EMAIL
MARKETING.

With email, the list is yours. People gave you their address, you can take the list to any platform, and a subscriber sees what you send without a feed deciding whether they should, which makes email one of the cheapest ways to bring a customer back.

The inbox has its own gatekeepers, though, and since February 2024 they have been strict. Gmail and Yahoo now reject or bury mail from senders who have not set up authentication, make unsubscribing hard, or let complaints creep up. So email marketing today is two jobs, and we do both: getting into the inbox, and being worth opening once you are there.

What we write and send

Most brands need two or three of these to start with, usually a welcome sequence and a newsletter, and add the automated ones once the basics work.

What a good welcome sequence looks like

The welcome sequence reaches people at the moment they chose to hear from you. A simple version has four emails, adjusted to the brand and the product.

1. Straight away: the welcome. Deliver whatever the sign-up promised, such as the guide, the discount or the first issue, and say what you will send and how often.
2. A day or two later: the story. Why the brand exists, who is behind it, how the product is made.
3. A few days on: the proof. Reviews, a customer's story, a result, and an honest answer to the question that stops most people buying.
4. About a week in: the nudge. The first purchase, booking or enquiry, with a reason to do it now, or the three things most customers start with.

After that the subscriber joins the regular newsletter. The timing and the number of emails change with the business: a clinic's welcome sequence answers questions about the first consultation, an online store's leads to the first order, and a foundation's explains where a donation goes.

Getting into the inbox: Gmail and Yahoo's sender rules

Google's rules for everyone who sends to Gmail took effect in February 2024: authenticate with SPF or DKIM, have valid DNS records, send over a secure connection, and keep the spam rate under 0.3%. Bulk senders, roughly those who send 5,000 or more messages a day to personal Gmail accounts, must do more. They need SPF and DKIM, a DMARC policy, a From address aligned with the sending domain, and one-click unsubscribe on marketing mail, and Google asks them to "keep spam rates reported in Postmaster Tools below 0.10% and avoid ever reaching a spam rate of 0.30% or higher." Enforcement tightened again from November 2025, with non-compliant mail rejected outright.

Yahoo's requirements for bulk senders are almost the same: SPF and DKIM, a DMARC policy, one-click unsubscribe, a spam rate below 0.3%, and unsubscribes honoured within two days (Google recommends 48 hours). "One-click" has a precise meaning, set out in RFC 8058: a List-Unsubscribe header carrying a web address, plus a List-Unsubscribe-Post header that says List-Unsubscribe=One-Click, so the person is unsubscribed in a single step. A mailto link on its own does not meet it.

The all-sender rules apply to every brand, and the bulk-sender rules arrive quickly once a list grows, so we set all of it up from the start. Before the first campaign we set up and test the domain's SPF, DKIM and DMARC records, connect Google Postmaster Tools so the spam rate is visible once volumes are high enough for Google to report it, make sure unsubscribes work in one click, and warm a new sending domain up gradually.

Open rates stopped meaning much

Since iOS 15 in September 2021, Apple's Mail Privacy Protection has prevented senders from learning whether an email has been opened in Apple Mail. Images are loaded for privacy whether or not anyone reads the email, so opens recorded from those inboxes say little about what people actually did.

So we do not judge emails on opens. The numbers that mean something are clicks, replies, purchases or enquiries traced back to the email, unsubscribes and spam complaints. It is the same principle as our co-founder Niraj's argument about the like button on social media, written up in Destroy the like button: measure the action that costs the reader something.

Consent and India's data protection law

India has no law written specifically for marketing email in the way TRAI's regulations cover promotional calls and texts. The law that applies is the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, because an email list is personal data. Under section 6, consent must be free, specific, informed, unconditional and unambiguous, with a clear affirmative action, and withdrawing it has to be as easy as giving it. The DPDP Rules were notified on 13 November 2025, and the consent and notice duties apply from about May 2027. Penalties under the Act reach ₹250 crore for failing to protect personal data and ₹50 crore for other breaches.

In practice that means a sign-up form that says plainly what people will receive, no pre-ticked boxes, a record of when and where each person subscribed, an unsubscribe link in every marketing email, and never buying or renting a list. A bought list has no valid consent behind it, so it will not satisfy the Act once the consent duties apply, and spam filters punish it already.

Emails people want to open

Each email has one idea and one thing to do. The subject line and preview text are written together, as the two lines that decide whether the rest gets read. The sender name is a person or the brand, never "noreply". The email reads well on a phone with images switched off, because some inboxes still block images by default, and every image has a text description.

The writing is done by the same team that writes the brand's social media and website, so the email sounds like the brand everywhere else. A newsletter is a chance to say something the brand believes in, show work, answer a common question or tell a customer's story. A brand that only ever emails discounts teaches its list to wait for discounts.

Platforms, lists and set-up

We work in the email platform you already use, or help you choose one that fits the size of your list, how much automation you need and your budget. Set-up covers the domain authentication, the sign-up forms on your website, the templates, the automated sequences, and the tags that let your list be split by what people bought or asked about. If you are moving platforms, we move the list and its consent records with it, and nobody who unsubscribed gets added back.

What we measure

Each month you see how many emails were delivered, clicked and acted on, the replies, the sales or enquiries traced to each campaign and sequence, list growth, unsubscribes and the spam complaint rate from Google Postmaster Tools. Then what we are changing: subject lines, timing, segments or the sequence itself.

What it costs

We quote against the brief. The price depends on how many campaigns and sequences you need, how much writing and design each takes, and how much set-up the account needs first. The email platform's subscription is paid to the platform, and GST at 18% applies to agency fees. Many brands start with a set-up project (authentication, templates, a welcome sequence) and then move to a monthly newsletter and campaigns. Send the brief with your list size and platform, and we will tell you where to start.