The 9 Steps of Email

Most of what's written about email marketing exists to sell you something. The industry runs on two products, information and technology, so the advice you find is usually a lure toward a free trial, a sales call, or a $997 course. The fundamentals, the part that actually makes email work, stay behind the curtain.

This is the part behind the curtain, written down and left open.

The 9 Steps of Email is a framework for planning, building, and running data-driven email marketing. I created it in 2013 and have refined it since across dating, SaaS, info products, services, and job portals. The tactics have changed (better builders, AI in the pipeline, Gmail's dominance, privacy regulation), but the principles haven't. That's what this is: the principles.

Is it a sequence or a checklist? A bit of both. Built from scratch it really is a sequence, because each step sets up the next. But most of the time you're not starting clean. You're diving headfirst into an existing program that's already half-built and a little on fire, and then it's a checklist: nine things to get right, in whatever order reality allows. You don't have three months to plan everything properly before the next KPI is due. Nobody does. So yes, there's a natural order to it, and yes, the reality is usually too messy to follow it cleanly. That's fine. Check them all.

One thing to settle before anything else, because it governs every decision downstream:

Email can do exactly one thing: get someone interested enough to click. Not buy. Not sign up. Click. The interest is the click through the link in your email. That's the ceiling. It's also the floor. Expect nothing more, but nothing less.

Why email

Not everyone is built to chase virality. There's a quieter side of marketing measured in data, systems, and revenue rather than likes, and email is its center.

Email matters more now than ever, for reasons that keep compounding:

Social algorithms keep throttling organic reach.
Paid acquisition keeps getting more expensive while targeting keeps shrinking.
Privacy changes keep eroding tracking.
AI makes content cheap, which makes genuine connection scarce and valuable.

Through all of that, email stays the most stable, controllable, and measurable channel available, the only one where you own the relationship instead of renting it from a platform.

Here's the structural reason that's true. Unlike Facebook or Google, email isn't a product owned by a company. It's a protocol of the Internet: over fifty years old, peer-to-peer, free, ownerless. When you build a list, you're not targeting an audience you have to keep paying to reach. You hold the addresses. You segment them how you see fit. No intermediary can raise the rent or change the rules out from under you overnight.

And it lands in the most private space a person has online. Your inbox is where your bank statements, your job offers, and your messages from people you love arrive. People guard it. That's why I say:

Email is the most personal place on the Internet.

That intimacy is the whole opportunity and the whole constraint. In your marketing mix, email is where you nurture, convert, retain, and win back: the middle and the back of the funnel, where trust is built and revenue actually happens. Acquisition gets the attention; email is where attention becomes a relationship.

Where email fits in your marketing mix: attract, nurture, convert, retain, and win back

The economics follow from owning the list. Send to 10,000 people who know you and want to hear from you: a clean send costs roughly $50–100. A well-nurtured list opens around 20%, and an enticing message earns maybe 25% clicks-to-opens. Call it 500 clicks for $75, about $0.15 a click. If you're cold-emailing, it's far worse. If people look forward to your email because you've earned authority, it's far better. The number isn't the point; the leverage is.

The two governing principles

Two principles have governed email since its inception. Build both into your program, or nothing else you do (copy, design, code) will matter.

Relevance. Email began as peer-to-peer messaging: I send, you read, you reply. Spam broke that, users demanded filtering, and providers delivered it. Power shifted from senders to mailbox providers, and there it has stayed. Gmail, Microsoft, Apple, and Yahoo decide what reaches the inbox. Nothing gets in or out without their say-so. Other channels punish irrelevance with a higher cost-per-click; email punishes it by blocking you: blacklists, lost deliverability, a sending domain you have to rebuild from scratch. The bar is a relevance threshold you can never see and never stop clearing.

Security. Email is a private space, so providers lock it down hard. That's why its front end evolves so slowly: almost no scripting in the message body, and image and interaction support that lags the open web by years. The lockdown is deliberate: in a space this personal, a clever attacker can do real damage, so providers prefer "better safe than sorry." Respect that posture and design within it.

ACME vs EMCA

There are two archetypes of company doing email marketing. The names are a mirror (read one backwards to get the other), and the difference between them is the difference between failing and compounding.

ACME is the larger group. They use email to extract: drive traffic, hit KPIs, monetize the list. They look for an excuse to send. When numbers dip, they send more. Their thinking is input-output: put in X, get out Y, make sure Y > X. That's a defensible view from a finance seat, but it's blind to the rules of engagement on the actual channel, and it's why so many programs spiral: send to inactives → engagement falls → more lands in spam → panic → send more → churn and cost climb while engagement keeps dropping.

EMCA is the smaller group. They use email to deliver: highly relevant messages that benefit the subscriber. They send less. They watch lifetime value and inbox placement instead of chasing opens. The orientation is inverted: not "what can we get from this list," but "what can we bring to it."

Here's the same split, side by side:

ACME	EMCA
Leverages the channel to drive traffic/sales	Uses it to deliver relevant, useful messages
Watches immediate KPIs and ROI	Watches LTV and list satisfaction
Looks for reasons to email	Pursues sending less
Short subscriber lifecycle, high churn	Grows subscribers, keeps churn low
Open rates, CTR, sales	Open rates, clicks-to-opens, inbox placement
Chases shiny new systems	Relies on stable systems and smart automation
Product-centered	Customer-centered

Jay Abraham's framing makes the EMCA stance concrete: be your client's most trusted advisor, responsible for their well-being. Never let them buy less than is optimal for them, in worse combinations, at lower quality, or less often than serves them. It sounds like a platitude until you apply it to email. If your channel genuinely exists to deliver value, then getting someone to confirm their address, open the message, and click through isn't manipulation. It's the necessary path to the thing that helps them. Same mechanics as ACME, opposite meaning. A glance at a few of anyone's emails tells you which one they are.

Build your entire channel as EMCA. Everything that follows assumes it.

The roadblocks

To get a subscriber to do what you want, a chain of things has to happen, and keep happening. Read it backwards, from the goal:

They take the action (subscribe, buy, book a call).
They click through the email.
They open the email.
The email reaches the inbox.
The email reaches the provider.

Working forward, the recipient has to see a message that excites them to act, with nothing in the way. Break that into its parts.

It has to be delivered. Which has prerequisites most senders ignore:

The address has to exist. Lists fill up with fakes, typos and junk signups that bounce, plus worse: black-hole spam traps that accept everything and then report you to Spamhaus and SpamCop. (More on protecting against this in Step 2.)
The address has to be reachable. Active six months ago doesn't mean active now. Plenty of people keep a throwaway inbox they never open.
Your infrastructure has to comply with the receiving provider's rules.
The provider has to think well of you. Your IP and sending domain need a good reputation.

Note what's not on that list: opt-in. It's legally required in some places (Europe, Canada) and not others (the U.S.), but the prerequisite for delivery is technical, not legal. What every jurisdiction does require is an easy way to opt out.

At the right time. The message has to arrive when the person can act. That means knowing your audience's rhythms, and a sending system reliable enough to send when scheduled, not whenever it gets around to it.

With the right subject line. Subject lines don't sell; they earn the open. Treat them as their own discipline.

That excites them to act. This is the message itself: how you answer, explicitly or not, the only question the reader is really asking:

If I'm your ideal prospect, why should I buy from you rather than your competitor, or do nothing at all?

Swap "buy" and "prospect" for whatever fits. The email exists to answer it.

With nothing in the way. Part of that is on you: a landing page that isn't distracting, an action that works on any device. The rest (their kids, their commute, a phone call) is out of your hands. Control what you can.

The 9-step model

The map below is the whole framework. The first four steps are written up in full; the last five are principle-level here and expanding into complete breakdowns. Nine things to get right. Start anywhere, but check them all.

Step 1 — Identify

Decide what you're actually asking email to do, and who's on the other end.

Answer three questions honestly. What are your goals for email as a channel? Keep it to a few; more goals, less focus. What's in it for the subscriber? Phrased as the one question they ask themselves: why should I read this now instead of doing literally anything else? (which hides three: who are you, what's in it for me, why now). And are you ready to commit? A real program costs software, hardware, knowledge, and people; if email is "nice to have" rather than load-bearing, do something else well instead.

Then define your personas, not stock photos and demographics, but where each one is now, where they want to be, what's blocking them, and the words they actually use. You're the facilitator of the trip from before to after. You can't write to someone you haven't pictured.

Read the full breakdown of Step 1 →

Step 2 — The Flow

Map the journey, then guard its edges.

First, know what you're selling. A commodity is something people already understand: they know the shape and the price and just want it efficiently. A journey is a solution to a problem they may not fully see yet, which means they have to step into the unknown to trust you. You already know how the story ends; your job is to frame each step so the next one feels like the obvious move. Design those steps in reverse, from the destination back, asking at each one: what do they have to believe and agree to before they'll move forward?

Then handle the three stages every flow has: opt-in, conversion points, and opt-out. Protect your list at the entrance (fakes and traps quietly wreck your reputation), choose single vs double opt-in to fit your funnel and your legals, and make unsubscribing one frictionless click. An easy unsubscribe is cheaper than a spam complaint, and with Gmail, a complaint is invisible to you and poison to your deliverability.

Read the full breakdown of Step 2 →

Step 3 — Sync

Turn personas and journeys into a strategy.

This is a three-dimensional model: user journeys × content types × email types, all in service of your goals and your channel's value proposition. Lean on your broader content strategy, but don't recycle the same content across every channel; email's value proposition has to be its own. People follow you across channels for distinct benefits, not to choose where to read the same thing. Make some of your best material exclusive to the inbox; it's what keeps people opening.

One underrated mechanic: get replies. The moment a real human replies to your send, most providers start prioritizing you. (Gmail behaves differently; covered later.)

Read the full breakdown of Step 3 →

Step 4 — Define

Give every email one job, and design the whole path to it.

Conversion is two events in sequence, not one (the email and the page it leads to), and each has its own mechanics. The email earns the click; the landing page earns the action; relevance multiplies everything. An email that tries to do five things does none. So fix the one purpose of each message, write in the voice that fits its type (a security notice and a weekly tip are not the same register), and design for the action: readable on any device, the call to action obvious, nothing competing with it.

Read the full breakdown of Step 4 →

Step 5 — Implement

Code and test the emails. Email's front end is deliberately restricted, so robust HTML and disciplined QA across clients and devices matter more here than almost anywhere on the web, and modern tools have commoditized much of it. The principle that lasts: test every build before it ships, against a real spread of clients, not just the one on your screen.