How do you do email marketing?
Opt-in lists and cold email use the same tools and obey different rules. Here is where the line sits.
updated · 2026-09-19
What is email marketing and how do you set it up?
Email marketing means selling through regular emails to people who gave you their address. Setup has three steps: open a way to collect addresses, authenticate your sending tool against your domain, and set a schedule. What separates it from cold email is consent, which is also why the metrics differ: here you watch opens and clicks.
In short
- Email marketing rests on consent; cold email is a first contact without it.
- What matters is not list size but how many people opened something in the last thirty days.
- Every send must carry an unsubscribe link.
- Sending newsletters and cold email from the same domain puts your reputation at risk.
What email marketing covers
Email marketing is sending regular email to people who handed you their address. Newsletters, campaign announcements, product news and post-purchase emails all sit under this heading.
Consent is at the centre of the definition. An email to someone who signed up is an expected email, which is why open rates are high and complaint rates are low.
Setting it up
The order matters. Growing a list before the sending setup exists burns your domain reputation on the first large send.
- Open a collection route: site form, checkout tick box, event registration.
- Authenticate your sending tool against your domain: SPF, DKIM and DMARC.
- Send the first campaign to a small group and clean the bounces.
- Set a schedule: two sends a month is a sustainable ceiling for most small companies.
- Move non-openers to a separate group and remove them after six months.
How it differs from cold email
The same tools send both, but the rules are not the same. In email marketing the recipient joined the list. In cold email they did not, which is why each message is written individually.
The metrics differ too. Newsletters are judged on opens and clicks, cold email only on replies. Judging cold email by newsletter metrics is how people convince themselves a bad email is working.
Pocufy
Three agents run the part of these steps that repeats every week: defining the audience, building the list, writing each email for the person, and following up on the reply.
Which tools do what
Newsletters go out through bulk senders: Brevo, Mailchimp, MailerLite and similar. They are built to deliver one message to thousands of addresses at once.
Those tools are the wrong fit for cold email, because the send leaves a shared pool and the text is identical for everyone. Cold email should leave your own mailbox, one at a time, written for the recipient.
The legal side
In most markets commercial email to consumers requires prior consent, and you need to be able to show a record of it. Pre-ticked boxes do not count, and unsubscribe requests must be honoured promptly and permanently.
Business-to-business rules vary by country and are usually narrower than people assume. Have your own obligations confirmed by a lawyer in the markets you send to.
Common questions
Behaviour matters more than size. Two hundred people who opened something in the last thirty days are worth more than ten thousand who never do, and those two hundred are what protects your sending reputation.
When you have something concrete to say. Sending to fill a calendar slot drives unsubscribes. Two a month is the ceiling for most small companies.
Not advisable. Newsletter complaints lower your domain reputation, and that drop then stops your one-to-one business emails from reaching the inbox. Run the two on separate domains.
Pocufy
Rather than doing all of this by hand, try it: paste your website link and get your first customer list in ten minutes.
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