: content downloads, event sign-ups, website forms, gated tools. Slow list growth with high quality beats fast list growth with poor quality every time.
For B2B outbound email, deliverability best practice involves warming new sending domains gradually — starting at 20–50 emails/day and scaling over 4–6 weeks. Use a dedicated sending domain (not your main company domain) for cold outreach, so that any reputation damage from outbound prospecting doesn't affect your marketing email deliverability. Keep cold and warm email infrastructure separate.
Segment your list from the moment of acquisition, not after. Tag every new subscriber by how they joined (content download, webinar, paid ad, organic) and what topic brought them in. That context is your most valuable segmentation data — and it degrades rapidly if you don't capture it at the point of sign-up.
Most email programmes are reactive — a newsletter goes out when someone remembers to write it, a promotional email goes out before a deadline. marketing:campaign-plan builds the proactive programme: what types of emails you're sending (broadcast, triggered, transactional, nurture), at what cadence, to which segments, tied to what business goals.
The plan also maps your email programme to your broader marketing calendar — so your email is amplifying campaigns rather than running independently of them.
Start with three email types: a welcome sequence (automated, sent immediately on sign-up), a regular newsletter (weekly or bi-weekly broadcast), and a promotional email (sent around key moments — launches, sales, events). Get these three running well before you add complexity. Most of your email revenue and engagement will come from these three types anyway.
Map your email cadence against your sales cycle length. If you're B2B with a 90-day average sales cycle, your nurture sequence should span at least 90 days with emails timed to match the typical consideration stages. If you send all your nurture emails in the first two weeks and then go quiet, you're not present when the buying decision actually happens.
Plan your Q4 email programme by September. Holiday and end-of-quarter campaigns require more lead time than most teams allow — approval cycles, design, list segmentation, and A/B testing all take time. The programmes that perform best in Q4 are planned and partially built in Q3.
A single email is a message. A sequence is a relationship. marketing:email-sequence designs the full programme — timing, logic, branching for engagement vs. non-engagement, exit conditions, and complete copy for every email in the flow. It handles welcome sequences, post-purchase flows, re-engagement campaigns, trial nurtures, and lifecycle programmes.
The output includes the sequence map (visual flow of who gets what when) and the full copy for every email — ready to load into your ESP.
Your welcome sequence is the most important email you'll ever send — open rates are typically 50–80% for welcome emails, compared to 20–25% for regular broadcasts. Treat it as the most valuable real estate in your email programme. The welcome sequence should: confirm their subscription, deliver on the promise that got them to sign up, and set expectations for what they'll receive from you going forward.
Build behavioural branching into your sequences. A subscriber who clicks the pricing link in email 3 is signalling higher purchase intent than one who only opened it. Route the click-engaged group into a shorter, more conversion-focused track. Route the non-click group into a longer educational track that builds more value before the ask. One sequence structure serving both groups equally is serving neither optimally.
Design your re-engagement sequence before you need it. Every list has inactive subscribers (no open or click in 90+ days). A re-engagement sequence — three emails, declining frequency, escalating offer — reactivates some and confirms the rest should be removed. Removing confirmed inactives improves deliverability for your active list. Run this quarterly.
marketing:draft-content writes the emails — subject lines, preview text, body copy, and CTAs — at scale and with consistent quality. I brief it with the email's goal, audience segment, where they are in the journey, and the one action I want them to take. It returns the full email with three subject line options and a preview text variant for each.
The subject line and preview text combination determine whether the email gets opened. The first sentence determines whether it gets read. The CTA determines whether it converts. Each needs to be written with intention, not as an afterthought.
The best email subject lines are specific, not clever. "How we increased trial-to-paid conversion by 34%" outperforms "The secret to better conversion rates" every time. Specificity signals you have something real to say. Vague curiosity gaps have been overused to the point where readers have learned to ignore them. Say what the email contains — if it's valuable, they'll open it.
Write for the mobile inbox first. Over 60% of emails are opened on mobile. On an iPhone, your subject line gets approximately 35–40 characters before it cuts off. Your preview text gets another 90 characters. These 130 characters are your entire pitch for the open. Brief Claude to optimise explicitly for mobile display — front-load the most important words in both fields.
Write the CTA last, not first. Most email writers start with the call to action and work backwards. Instead: start with what problem this email solves for this subscriber, write the body that demonstrates you understand that problem, then close with the CTA that's the natural next step. The CTA should feel inevitable, not bolted on.
Email is the most personal channel you have. A tone inconsistency that might be tolerated on a website feels jarring in an inbox. brand-voice:brand-voice-enforcement ensures that every email — across every sequence, every segment, every team member writing them — sounds like the same company.
I run this on every email batch before scheduling, with particular attention to promotional emails where the pressure to be urgent and salesy often pushes copy out of brand voice.
The most common voice mistake in email is switching from "we're here to help you" in the newsletter to "BUY NOW — LIMITED TIME" in the promotional email. Your subscribers subscribed to a relationship with a brand that cares about them. When the promotional email suddenly reads like a direct-response ad, it breaks that relationship. Urgency and value can coexist with brand voice — brief Claude specifically on this tension.
Persona-specific tone adjustment within brand voice is advanced but high-leverage. If you're emailing a VP of Marketing vs. an individual contributor, the formality level, vocabulary, and reference points should differ — while still sounding like the same brand. Brief Claude with both the brand voice and the specific audience segment for each email, and ask for segment-appropriate tone within brand guidelines.
Read your email aloud before sending. Voice drift is much easier to hear than to see on a screen. If any sentence sounds like something you wouldn't say in a real conversation with a subscriber, it's a candidate for revision.
marketing:brand-review checks every email for compliance issues before it sends: unsubscribe mechanism present, physical address included, no deceptive subject lines, promotional claims appropriately substantiated, and regulatory language correct for your audience's jurisdiction. It also flags brand consistency issues and factual inaccuracies.
One compliance miss on a large send can be expensive — CAN-SPAM fines run up to $51,744 per violation in the US. GDPR fines can reach €20 million or 4% of global annual revenue, whichever is higher.
The non-negotiable compliance elements in every marketing email: a working unsubscribe link, your company's physical mailing address, an honest subject line that accurately reflects the email's content, and no false "Re:" or "Fwd:" prefixes on subject lines. These are CAN-SPAM requirements that apply to anyone emailing US recipients regardless of where your business is based.
If you're emailing EU or UK subscribers, consent management is the compliance risk area. GDPR requires explicit opt-in for marketing email — pre-ticked boxes don't count. You need to be able to demonstrate when and how each subscriber consented, and that consent wasn't bundled with terms acceptance. Your ESP should be storing consent timestamps and sources for every subscriber.
Create a pre-send checklist that includes compliance items alongside design and copy QA. Subject line (not deceptive), unsubscribe link (functional), address (present), segment (correct), send time (appropriate for timezone), plain text version (exists) — run through it on every send. Compliance errors are entirely preventable with a systematic check.
Open rates tell you what got opened. data:analyze tells you what drove revenue. Export your email performance data with revenue attribution and ask the right questions: "Which automated sequences are generating the most conversions per subscriber?" or "Which segments have the highest email-attributed revenue per email sent?"
Most email programmes have a power law distribution — a small number of emails (often the welcome sequence and one or two re-engagement emails) drive a disproportionate share of revenue. Knowing which ones lets you protect and optimise them first.
Revenue per email (RPE) is the metric that connects email performance to business outcomes. Total revenue attributable to email ÷ total emails sent = RPE. Track this by campaign type and by sequence. It immediately shows you which parts of your email programme are earning their keep and which are just generating impressions.
Attribution for email is complex because email is rarely the last touchpoint before purchase — it's often the channel that maintains relationship across a long buying journey. Use first-touch attribution to credit the email that originally acquired the subscriber. Use multi-touch attribution to credit emails that influenced the conversion. Both views tell you different things about different parts of your email programme.
Analyse your unsubscribe rate by email type and segment, not just in aggregate. An unsubscribe rate of 0.8% on a promotional email to your oldest, most engaged segment is a signal that frequency or relevance has slipped — that's a different problem to a 0.8% rate on a cold outreach sequence. Aggregate rates hide what the segment-level data reveals.
Subject line A/B testing is table stakes in email marketing. What most programmes get wrong is calling the winner too early. data:statistical-analysis tells you when you have enough data to declare a winner with statistical confidence — and how much more data you need if you don't.
The standard is 95% confidence. That means only a 5% chance the performance difference you're seeing is random noise rather than a real effect. Most email A/B tests are called at far lower confidence levels — producing decisions based on noise.
To get valid A/B test results from email subject lines, you need a minimum of around 1,000 subscribers per variant. Below that, your results are too heavily influenced by random variation to be reliable. If your list is smaller, run tests over multiple sends — test the same subject line format across several emails and aggregate the results before drawing conclusions.
Test subject lines, but also test the email type itself — plain text vs. HTML, short vs. long, single CTA vs. multiple options. These "format tests" often produce larger performance differences than subject line tests because they affect the entire email experience, not just the open decision. Run format tests at the sequence level across multiple sends rather than on individual emails.
Build a test log. Every time you run a test, record the hypothesis, the result, and the confidence level. After 20–30 tests, patterns emerge — certain subject line structures consistently outperform others for your specific audience. That's your audience intelligence, built by running this skill on every test result.
Subscribe to your competitors' email lists. It's the easiest competitive intelligence in marketing — free, immediate, and comprehensive. marketing:competitive-brief helps you systematically analyse what you observe: their cadence, subject line patterns, offer structures, content formats, and the journey they take a new subscriber through.
The goal isn't to copy. It's to understand the standard your audience is being exposed to — and identify where you can be meaningfully different or better.
Set up a dedicated email address for competitor research and subscribe to the top five competitors in your space. Archive everything. Over 6–8 weeks, you'll have a complete picture of their email strategy — how often they send, what they promote, how they sequence their welcome journey, and where their messaging focuses. This is free primary research that most teams never do systematically.
Analyse competitor email frequency relative to their list health indicators. If a competitor has been increasing send frequency significantly, check whether their social media mentions have risen (more engaged subscribers) or whether there are complaints about email overload. Frequency changes are often a sign of a struggling programme trying to compensate for declining engagement with volume.
Brief Claude with 10–15 competitor subject lines from the past month and ask it to identify patterns: length preference, personalisation usage, urgency triggers, specific vocabulary. Then look at what none of them are doing — that's the whitespace in your competitive landscape.
Email reporting that leads with open rates and click-through rates is email reporting that gets dismissed by finance and leadership. marketing:performance-report builds the report that connects email performance to revenue — attributed pipeline, customer retention metrics for lifecycle emails, unsubscribe trends, list growth rate, and programme ROI.
The format is built for the audience: an executive summary for leadership, a channel breakdown for the marketing team, and a recommended action list for the next period.
Report email performance monthly, not weekly. Weekly data has too much noise — send day, subject line, content topic, and list fatigue all create variation that smooths out over a month. Monthly reporting gives you cleaner trend lines and more meaningful comparisons to prior periods. Track: list size and growth rate, average open rate, average CTR, revenue attributed, and unsubscribe rate.
Report on list health as a leading indicator of future performance. A growing unsubscribe rate, declining CTOR, or rising spam complaint rate all signal programme health problems before they show up in revenue. Catching and addressing list health deterioration early prevents the much more expensive problem of deliverability damage — which can take months to recover from.
Calculate and report the cost of your email programme per subscriber per year. If you're paying £12K/year for your ESP and have 8,000 active subscribers, that's £1.50 per subscriber per year. If those subscribers generate an average £28 in attributed revenue each, the ROI is clear — and easy to defend when the ESP contract comes up for renewal.
Email marketing rewards consistency and system-thinking. The skills above aren't a one-time setup — they're a recurring cycle. Run the sequence design quarterly, the testing continuously, the analysis monthly, and the compliance check on every send. Over time, the programme compounds.
If you're building or optimising an email channel and want to compare notes, reach out.
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