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.

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.

Genuine feedback would be nice!

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.

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.

Ive become in charge of an alumni group of my school. Only about 500 members, and a quarterly newsletter would be sent out.

I've got a google workspace email domain. Setup though Brevo Free and tested it with my personal email and it seemed to work. Did all of the SquareSpace configurations. Brevo is a little confusing but I also got the captcha working.

Now I imported my contacts list and need to think of the correct order based on the people there are, and my contacts are not complete

• Have list of names and general years in school
• Only have phone number and no email
• Know the email may be old as is school domain
• May not be a good email or number based on age of older alumni

I will need to pay for the SMS. I am guessing I will configure the "update contact form" and send to all emails in ".edu" (is there a way to do this?), and then send the form to phone numbers without an email.

Or do I just send to all emails and say to update their profile? Then wait and send to all phone numbers without email? I am trying not to annoy people to update before we have even sent out the first newsletter. And I dont want to send the newsletter to a bad email or a phone number that is in use by someone else. There is currently a facebook group that I posted and only got 25 people to update through a google form (before I uploaded to brevo).

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)?

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?

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.

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

Hi all, would love your advice on where to start.

I run a Mastermind Club for CEOs of Boutique Consulting Firms. $10k per year. (5 paying members, 20 free members). I've never really marketed it serious other than recommending it to my existing clients (I do strategy work). I think I have the fundamentals in place:

- good landing page
- lots of great lead magnets
- CRM: 4000 leads
- LinkedIn Newsletter: 11,000 leads

I send out a 'useful' newsletter once a month, but have never really 'sold' other than an occasional footer which brings in no leads at all.

I would love your advice on if you think email marketing could work for me, and where to start.

Thanks

Joe

I'm not sure where to get information about email marketing to make sure I'm up to date on the laws or changes happening.

For example: I didn't know that CEMA now includes "false" subject lines like "Our sale extended". I also just found out about Yahoo's Sender Hub. I have worked with 4 ESPs in the last 2 years and none of them mentioned I should be tracking my deliverability with Yahoo Sender Hub.

Independent restaurant, one location, no marketing person.

Our emails are seasonal menu drops, the odd ticketed event, maybe a promo here and there. not high volume at all. and somehow one email can still eat an afternoon. photo, copy, layout, mobile check, somebody changes the menu price, start over. Restaurant email marketing at our size should not require a tiny agency living inside the office.

What are other one location places doing? genuinely curious, thanks in advance

Hi everyone, I currently have a two week daily email automation sequence using KIT. I’m wondering what is the best way to track which specific emails in the automation are resulting in sales. Does anyone have any suggestions on specific software to use or ways I’d be able to start tracking that information?

Thank you!

Hi everyone,

I'm evaluating email marketing platforms for a permission-based mailing list and expect to send approximately 10,000 emails per day, or around 300,000 per month.

I'd appreciate advice from email marketing professionals who manage campaigns at this scale.

My main priorities are:

• Maintaining strong inbox placement and sender reputation
• Managing unsubscribes, bounces, and spam complaints
• Segmenting subscribers and tracking campaign performance
• Choosing a platform that can handle this volume cost-effectively

Which deliverability practices and platform capabilities would you prioritize at this scale? I'd especially appreciate insights based on real-world experience.

Thanks!

I'm thinking about starting a small community for email marketers, especially beginners and intermediate marketers.

Many of us work from home and spend most of our day working independently. Sometimes, I miss having people around to bounce ideas off, ask for feedback, or just chat with about work and everyday life.

So, I'd love to bring together a few like-minded people for a mix of professional and casual exchange.

The idea:

• Share ideas, ask questions and help each other with email marketing challenges
• Try occasional challenges and give each other feedback
• Chat about everyday life, hobbies, remote work, or whatever comes up
• Get to know people who feel more like colleagues than strangers on the internet

No selling, no self-promotion, no pressure. Just a friendly space to learn from each other and connect.

I'm thinking of starting a small group on Telegram or WhatsApp. Or perhaps such a group already exists? 👀 In that case, I'd love to join too.

Hi all,

I've seen coaches launch this type of email campaign, where they ask you to reply with a keyword (like "strategy"), and they send you another email containing the requested free resource (like a strategy guide).

That's honestly a smart type of campaigns. Not only does it result in high open rates (if the lead magnet is really attractive), it also generates high reply rates + additional opens for the 2nd email.

I'm wondering if any of you has experience doing that kind of campaigns? If so, what tools do you use for the automated response which is triggered based on unique keywords?

Thanks

It’s been 5 years since Apple made us all look like geniuses for a hot minute (by changing their native mail app so all downloaded emails are reported as opens). Does anyone work with leaders who care about other metrics? At my workplace open rates are still the main thing people worry about, but a few at least seem to understand that click rates are important, too.