Email Marketing

What does email marketing do?

Email marketing means sending people who have given you permission messages prepared around their interests, at the right time. On social media, the platform’s algorithm decides who sees a post; your email list belongs directly to you, and you choose who you reach. A well-managed list is therefore a lasting channel for talking to your customers, independent of any ad budget.

The real strength of the channel is that a message can be shaped around a person’s behavior. Instead of sending the same email to someone who has just subscribed and to a customer who has been buying for two years, each can be shown content that fits their stage. In email marketing, results depend less on how many emails you send than on how well this distinction is made.

Email marketing is an especially productive channel for these businesses:

• E-commerce brands with repeat purchase potential
• B2B companies with a long sales process that need to build trust at the quote stage
• Clinics, studios and educational institutions that work with appointments, memberships or subscriptions
• Businesses that regularly announce new products, menus, events or campaigns

The steps of an email marketing engagement

Whether we are building a new list or taking over one that has been in use for years, we move through the work in the same order:

1. Current state: We review how the list was collected, the platform in use, the results of past sends and the domain settings.
2. Consent and infrastructure: We set up the consent structure, the authentication records and the unsubscribe process.
3. Segment and flow plan: We map out what goes to which person at which stage.
4. Templates and content: We prepare email templates that fit your brand identity and read comfortably on mobile.
5. Testing and launch: We check links, appearance and triggers before sending.
6. Measurement and improvement: We report results regularly and update flows and campaigns based on the data.

A permission-based list: the legal foundation of email marketing

The success of an email marketing campaign starts with how the list was collected. Sending to addresses collected without permission or bought from a third party carries legal risk and quickly damages your sender reputation. That is why we start email marketing work by checking the consent structure before the content.

Commercial electronic message consent and İYS

In Turkey, commercial electronic messages that promote a product or service generally require the recipient’s prior consent. These consents are recorded and managed through the Message Management System (İYS, Turkey’s commercial message consent registry), which was set up under the relevant legislation. Recipients can exercise their right to refuse at any time without giving a reason, so every email must include a clear and easy unsubscribe link.

Different rules may apply to sends to tradespeople and merchants, or to messages that are purely informational. Because an email address is also personal data, the notification obligation under KVKK (Turkish Personal Data Protection Law No. 6698) applies as well. We recommend confirming with your legal adviser which rule applies to your sends; we do the technical setup to fit that framework.

Growing the list the right way

In email marketing, a healthy list forms when people sign up at the moment they actually want to receive email. These are the main methods we use to grow a list:

• Sign-up forms placed at suitable points on the site that clearly say what kind of emails will be sent
• Value offered in return for signing up, such as a guide, a checklist or a benefit on the first order
• A consent checkbox at the payment step that is not pre-checked
• Sign-ups collected in a store, at a trade fair or at an event, with documented consent

Sending a confirmation email after sign-up and asking the person to verify their address, known as double opt-in, keeps mistyped and fake addresses off the list. The list grows a little more slowly, but every email you send reaches someone who exists and is interested.

Deliverability: getting email to the inbox

Even the best-designed email marketing campaign goes unseen if it lands in the spam folder. Deliverability depends on how your domain is set up, your sender reputation and how recipients react to your emails. In our email marketing service, we prepare this technical groundwork before any campaign.

Domain authentication: SPF, DKIM and DMARC

SPF defines which servers may send email on behalf of your domain. DKIM adds a digital signature to the email, showing it was not altered in transit. DMARC tells receiving servers what to do with emails that fail those two checks. Together, they make it harder for anyone else to send email in your name and prove to providers that the sender really is you.

This is no longer a choice; it is an explicit expectation of the major providers. According to Google’s email sender guidelines, anyone sending more than 5,000 messages a day to Gmail accounts must set up SPF, DKIM and DMARC together and support one-click unsubscribe in marketing emails. Other large providers, such as Yahoo, expect similar steps from high-volume senders.

Sender reputation and list cleaning

Providers judge your reputation by whether recipients open your emails, whether they mark them as spam and how many of your addresses are invalid. Sending to thousands of people at once from a domain that has been idle for a long time strains that reputation. On a new sending infrastructure, we raise volume gradually and send the first messages to the most engaged subscribers.

Cleaning the list regularly is also part of deliverability. We remove addresses that bounce, and we first put subscribers who have not engaged with any email for a long time into a win-back flow. Stopping sends to those who do not respond to that either shrinks the list, but it raises the chance that campaigns reach the inbox.

Segmentation and automated email flows

In email marketing, segmentation means splitting the list into groups that share traits. Sending everyone the same email is easy, but a person who keeps getting irrelevant email stops reading after a while or unsubscribes. A good segment structure gets more meaningful results with fewer emails.

What do we base segments on?

• Purchase history: Customers who have never bought, bought once or buy regularly
• Time of last engagement: People who opened and clicked recently, and those who have been quiet for a long time
• Area of interest: The categories they browsed, the form they signed up through or the content they downloaded
• Customer value: Total spend and order frequency
• Location and language: Announcements specific to a branch, or lists that need to be sent in a different language

Segments are fed by data from sign-up forms and from your e-commerce or CRM system. That is why it matters to integrate the email platform properly with your site; when we set up an e-commerce website, we plan this connection from the start.

The core flows we build

Automated flows are email sequences that start on their own when a certain behavior occurs. They are set up once and then reviewed regularly. These are the flows we build most often for e-commerce businesses:

• Welcome series: Introduces the new subscriber to the brand, the featured products and, if there is one, the sign-up benefit.
• Abandoned cart: Reminds people who added items to the cart but did not complete payment of the products and the purchase terms.
• Browse reminder: Shows related products to subscribers who viewed a particular product page but did not add it to the cart.
• Post-purchase: Keeps the relationship going with usage tips, a review request and complementary products.
• Win-back: Reminds customers who have not shopped for a long time about the brand.

Transactional emails and marketing emails

Transactional emails such as order confirmations, shipping notices and password resets serve a different purpose from campaign emails, and recipients usually expect them. We design these emails in a way that matches the brand’s voice and stays orderly. However, adding promotional content to a transactional notice can turn it into a commercial message, so we draw the line between email marketing and transactional emails with the consent rules in mind.

Flows for B2B and service businesses

In businesses where sales move through quotes and meetings, email marketing focuses on informing the prospect until the moment of decision. Someone who downloads a guide or fills in a quote form can be sent a short series that explains the process, answers frequently asked questions and offers examples of similar work. The series does not replace the sales team; it means the first meeting starts with a better-informed, better-prepared counterpart.

For more advanced scenarios that change the content based on a person’s behavior, we plan email flows together with our personalized marketing work.

Planning email marketing campaigns

While automated flows run in the background, email marketing campaigns carry a specific announcement, discount or piece of content. For each campaign, we first set a single goal: introducing the new collection, collecting sign-ups for an event or announcing the seasonal sale. Squeezing several goals into one email can end with the reader clicking none of them.

Subject line, preview text and sender name

There are three things a person sees in the inbox: the sender name, the subject line and the preview text. A familiar, consistent sender name helps people recognize who the email is from right away and open it. We summarize the content honestly in the subject line and use the preview text as a second sentence that completes the subject. Exaggerated, all-caps or misleading subject lines may draw attention in the short term, but they weaken trust and deliverability.

Content: not only discount announcements

A brand whose every email is a discount teaches its subscribers not to open email when there is no discount. That is why, in the email marketing calendar, we make room for content that helps the reader alongside sales-focused campaigns. A short guide on how to use a product, seasonal recommendations, a behind-the-scenes look at a new service or an answer to a frequent question gives people a reason to open your next email too.

You do not have to produce this content from scratch. Blog posts, social media videos and information gathered from customer questions reach a different audience a second time when adapted to email.

A/B tests

We can test a single variable with two versions, such as the subject line, the send time, the main image or the text of the call-to-action button. On large lists, we first send the test to part of the list and then send the better-performing version to the remaining subscribers. In automated flows, holding a small group out of the flow and comparing helps show whether the flow is really bringing in additional sales.

Design: mobile, dark mode and accessibility

A large share of emails is read on a phone, so we prepare the design in a single column, with buttons that are easy to tap and a readable text size. We check how colors and the logo look in dark mode. We do not put important information only inside an image; we use alternative text and real text so the message still comes across when images do not load or a screen reader is in use.

Different email programs can display the same code differently. Some desktop programs support modern design features only in part, and emails with a very large amount of code may be clipped in some programs. For this reason, we test templates in different programs and on different devices before sending and check that links go to the right page.

Send calendar and frequency

There is no single right answer to how often to send in email marketing. We set the frequency by whether you can tell the subscriber something genuinely new and useful each time. We plan the campaign calendar together with social media, ads and website announcements and make sure the same subscriber does not receive conflicting offers within a short time. If unsubscribes and spam complaints are rising, that is a sign the frequency or the content needs a second look.

Measurement and common mistakes

We do not judge email marketing results by looking only at the sending dashboard. By adding campaign parameters to the links in emails, we also follow what this traffic does on your site in your analytics tool. That way we see not whether a campaign brought clicks, but whether it turned into sales or inquiries.

Which metrics do we look at in email marketing?

• Delivery and bounce rate: Shows the health of the list and whether the technical setup is correct.
• Click rate: Shows whether the content and the call to action moved the reader to act.
• Conversion and revenue: The number and value of sales, forms or appointments that came from the email
• Unsubscribes and spam complaints: An early warning of a problem with frequency or content
• Flow performance: How much each automated flow delivers over time

We no longer rely on open rate as much as we used to. Features such as Apple Mail’s privacy protection can make an email look opened even when the person did not open it. So we use open rate only to follow trends and base decisions on click and conversion data. In subject line tests, we also use clicks and conversions as the measure where possible.

What do the reports include?

In our email marketing reports, we evaluate campaigns and automated flows separately. For each period, we share which email brought the most clicks and conversions, how much the list grew, which segments went quiet and whether there is a deliverability problem. At the end of the report, we also write down the subject line, segment or flow changes to try in the next period.

What to prepare before we start

To start an email marketing engagement quickly, it is enough to have the following information ready:

• Access to your current email platform and list, if you have them
• Information on which channel and with which consent text subscribers were collected
• The person or control panel access that can change your domain’s DNS settings
• The name of your e-commerce, reservation or CRM system
• The campaign calendar for the coming period and the products or services you want to feature
• Your logo, colors and the product images we can use

Common mistakes in email marketing

• Using a purchased list: It goes against the consent rules and quickly lowers your sender reputation.
• Skipping authentication: Without SPF, DKIM and DMARC, emails struggle to reach the inbox.
• Sending everyone the same email: Irrelevant content raises unsubscribes and the number of quiet subscribers.
• Announcing only discounts: Over time the list turns into an audience that expects nothing but discounts.
• Setting up flows and forgetting them: Products whose prices changed, closed campaigns and broken links can stay in automated emails for months.
• Making unsubscribing hard: A hidden exit link pushes people to report the email as spam.

Frequently asked questions

Does email marketing still work?

With a permission-based list that is split into segments and cleaned regularly, email marketing is still a productive channel. Email is one of the few channels where you can reach your own customers directly, without depending on a platform’s feed algorithm.

Do I need an İYS registration to send email?

Businesses that send commercial electronic messages need to manage recipient consents through the Message Management System. For exemptions and details, we recommend getting your legal adviser’s opinion.

Where should I start if I have no email list at all?

You can start email marketing by setting up a sign-up form with a clear consent text on your site and a welcome series. As the list grows, we add segmentation and the other automated flows step by step.

Why do my emails land in the spam folder?

The most common causes are missing SPF, DKIM or DMARC records, a list made up of addresses collected without permission or outdated ones, and a high complaint rate. The technical setup and the health of the list need to be checked together.

Which email marketing platform should I use?

The right platform depends on the size of your list, integration with your e-commerce or CRM infrastructure and the automations you need. We make the choice together after reviewing your existing systems.

Are email marketing and SMS subject to the same rules?

Both count as commercial electronic messages and, as a rule, require prior consent. Consents are kept in İYS by channel, that is, separately for email, calls and messages.

Let’s start email marketing together

Let’s talk about your current list, the platform you use and your sales process, and decide together which flows make sense to start with. You can reach us through our contact page, and we can handle email marketing in the same plan as your other digital marketing work.