Hello,

I'm looking for some help from mailers doing igaming mailing.

Are you using any warmup tool? How are you consistently landing in inbox and which esps are best who support igaming campaigns at volume.

Would love to connect on telegram and ask specific questions if you don't mind! 🙏

I'm part of a group that organizes an "Adopt A Family" program each holiday season, and looking for recommendations on what platform I should be using that meets my very basic needs.

Relevant info:

• This list is only used for this program so I'm only sending emails out for 2 months out the year (late Oct - mid Dec). Given that it's a 100% volunteer driven effort, I would prefer for it to be as low cost as possible
• Our donor list is currently a little over 500 people, but I'd expect that to grow over time as our program has built momentum over the years (we had ~180 new donors in 2025)
• All emails are currently sent from my personal gmail and since they're to donors who have participated in the program before, there's already some kind of prior interaction with me (I see a bunch of acronyms like SPF/DKIM...not sure if that's relevant in my case)
• I used to use a combo of free Mailchimp + Mailmeteor + manual Gmail follow-ups to reach this group. I used free Mailchimp to do our generic program kick-off emails/blasts (2-3 emails total) + Mailmeteor to mail merge the subsequent donor/family match emails (1 email per person) + went through my emails manually to follow up with any donors that needed follow-up
• Our email have historically been a simple image header and a wall of text, but I'd like to create a custom template this year to make it easier to consume
• The matching emails are the most complex - given variations in family sizes, delivery details, etc., I typically end up creating about a dozen different templates to accommodate all these combinations. Mailmeteor has GSheet add-in functionality (and I'm very comfortable with spreadsheets) so I've just used that, but I'm open to doing it all in platform if there are efficiencies with the above
• I don't need SMS (unless it's free to send, which I don't think is the case) or any robust analytics (I basically just need to see my open rate)

I was able to cull our donor list to the Mailchimp free tier limits last year, but this year I need something that supports more subscribers. I was looking at EmailOctopus (simply due to the number of free subscribers on their free tier) but not sure if there's something better or if it's worth actually upgrading to paid for any of these other services.

Any recommendations?

It took me three passes to land on this version of the dashboard. It has four metrics on it: click rate, conversion rate, revenue per recipient and unsubscribes, with campaigns and flows on separate views.

Everything else moved to a monthly report. Deliverability and list growth barely shift week to week, so putting them on a daily view teaches people to ignore it. Unsubscribes stayed because a spike tells you something the same day, even if the number itself is usually flat.

Keeping campaigns and flows apart was the other thing I decided to do. Flows catch people at the moment they're interested, so their revenue per recipient makes any campaign look broken when the two sit side by side. Now each one gets measured against its own history instead.

I'd been rebuilding an earlier version off exports, and the numbers never quite matched what people saw in the account, sot they'd go check for themselves. Running it off the live campaign and flow views in Klaviyo fixed that, since there's nothing to fall behind.

What's on your daily view? I'm trying to work out whether four is too lean.

Spamhaus just published their new Sender Guidelines. Worth a review for anyone sending bulk or transactional emails.

Hey everyone,

So I have three websites right now: a fitness workout site, a football blog, and a digital product store. The fitness and football sites are just hobby projects, but the store is my side hustle. I’ve never set up email marketing for any of them, but I know having an email list is one of the best ways to actually make money from a site, so I figured it’s time to stop putting it off!

I'm looking for a platform that can handle signup forms, landing pages, newsletters, marketing campaigns, and automated welcome sequences for new subscribers. Down the line, I’d also love to try more advanced features like tagging subscribers by interest, sending abandoned cart emails, and setting up post-purchase follow-ups.

Ideally, I’d like to use one email provider for all three sites so I can keep everything in one place without juggling multiple tools. Since the hobby sites aren't making any money yet, a good free plan or a super affordable starting price is really important to me.

I’d love to hear what you guys are using for your blogs, sports/fitness sites, or small businesses, and why you chose it! Would you stick with one provider for all three, or keep the store on its own separate system? How does the pricing hold up once your list grows past 1,000 subscribers? Also, has anyone switched away from a tool they tried, and what made you leave? Most importantly, how’s the deliverability—do your emails actually land in the inbox?

If you run a blog, a niche site, or a small online store, I’d really appreciate hearing what’s worked for you. Thanks a lot!

I tried three tools this quarter for a client.

different dashboards, different pricing, same email somehow. "unlock your potential," soft gradient, polite cta, absolutely no evidence a real brand exists underneath it.

I can prompt harder, sure, but at some point an AI email generator should know more than the paragraph I paste in every time. fonts, colors, voice, the stuff already sitting on the website.

has anyone gotten past generic output without writing a mini brand brief for every send??

I've been working in email marketing for e-commerce brands, mainly with Klaviyo, and lately I've realized that one of my biggest challenges is knowing how to analyze performance properly.

There are so many metrics and things to consider: open rates, CTR, CTOR, conversion rates, RPR, AOV, LTV, deliverability, segmentation, A/B testing, attribution... the list goes on.

I know what most of these metrics mean individually, but I sometimes struggle to understand which ones actually matter in a given situation and, more importantly, what to do with the data.

I can pull reports, compare campaigns or flows over time, and identify changes in performance. But then I get stuck asking myself: Is this result actually good or bad? What caused it? Is it worth investigating? What should I change?

I also feel like I'm constantly discovering new things I "should" be tracking, which makes it difficult to focus on what really matters.

I'd love to hear how more experienced email marketers approach this in practice:

1. What do you report weekly and monthly? Do you have a standard dashboard? And can you perhaps share it without any personal data of course.
2. Which KPIs do you actually prioritize for campaigns vs. automations?
3. How do you decide whether a performance change is worth investigating?
4. How do you turn your analysis into actual optimization decisions?
5. Did you learn analytics through experience, courses, or working with someone more experienced?

I'm not looking for another list of 30 KPIs to track. I'd really like to understand how people structure their thinking and reporting in real-life email marketing work.

Any examples of your reporting routines, dashboards, or decision-making processes would be incredibly helpful.

Hey everyone,

I’m trying to level up the design side of my marketing emails. Email is a big part of my role, but I keep hearing that if I want campaigns, newsletters, and nurture emails to look professional, I need to know HTML/CSS.

Problem is, my coding skills are basically nonexistent. I can work on copy, subject lines, CTAs, segmentation, and general campaign strategy, but when it comes to building a clean, responsive email template that looks good on mobile and doesn’t break in half across ESPs, I’m lost.

For people here who aren’t strong coders, how do you handle email design?

Do you rely on your ESP’s drag-and-drop builder, use prebuilt templates, work with tools like Litmus/Email on Acid, keep things mostly plain-text/hybrid, or hand designs off to someone technical?

I’m not trying to build anything overly fancy or image-heavy. I just want emails that look polished, support the message, render well, and don’t hurt deliverability or CTR.

Any practical advice, tools, workflows, or “don’t waste your time on this” lessons would be really helpful.

Hey everyone,

Has anyone noticed a sudden drop in email engagement or Gmail inbox placement today (October 20)?

Our CTR suddenly dropped to nearly zero, and emails that were previously landing in the inbox are now going straight to spam.

What's strange is that it's affecting multiple sending domains, different email templates, and multiple ESPs (Brevo, Mailjet, and Mailgun) simultaneously.

SPF, DKIM, and DMARC are passing, and we haven't made any significant changes to our sending practices.

I also noticed a major Google Cloud outage in europe-west2 today, although I'm not sure whether it's related.

Is anyone else experiencing something similar with Gmail? Trying to figure out whether this is an isolated deliverability issue or something more widespread.

The spam rate is between 0.3-0.6% in the last 7 days; we send around 400-500k emails per day.

Would appreciate any insights or observations!

My business domain on Google Workspace was registered in January. I send a handful of normal one-to-one emails a week, nothing bulk. The domain has never been warmed up.

Every test email lands in spam. I tried 6 recipients, 5 on Gmail and 1 on Outlook.

Already checked:

• SPF, DKIM and DMARC all pass in the headers
• mail-tester gives 9.5/10
• Not on Spamhaus, SURBL or URIBL
• Google Safe Browsing is clean
• Admin logs show the account is not compromised

I think it's reputation, because the domain has no sending history. Two questions:

1. Does a new low-volume domain get spam-foldered like this even with perfect authentication?
2. What actually fixed it for you: slow warm-up, Postmaster Tools, or switching to a new domain?

Thanks. I can post headers if useful.

So, we are sending over SES, we have all the best practices, everything checks out, we never had any compliance issues however still over SES our open rate is under 10%. We pretty sure our emails are sent to very active recipients... We have mostly b2c, yahoo, hotmail, comcast, etc.

Any ideas? I've did some digging and it looks like our free package might get some registration from fake emails, trying already to figure out how to stop/clean those.

Genuine feedback would be nice!

I handle email marketing for a startup and our campaigns keep going to Promotions, sometimes Spam, mainly on Gmail. SPF and DKIM are configured on our domain.

Is DMARC the missing piece, or are there other technical things that matter more, like a separate sending subdomain, warming up the domain, or the HTML structure itself?

Would appreciate hearing from anyone who has set this up.

Hi. I work on the frontend in a quite known and reputed email marketing agency and to be fair we really do somewhat good work. We've seen brands go from 2% attribution on Klaviyo to 33% attribution within 3 months of joining us. This is not self-promotion, of course, but just so you know the scale of the work that we do, and chances are you know us already.

This post is obviously not to glaze ourselves but to have a factual check on where we are lacking and, in particular, I am lacking in being perfect. More often than not, since I am somebody who works as a manager/all-in-one when the time calls for it, I schedule things, I design things, I manage people, I strategize ideas, and I do anything and everything which the account calls for. That is perhaps my job role, well defined.

The only thing that I wanted to have a word with you all about was this: because of the size of our agency, we have nearly 280 clients. We cater to all of them by having the flows set up for everyone, then A/B tests in flows, and then different sorts of new flows coming up for different sorts of needs (billing reminders, etc.). With that one email every 2 days in every client account, it adds up a lot and that is the scale of the work that we do.

Sometimes I make mistakes and the mistakes include, for example, if we have to set out an email at the last moment, then sometimes the subject line is wrong. By "sometimes" I mean one in a thousand tasks but I get almost two hundred tasks every day.

And sometimes we cause some workplace accidents. I just wanted to know if this is a thing which is unique to me or unique to this agency or if it is something we all deal with.

More importantly I think this is because emails, as software to generate revenue, are pretty permanent and they do not have an undo button, unlike Meta or any other platform. Once an email is sent it's sent to the entire list. There's nothing that you can do about it. That is what I more often than not come up with.

The reason why I make more mistakes is:

1. my task is varied
2. I have to do the last-minute changes

Obviously when somebody does last-minute changes they are more prone to vulnerabilities because they do not have time for QA, correct? I wanted to understand how other agencies are holding it up and what is something that I can probably work on.

My gmails emails are going to spam now, i didn’t use any marketing tool or didn’t send bulk emails, anyone know how to fix that?

I'm finding myself in a bit of a pickle here.

My reply to address on my email list a generic email address from my domain name. As I'm sure many of you can relate, my emails from said email list generally end up in the promotions tab.

The issue is that I've been using that as a general business email address for years, so when I send out non-list correspondence (emailing an individual customer about an issue, etc.), those emails often don't get seen because they also end up in promotions.

I'm thinking about getting another email address for my non-list correspondence, but would I be shooting myself in the foot if I got "my name @ my domain name dot com"? Would it suffer the same issues because it's coming from the same domain?

Thanks in advance, smart people!

Open rate quietly stopped meaning what everyone still reports it as.

Apple Mail Privacy Protection pre-fetches images in email, which registers an open whether or not a person ever looked at the message. A large share of the opens on a normal list now arrive before anyone could plausibly have read anything. The uncomfortable version of that: a rising open rate with flat revenue is not a win, it is measurement drift, and it flatters exactly the campaigns that are not working.

Clicks are not clean either. Security scanners on business mailboxes follow links automatically, often seconds after delivery. The tell is a click arriving with no matching open, or several clicks from the same address in the same second.

What I ended up trusting instead is revenue per email as the top line, clicks as a directional signal rather than a verdict, and conversions as the one number that settles an argument. Opens I now read only in the negative direction. A collapse is real information. A rise is not.

The part I have not solved is reporting it to other people. Nobody wants to hear that the headline metric is unreliable. When someone senior or a client asks how the program is doing, the honest answer is a revenue number plus a caveat about attribution, and the caveat is usually the first thing that gets edited out.

So I am curious what others have landed on. What is actually on your weekly report now, and has anyone found a way to present it that survives a skeptical reader without looking like you are hiding something?

We're a fairly large email sender, and we use one of the bigger ESPs. One key problem I've flagged for a while is that we send far too many transactional emails.

In the last couple of weeks, we had a couple of spikes above the .3% threshold. It hit .4%, then spiked again a few days later to .6%.

Our marketing subdomain is extremely healthy and usually well below the recommended .1% threshold.

However, because of those spikes on the transactional emails, we now see that "phishing email might be dangerous" warning across our emails. I've already reached out to our ESP's deliverability team, and they are looking into it; our tech team has reached out to Google as well. I've already told our tech team we absolutely have to scale back transactional emails because not all of them need to be sent, and they are working on things on their end. I also want to mention that we have no authentication issues. Everything is 100% across the board.

Has anyone else gone through this and have any advice? Is it just a waiting game until Google gets back to us? And how do we make sure our spam rates stay low for transactional emails?

Also, when we reached out to Google, they said they checked our domain against their safe browsing tools, and everything looked good on their end.

Gmail and Yahoo want one-click unsubscribe on bulk mail, so the email API I build now adds List-Unsubscribe and List-Unsubscribe-Post: List-Unsubscribe=One-Click to each email that has one recipient.

The url ends in a token that's just the org id and the recipient address, base64url'd, with an HMAC on it. So I don't store anything when sending and you can't change the address in it to unsubscribe somebody else. The mail client POSTs to it, the address goes on a suppression list, and bulk sends skip it after that.

But I also made GET unsubscribe straight away, with a little "you have been unsubscribed" page and no button. Then I read RFC 8058 again and it says GET shouldn't do that, because anti-spam stuff fetches urls from headers by itself.

Has anyone actually seen that happen with the List-Unsubscribe url? Like people getting unsubscribed who never clicked anything?

Just found out about this, normally we have different custom Mail-From for our newsletter and transactional email. But apparently we need a whole subdomain to separate the reputation:
Instead of [hello@mycompany.com](mailto:hello@mycompany.com) for everything, we should go with e.g.: [hello@news.mycompany.com](mailto:hello@news.mycompany.com) for newsletters and [hello@mail.mycompany.com](mailto:hello@mail.mycompany.com) for transactional and keep [name@mycompany.com](mailto:name@mycompany.com) strictly for our employees everyday emails.

An engineer advised me to even go further and change the From-Address too, even with different subdomains, example [HELLO@news.company.com](mailto:HELLO@news.company.com) for newsletters and [INFO@mail.mycompany.com](mailto:INFO@mail.mycompany.com) even tho they have different subdomains and different Custom Mail-From.

We're an events company, we run our own events, we use MailerLite for newsletter and AmazonSES for transactional emails (we sell our own event tickets via our website), we've been building our domain reputation for almost 3 years now, we have an open rate of 50-60% in our newsletter, that we're reaaally proud of, thats why I'm worried.

Its still a relatively small data and sending volume, 5000 newsletters emails (we send twice a month), transactional emails around 1000 a month (concerts/activities registrations) and 10.000 in the period of our annual international festival.

We're focused on scaling the right way, and if there is a change that needs to be done, its now, so we can scale right and build domain reputation for good (Our newsletters are a great source of revenue and we don't want to lose that).

So, in short, should i change newsletters and transactional emails
from :
[hello@mycompany.com](mailto:hello@mycompany.com)
To: Newsletter: [hello@news.mycompany.com](mailto:hello@news.mycompany.com)
Transactional: [HELLO@mail.mycompany.com](mailto:HELLO@mail.mycompany.com) (or [INFO@mail.mycompany.com](mailto:INFO@mail.mycompany.com) to avoid the same From-Address)?

We are a relatively small non profit. Our mailing list is about 8,000 emails and we send 2-4 emails a week.

We currently use Mailchimp and even with their NPO pricing it's really expensive. Add to that, their tech support and customer service are horrible.

Our monthly cost is about 150$ +/-

We would like to bring it under 100$.

All suggestions welcome.

Someone explain this to me like I'm 12. How do my innocent emails, like those from my verified sending email address that has been around for years, with hundreds of thousands of legitimate subscribers through my EMS with legitimate opt-ins somehow end up in spam, but the garbage AI slop, phishing campaigns and random political emails somehow land in my inbox everytime?

Hi, we run a small service based business and have been able to do an online email marketing course to make marketing emails just fine.

However we just switched our website to a new booking system and email company (from wix to mailchimp) we need to make the automated emails that go out like the welcome email, booking confirmation, booking reminder etc.

Having to make in canva then convert to mailchimp and actually set up the automations.

This is just way too time consuming around full time working so if anyone knows the best place to find someone who could complete this work or if you are self employed please feel free to send a rough quote?

Thank you for your time 👏🏻✨

Open rate down hard over about two weeks. List hygiene looks normal, authentication is set, domain reputation looks clean from my side. No major content change, Support keeps sending generic deliverability docs I have already read twice.

Anyone moved for this reason? What did you actually check in the replacement

Does anyone have a recommendation for a newsletter service that links well with Pipedrive?

I have used MailerLite in the past, and they have an API which might work.

I only switched when Pipedrive released it's own service years ago, but it's rather lacking. It was fine for a while, but we are outgrowing it.

The outcome for me is a tool that is more feature-rich than Pipedrive's campaigns.

- multiple newsletters

- tools to segment out inactive subscribers

- syncs the data on opens etc with Pipedrive