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If you search for “email marketing strategy” online, you’ll find advice about complex funnels, behavioural triggers, segmentation trees, and automation workflows that would make your head spin. No wonder so many business owners either avoid email marketing entirely or set something up and never touch it again.
Here’s the thing: a good email marketing strategy doesn’t need to be complicated. It needs to be consistent, intentional, and set up in a way that works even when you’re not thinking about it.
In this post, I’m going to walk you through what a solid email marketing foundation actually looks like, so you know what you’re working towards and can build it piece by piece.
Why Email Marketing?
Social media is great for getting discovered. But you don’t own your audience there. Algorithms change, platforms come and go, and there’s no guarantee your post reaches the people who actually want to hear from you.
Your email list is yours. When you send an email, it lands directly in your subscriber’s inbox*. No algorithm deciding whether it’s worth showing. No competing with seventy other posts. Just you and the people who chose to hear from you.
Email also lets you get specific. You can send different messages to different people based on what they’ve signed up for, what they’ve bought, or where they are in their journey with you. That’s the part most people don’t realise until they start using it properly. You’re not just broadcasting to everyone and hoping the right person sees it. You’re actually having different conversations with different people, all from the same list.
Someone who just signed up yesterday doesn’t need the same email as someone who’s been reading for two years. A person who bought your course doesn’t need to keep seeing pitches for it. Email lets you treat people like individuals, not just a number. And when people feel like you’re actually talking to them? They pay attention.
*This assumes a few things are in place: your sending domain is verified (especially important as your list grows), your emails aren’t heavy with large images, and you’re keeping your list clean by removing subscribers who never engage. We’ll cover that last one in a separate post.
New to email marketing entirely? Start with how to create your first email newsletter before coming back here.
Before You Build Anything
Before thinking about automations or sequences, you need three things in place.
A platform to send from. This is your email marketing tool, the place where your list lives, your emails are built, and your automations run.
Want to try out Kit? Check out my special affiliate link below with a 30 day free trial.
A way for people to join your list. This is usually a signup form on your website, a freebie, or both. Without this, there’s no one to send emails to. I’ve written more about how to set up freebies in a separate post.
Something to say. This one trips people up more than the tech does. You don’t need a perfectly planned content strategy before you start, but you do need a general sense of who you’re writing to and what’s useful to them.
Think about the people you want to reach. What questions do they ask you? What problems are they trying to solve? What worries keep them up at night, and what are they hoping to find an answer to? When you know that, you’ll find you have plenty to say. Your emails don’t need to be clever or complicated, they just need to be relevant to the person reading them.
Once those three things are in place, you’re ready to build.
Your Email Marketing Foundation
So what does a solid email setup actually look like? Not the full complex version with dozens of automations and elaborate segmentation. The foundation. The thing that does the job and works for you even when you’re busy.
It has three parts, but you don’t build them all at once.
Start with your newsletter and a simple signup form. That’s it. No freebie required, just a way for people to say “yes, I want to hear from you” and a regular email that makes that worth their while.
Once that’s running, when you’re actively selling, you add an after-purchase automation to look after the people who buy. And then later on you can add a freebie automation, something valuable that gives people a reason to join and kicks off the relationship with a welcome sequence.
Here’s what each piece looks like.
Your newsletter
This is your regular email to your list. It keeps you visible, gives people a reason to stay subscribed, and reminds them you exist before they need you. I recommend sending it weekly. Consistent weekly emails actually help your deliverability, because email platforms and inboxes recognise you as a regular, expected sender.
What should you write about? Think of your newsletter less like a blog post and more like an email from someone your reader enjoys hearing from. You don’t need a formula, but a rough shape helps: share something useful (a tip, a perspective, an answer to a question you get asked), something that lets people see the human behind the business (a story, a lesson learned, even a mild rant), and something they can do next (reply, check out a resource, book a call).
The goal is that people look forward to seeing your name in their inbox, not just opening it when they need something.
Your after-purchase automation
When someone buys from you, the experience shouldn’t stop at the receipt email. An after-purchase automation sends them what they need next: how to access what they bought, what to do first, and what’s available to them if they need more support. You can also add some extra tips over the next couple of days to make it easier for people to use their new product, course or service.
This is often the most overlooked part of an email strategy, but such an important one. A good post-purchase experience builds trust by saying ‘yes, you made a great choice’, making it much more likely that they come back and refer others to you.
You can start by having one automation that will work for several items by being less specific and then when you feel ready start adding automations for a specific offer you have.
Your freebie automation
If you offer something free in exchange for someone’s email address, whether that’s a guide, a checklist, a mini course, or anything else, you’ll want an automation to deliver it. This is the email that goes out the moment someone signs up, containing whatever they signed up for.
This freebie automation then leads into your welcome sequence. A welcome sequence is a short series of emails that introduces you, outlines what people can expect from you, and begins building the relationship.
If you want to know exactly how to set up your freebie automations in a way that you don’t redo the welcome sequence each time, read this article.
By the way, this isn’t the beginner version of email marketing. It’s the version that actually works. Everything else, the segmentation, the behavioural triggers, the clever automations, gets built on top of this, not instead of it.
When to Add More
Once you’ve got something running, whether that’s just your newsletter or all three pieces, you might start wondering what to add next. And there’s plenty you could add: tags to segment your subscribers, re-engagement sequences for people who’ve gone quiet, behavioural automations that respond to what people click or buy.
Before you add anything, ask yourself: what problem am I trying to solve?
If people are unsubscribing because your emails aren’t relevant to them, that’s a segmentation problem. If people are signing up but never opening anything, that could be a welcome sequence problem or a deliverability problem. If you’re getting engagement but no sales, it might be a nurture problem or an offer problem.
The point is to add things that solve the actual problems you’re seeing. Not things that look impressive or that someone told you that you “should” have.
Complexity isn’t a sign of a good email strategy. Consistency is. But so is paying attention to what’s actually happening.
Ready to Build Your Email Strategy?
If you want help figuring out what you want to focus on in your email marketing, then a Pick my Brain strategy session might be just what you need.
In 120 minutes, we can map out your email foundation, figure out what to prioritise, and give you a clear next step that isn’t overwhelming.
