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06 · Email Marketing · Fixed scope

You already paid to reach these people. Stop paying to reach them again.

Every ad click, every visit, every order left an email address in your database — and the ad platforms charge you again to reach the same person next week. The list itself, the only audience you own outright, gets a newsletter when someone remembers, from a domain nobody has checked since Gmail changed its rules. The customers most likely to buy again are the ones you talk to least.

This project turns that list into a channel that runs on its own: a sending domain that reliably reaches the inbox, five automations that welcome, convert, and win back people based on what they did rather than what the calendar says, templates that hold up in Outlook and in dark mode, and a report that counts revenue instead of opens. Built inside your own accounts and handed over in about four weeks with a 90-day playbook — so your team owns it, and we stay on only if you want us to.

Who this is for

Three situations we see most.

Online store

Ads are getting dearer and repeat orders are not coming.

Thousands of past customers, and a platform that sends nothing but the receipt. Every repeat purchase is currently bought again through Meta or Google. The welcome, post-purchase, and win-back flows are the cheapest revenue you have not collected.

B2B

Leads download something, then go quiet.

The CRM holds two years of demo requests and whitepaper downloads, and follow-up is whoever in sales remembers. A nurture sequence in a named person's voice keeps the conversation going until the buyer is ready — without a rep's calendar.

Any company

The newsletter goes out. Nobody knows if it arrives.

Sending has run the same way for years, the person who set it up has left, and open rates slid without anyone saying why. Gmail changed the rules in 2024. Week one of this project finds out where your mail actually lands, before anything is redesigned.

Not for you ifYou have fewer than a few hundred addresses, or a CRM owner with flows already running. Both are in the honest limits below, and we will say so in the audit rather than sell you the project.

Why it matters

Email rarely fails loudly. It fails in the spam folder.

Landing in spam, and nobody knows

Since February 2024, Gmail and Yahoo junk or reject bulk mail from domains without aligned SPF, DKIM, and DMARC, or with a spam complaint rate above 0.3%. Microsoft applied the same rules to Outlook.com in 2025. Most companies have never opened Postmaster Tools, so the first sign is a quiet drop in a channel nobody was watching.

The open rate is fiction

Since Apple Mail Privacy Protection arrived in 2021, a large share of "opens" are recorded by Apple's proxy whether or not a human read the message. Programs still tuned on open rate are tuning on noise. Clicks, replies, and revenue per send are the numbers that survive.

One newsletter, sent to everyone

A subscriber who joined yesterday, a customer three days from reordering, and someone who went quiet a year ago all receive the same message on the same Tuesday. The automations that would treat them differently have been "phase two" for two years.

Templates that break in the client that matters

It looked right in the platform's preview. In Outlook the columns stacked; in Gmail dark mode the logo vanished into the background; on a phone the button was a nine-point link. Email is not a web page, and nobody tested it in the client half your list uses.

What you get

Eight parts, all in your accounts.

01 · Authentication and deliverability

SPF, DKIM, and DMARC on a dedicated marketing subdomain, verified by real test sends to Gmail, Yahoo, and Outlook. One-click unsubscribe headers, DMARC reports going to someone who reads them, Google Postmaster Tools connected, and a warm-up schedule if the domain is new.

02 · Platform setup or migration

Your platform configured, the sending domain connected, the list imported with bounces and unsubscribes suppressed and the consent source recorded, and your site forms wired in. Changing platforms? The move is in scope.

03 · Segmentation

New, active, lapsing, lapsed; customers versus prospects; country and language. Built from data you already have, so every automation has someone specific to send to.

04 · Five lifecycle automations

Welcome, post-purchase or onboarding, abandoned cart or lead nurture depending on your model, win-back, and a sunset flow that stops mailing people who never engage. Written, wired to real triggers, and tested end to end.

05 · Template system

One master template and five layouts — newsletter, announcement, promotion, onboarding, and a plain-text style — with dark-mode handling, rendering-checked in Gmail, Outlook, Apple Mail, and on mobile before anything ships.

06 · Measurement

UTM conventions, GA4 events for email-sourced sessions and conversions, and a report built on clicks, conversions, and revenue per send. Open rate is not on it. A spam-complaint guardrail watched from day one.

07 · 90-day playbook

What to send, to whom, how often, for the first quarter — with subject-line rules, frequency guardrails, and a compliance checklist per market: GDPR, CAN-SPAM, CASL, and Korea's Network Act.

08 · Korea variant

When Korea is in scope: flows written in Korean, the (광고) subject prefix and prior-consent rules applied, and rendering checked in Naver Mail and Daum Mail. Kakao Channel messaging is scoped separately with our Korea market entry work, since it needs a Korean business registration.

What lands in the folderThe authenticated sending domain with every DNS record documented, the platform under your logins, five live automations with their copy in a document, the template files, the segment definitions, the measurement setup, and the 90-day playbook. Nothing sits in an account of ours.

How it is built

Deliverability first. Design after.

01

The order is the method

Authentication and list hygiene are finished and verified before a single campaign is designed, because a beautiful template sent from an unauthenticated domain is a beautiful template in a spam folder. We run the same chain on our own domain, with DMARC enforcing — it is not advice we have not taken.

  • Verified, not assumed — alignment is confirmed by test sends to Gmail, Yahoo, and Outlook seed addresses, not by a green tick in the platform.
  • Reputation isolated — marketing goes out on its own subdomain; your sales team's one-to-one mail is never in the blast radius.
  • Warmed up, not switched on — a new domain ramps volume over two to four weeks, because going from zero to full volume is itself a spam signal.
02

Automations do the work, campaigns do the talking

Most email revenue comes from messages triggered by what a person did — signed up, bought, went quiet — not from what the calendar says. The five flows are built first and run without anyone remembering to send them. Campaigns then go out on top, to a list that is already warm.

  • Triggered by behaviour — every flow starts from an event in your platform, not a date.
  • One job per message — one idea, one link. A message that asks for three things gets none of them.
  • Quiet subscribers are retired — list health beats list size; the sunset flow is not optional.
03

Written for the reply, not the open

Subject lines are written for the person reading, not for a click-bait test. In business-to-business programs the sender is a named person, because that is who gets answered. The preheader is written on purpose rather than left to whatever the first line happens to be.

  • Plain language — the message reads the way the person who signs it would actually write.
  • Plain-text checked — every message is read as text-only, because that is how a share of the list will see it.
  • In the reader's language — written in it, not translated into it, in whatever languages your customers use.
04

Measured on money, not opens

Open rate is not on the report. Since Apple Mail Privacy Protection, a large share of opens are recorded by a proxy whether or not anyone read the message, so we report on what a proxy cannot fake — clicks, conversions, revenue per send, and list growth net of unsubscribes — with the spam complaint rate watched as a guardrail rather than buried in a dashboard.

  • One number per flow — each automation reports its own conversions and revenue, so you can see which flow is earning and which needs rewriting.
  • Complaint rate as a tripwire — Gmail recommends staying under 0.1%; we alert well before 0.3%, the point where mail starts being rejected.
  • Attribution you can check — UTMs and GA4 events, so the number in the email report matches the number in your analytics.
05

Korea, if it is in scope

Commercial email in Korea runs under its own rules and its own clients. The English flows are not copied over; the Korean ones are written to Korean law and read in Korean mailboxes.

  • The (광고) prefix and prior consent — required by the Network Act for commercial email; built in, not bolted on.
  • Naver Mail and Daum Mail — checked alongside Gmail, because that is where a Korean list actually lives.
  • Kakao Channel, scoped separately — the message a Korean customer reads within minutes, but it needs a Korean business registration, so it lives in our Korea market entry work rather than here.

Process

Four steps, about four weeks.

Week 1

Access and audit

Read access to your platform, DNS, and analytics. We find out where your mail lands today with seed tests and Postmaster data, what consent exists for the list, and what your site currently collects.

Week 2

Foundation

Sending subdomain and DNS records, platform configured, list migrated with suppressions and consent source intact, forms connected. Warm-up starts here if the domain is new.

Week 3

Build

Segments defined, five automations written and wired, the template system built and rendering-tested, and measurement instrumented so the first send is counted correctly.

Week 4

Launch and handover

Flows switched on in sequence, the first campaign sent from the new template, a working session with whoever will own it, and the playbook. Then run it yourself — or keep us on monthly.

What we measureRevenue, or qualified leads, attributed to email in the ninety days after launch — per message sent, not in total — with two guardrails alongside it: inbox placement on the sending domain and a spam complaint rate under 0.1%. Open rate is not on the report.

Honest limits

What this project will not do.

01

It will not fix a list you do not have. Email multiplies an audience; it does not create one. Under a few hundred addresses, a capture point — a form, a checkout checkbox, something worth signing up for — matters more than automation, and we will say so before building the automation.

02

It will not rescue a burned domain overnight. Reputation with Gmail is earned by sending behaviour over weeks. If your domain is already on blocklists or your complaint rate is already high, the first month is repair rather than growth, and the plan will say that in writing.

03

Purchased lists are declined. Not only on principle. Mailing people who did not ask breaks the law in most of the markets you sell into, and it puts the sending domain on blocklists that take months to leave. There is no version of this project that starts with a bought list.

04

If you have a CRM owner and working flows, you may not need us. A team with its platform in daily use and a named person accountable for it can do most of this internally. The case for buying it is a company where the platform was set up once, by someone who has since left, and nobody is sure what it is sending.

FAQ

Email marketing, answered.

Which email platform do you work with?+
Whichever one your team will actually log into. We build in Klaviyo, Mailchimp, HubSpot, Brevo, ActiveCampaign, Customer.io, and the email tools built into Shopify, and can recommend one if you have none. Migration is in scope if you are changing platforms. GrowLinq holds no reseller or referral arrangement with any of them, so the recommendation is not a commission.
Do we need a new sending domain?+
Usually a subdomain of the one you have — news.yourbrand.com, or similar. Mailbox providers score reputation per domain, so marketing mail on its own subdomain means one bad campaign cannot damage the deliverability of your sales team's one-to-one email. A new subdomain is warmed up over two to four weeks by ramping volume, because switching a fresh domain straight to full volume is itself a spam signal.
What do you need from us to start?+
Access to DNS or the person who has it, a login to your current email platform, read access to your analytics, your existing list with a note on where each contact's consent came from, brand assets, and one person who can approve copy within a day or two. The consent record is the only real blocker: a list with no record of how it was collected cannot be mailed responsibly, and we will tell you so rather than send to it. One more condition: the abandoned-cart and post-purchase flows assume a platform your email tool integrates with natively, such as Shopify or WooCommerce. On a custom-built site, your developer installs the tracking code before those two flows can run.
How long does it take?+
About four weeks from access to handover: audit and access in week one, foundation in week two, automations and templates in week three, launch and handover in week four. If you are moving to a new sending domain, mailbox providers require volume to ramp over two to four weeks, so full-volume sends may land after handover. That is a rule of the inbox, not a delay in the build.
Can we run it ourselves afterwards?+
Yes. Everything is built in your accounts under your logins — the sending domain, the platform, the automations, the templates, and the report. The handover includes the written playbook and a working session with whoever will own it. Companies that would rather not own it keep us on monthly, but the project does not require that.
What about GDPR, CAN-SPAM, and other email laws?+
We build the mechanics the laws require: consent captured and recorded, sender identification in every message, and unsubscribes honoured well inside the legal window. CAN-SPAM allows ten business days; Gmail and Yahoo expect one-click unsubscribes processed within two, and we set the platform to that. We are not lawyers, so the compliance checklist we hand over per market is a starting point for your legal review, not a substitute for it.
Does this cover Korea?+
Yes, when Korea is in scope. Korea's Information and Communications Network Act requires prior consent for commercial email and a (광고) prefix in the subject line, so the flows are built to those rules rather than copied from the English versions. Korean-language messages are written in Korean and rendering is checked in Naver Mail and Daum Mail. Kakao Channel messaging — where Korean customers actually read — needs a Korean business registration, so it is scoped with our Korea market entry work rather than promised here.

Also

Web & Landing Pages →The forms and pages that feed the list — built and tested so the capture rate keeps climbing. Brand Kit →The email header, footer, and signature every template here is built from. Korea Market Entry →Kakao Channel, Naver, and the consent rules a Korean list is mailed under.

If you have read this far, the website audit is free.

The free audit is a website audit: how you show up in search and in AI search, whether basic tracking is alive, and the first three things we would fix, in writing. It is the same audit whichever page you came from, and it costs nothing. If it is Email Marketing you want, send us your last three campaigns and the address you send from in the same form, and we will answer about that instead.

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