The three emails that pay

What does an email marketing agency do for a small brand?

Less than the big platforms want you to buy. It sets up the three automated emails that do most of the work, writes the monthly send, keeps the list clean so the mail arrives, and reads the revenue each email produced. It does not build a forty-step flow for a list of nine hundred people. For most small brands the whole job is three automations done well and one honest send a month, which is why it sits inside Standard rather than being sold on its own.

The three emails that pay

• The welcome. Sent the minute someone signs up, while they still remember why. It says who you are in one paragraph and shows one product. It is the highest-earning email most brands will ever send, and most brands have never written it.
• The abandoned cart. A buyer who got as far as the checkout and left has told you exactly what they want. One plain reminder, a few hours later, with the product and the link. No discount in the first message; the discount trains the buyer to abandon.
• The monthly. One send a month with something worth opening: a new product, a story from the studio, a reason to come back. Not a newsletter of everything. One thing, said well.

Why we do not report open rates

Open rates stopped meaning much when mail apps began loading images on the reader's behalf, which registers an open whether or not a person looked. An agency that leads its report with opens is reporting the behaviour of software. We report what an email was sent to do: the orders, the replies, the visits that came from it, and the unsubscribes it cost.

The same honesty applies to the list. A list that has not been cleaned is sending to addresses that bounce, and enough bounces mean the people who do want your mail stop receiving it. Cleaning the list makes the numbers look smaller and the mail arrive. We do it first.

How we set email up

1. 01

   Audit what exists

   Where the addresses came from, whether they agreed to be written to, which automations are already firing and what they say. Most brands have a welcome email they have never read.

2. 02

   Clean, then connect

   Remove the dead addresses, confirm the sending domain is set up so your mail is not filed as junk, and connect the store so an order is credited to the email that caused it.

3. 03

   Write the three

   Welcome, abandoned cart, monthly. In your voice, not ours, with one product and one link each. Plain text where plain text performs, which is more often than designers like.

4. 04

   Send, read, adjust

   Two campaigns a month on Standard. After each, one short note: what it earned, what it cost in unsubscribes, what the next one changes.

When is email the wrong channel?

When there is no list. Email cannot find customers; it can only keep them. A brand with a few hundred addresses should spend on finding buyers and let email grow from the sales. It is also the wrong lead channel when the sale closes in a conversation. For The Gallery, where a first order is agreed in the DMs, the list is the one asset the platform cannot take back, so we build it from the sale rather than the other way round.

What it costs and what it includes

Two email campaigns a month are inside Standard, at $4,000 a month, alongside the content, the search work and the monthly report. The three automations are set up in month one as part of that. We do not sell email as a standalone retainer, because for a small brand it is not enough work to be one, and a fee bigger than the revenue it produces is not a service.

You keep the platform account, the list and every template. The addresses are your customers, not ours.