What is the difference between email marketing and transactional email?

Email marketing sends promotional and relationship-building messages to opted-in subscribers — campaigns, newsletters and automated nurture flows. Transactional email sends system-triggered messages tied to a specific user action, such as order confirmations, password resets and receipts. They use different infrastructure and often different tools, though some platforms handle both.

How important is deliverability and how do I check it?

Deliverability determines whether your emails land in the inbox or in spam. It is the single most important technical factor in email performance. Check it using seed-list testing tools, monitor your postmaster dashboard for spam-rate signals, and watch your engagement rates over time — a sharp drop in opens often signals a deliverability problem rather than a content issue.

Should I use a newsletter tool or a full email marketing platform?

Newsletter tools are optimised for editorial content, clean reading experiences and subscriber growth from a public sign-up page. Full email marketing platforms add automation, behavioural triggers, ecommerce integrations and revenue attribution. If you are building a content business, a newsletter tool often suffices. If you are running lifecycle marketing for a product or ecommerce store, you need the full platform.

What list size is worth paying for a premium platform?

Most free tiers support lists up to 500 to 1,000 subscribers with basic broadcast capability. Once you hit 2,000 to 5,000 subscribers and start using automation, it is worth paying for a platform with proper segmentation, deliverability controls and flow logic. The cost of poor deliverability on a larger list outweighs the subscription fee many times over.

How do I move my list from one platform to another?

Export your subscriber list as a CSV with all custom fields, tags and subscription status. Import into the new platform and map fields carefully. Re-confirm your DKIM and SPF DNS records for the new sending domain. Rebuild automations manually — they do not transfer. Warm up your sending reputation on the new platform gradually if you have a list above 10,000 contacts.

What metrics should I actually track?

Track click-to-open rate (CTOR) rather than raw open rate, as open rate is inflated by email client pre-fetching. Track revenue per email sent for commercial campaigns, unsubscribe rate per send and spam complaint rate. For automated flows, track conversion rate and revenue attributed per flow entry. Open rate alone tells you almost nothing useful at scale.

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