What this is for#
Email marketing is a loop. People give you permission, you send them something worth reading, mailbox
providers decide where it lands, and the results tell you what to send next. This article walks the
loop once, so every other article in this knowledge base has a place to fit. New terms are defined in
the Email Marketing Glossary.
1. Permission — someone asks to hear from you#
Everything starts with a person agreeing to receive your email: a signup form on your website, a
checkbox at checkout, a download that says you will follow up by email. That agreement — consent —
is what separates email marketing from spam, for the law and for the mailbox providers that watch how
recipients react to your mail.
Two things to hold on to: consent covers the kind of email you described, and you should be able to
show when and how each person signed up. More in
Consent and Opt-In in Email Marketing.
2. The list — where those people live#
Each signup becomes a contact on a list: an email address plus whatever else you asked for —
name, country, interests. A list is only as good as the way it was collected and kept: addresses go
stale as people change jobs and abandon inboxes. See
Email List Quality Explained.
You rarely send everything to everyone. A segment is a part of the list chosen by rules — "bought
in the last 30 days", "lives in France", "never clicked" — so each message reaches the people it is for.
3. The message — campaigns and automations#
There are two ways to send marketing email:
- Campaigns — one message to a list or segment at a time you choose: a newsletter, an announcement,
a promotion.
- Automations — messages sent by themselves when a contact does something or a date arrives: a
welcome series after signup, a reminder after an abandoned cart, a birthday offer. You build them
once; they run for every contact who qualifies.
Receipts and password resets are a third kind — transactional email — with rules of their own. See
Transactional vs Marketing Email.
Every marketing email needs a sender name the reader recognises, a subject line and preheader, content
the reader expects, one clear call to action, and a working unsubscribe link. In the US it must also
carry your postal address.
4. Sending — handing the message to the internet#
An email marketing app does not deliver mail on its own. It hands each message to a sending server
— your own mail server or a service such as Amazon SES — which passes it to the recipient's mailbox
provider over SMTP. The full path is in
How Email Delivery Actually Works.
Before that works well, your domain has to prove the mail is really yours, with three DNS records —
SPF, DKIM and DMARC.
5. Delivery — the mailbox provider decides#
The receiving server first accepts or refuses the message (a refusal is a bounce). Then the mailbox
provider files it: inbox, a tab such as Promotions, or spam. It decides from your authentication,
your reputation, how recipients treated your earlier mail, and the quality of your list. See
Email Deliverability Explained.
6. Measurement — what happened, and what to change#
The campaign report counts what came back: deliveries, bounces, opens, clicks, unsubscribes, complaints
and — with tracking on your site — sales. Opens have become unreliable since mail apps began loading
images automatically, so judge campaigns by clicks and conversions. Each number is explained in
Email Marketing Metrics Explained.
Then the loop closes: what you learn changes who you send to (segments), what you send (content, A/B
tests) and when — and the next campaign starts from a better list.
How this shows up in AcelleMail#
Each step of the loop, in the app:
- Permission: Build a Signup Form and Embed It on Your Site
- The list: Importing Contacts CSV and How to build a subscriber segment
- The message: Your First Email Campaign in AcelleMail and How to set up a welcome email automation
- Sending: How to Set Up Amazon SES with AcelleMail and How to Set Up SPF, DKIM, and DMARC Records
- Delivery: Sender Reputation Monitoring
- Measurement: How to read your email campaign report
What to do after#
- Find the step of the loop you know least about and read its article above.
- Keep the glossary open while you read the rest of this knowledge base.
