Email 101: Work Mail, Transactional & Marketing Emails

Email Still Drives Serious Revenue

Here's a number that might surprise you: email should account for 25 to 30 percent of your online revenue. That's not my number — that comes from Dan Reifenberger of Loyal Tribe, whose entire job is sending emails on behalf of businesses to generate profit. Most of that revenue comes from return customers.

In the age of Instagram and TikTok, it's easy to dismiss email as outdated. But here's the thing: more people still have email addresses than accounts on any single social platform. And unlike social media followers, your email list is something you actually own. No algorithm changes, no platform shutdowns — just a direct line to your audience.

The catch is that you need three different types of email working together to make your business as profitable as possible. Let's break each one down.

Type 1: Work Mail — Your Company Email

Your regular company email is the foundation. This is what you use to communicate with your team, answer customer support tickets, and handle day-to-day business correspondence.

The most important decision here is choosing a reputable provider like Google Workspace, Zoho Mail, or Rackspace. Why does the provider matter so much? Because email reputation works on two levels: your domain reputation and the IP address reputation of the server sending your emails. If you're on a cheap shared hosting plan and someone else on that same server is blasting out spam, their bad behavior drags your deliverability down with it.

The rules for work email are straightforward: pick a quality provider, never do cold outreach, and only email people who actually want to hear from you.

Type 2: Transactional Emails

Transactional emails are the ones your business is probably already sending without you thinking much about them. Any time a user takes an action on your website — makes a purchase, resets a password, gets a shipping notification — a transactional email fires off automatically.

These emails absolutely must hit the inbox. A customer who just bought something and never receives a confirmation email is going to flood your support channels. Dan specifically calls out Black Friday and Cyber Monday as times when transactional email deliverability becomes critical for customer service.

For maximum reliability, consider a dedicated transactional email service like Postmark, which maintains exceptionally high IP reputation because they only handle transactional emails — no marketing, no newsletters. Their average open rates hover around 98%. Amazon SES, Mailgun, and Zoho TransMail are other solid options. Not every business needs a dedicated service, but if you're in e-commerce or any scenario where customers need to know their order went through, it's worth the investment.

Type 3: Marketing Emails

Marketing emails are where the money is. These are the emails with the clearest potential to drive profit — whether that's a drip sequence designed to nurture leads toward a purchase, a weekly newsletter building brand awareness, or a promotional blast announcing a new product.

Popular email marketing platforms include ConvertKit (great for creators), ActiveCampaign (powerful automation), and Klaviyo (built for Shopify and e-commerce). These services aren't cheap, but they handle a lot of the heavy lifting on deliverability, segmentation, and automation.

The key takeaway is that marketing emails need their own dedicated provider — don't try to send marketing campaigns through your regular work email or your transactional service. Each type of email has different reputation requirements and sending patterns, and mixing them together is a recipe for deliverability problems.

Self-Hosting Your Email Marketing

There's a growing movement toward self-hosted email marketing, driven primarily by the high cost of platforms like ActiveCampaign and ConvertKit as your list grows. The idea is to run your own email marketing software and pair it with a cheap transactional sender.

Tools like FluentCRM (a WordPress plugin) or Mautic let you manage your lists, automations, and campaigns on your own server. You then connect a transactional email service like Amazon SES to actually deliver the emails. The cost savings can be substantial — Amazon SES charges fractions of a penny per email compared to per-subscriber pricing from traditional platforms.

The tradeoff is maintenance and deliverability management. When you self-host, you're responsible for keeping your sending reputation clean. Hitting the inbox consistently is the hardest part of email marketing, and services like ActiveCampaign do a lot of that work behind the scenes. Self-hosting makes sense for technically inclined users who want to save money and don't mind the extra upkeep, but it's not for everyone.

Measuring Results: The Numbers That Matter

Once you're sending marketing emails, you need to know which numbers to watch. Dan breaks it down into four key metrics: open rate, click-through rate, sales conversion rate, and reply rate.

Here are the benchmarks to aim for. Open rates should land somewhere between 16 and 20 percent at a minimum. For click-through rates, 3 to 4 percent is excellent, but anything above 1.5 percent is solid depending on the context of the email. Sales conversion rates of 0.5 to 1 percent are considered good in e-commerce.

The exact numbers will vary by industry, so the most practical advice is to focus on improving over your current baseline. Track your metrics consistently, make sure they're trending in the right direction, and use these benchmarks as targets rather than hard rules.

Using Segmentation to Boost Open Rates

If you can't hit that 20 percent open rate target, segmentation is your best lever. The strategy is counterintuitive but effective: send to fewer people to get better results.

Start by creating a segment of subscribers who have engaged with your emails in the last 30 days and send only to them. If your open rate jumps to 30 percent, expand to 60-day engaged subscribers. Maybe that drops to 25 percent. Then try 90 days and find the sweet spot where you're maintaining around 20 percent open rates.

Dan admits that telling a client you want to remove 40 percent of their email list always raises eyebrows. But the proof is in the financial results. Sending to a smaller, engaged audience consistently outperforms blasting your entire list. Your email provider's reputation improves, your deliverability goes up, and the people receiving your emails are actually interested in what you're selling.

Writing Emails That Hit the Inbox

Content matters for deliverability. Spam filters are sophisticated, and certain words and patterns will get you flagged faster than anything else. Avoid the language of multi-level marketers and late-night infomercials — phrases like "work from home," "limited time offer," or anything that screams advertisement will trigger filters.

The golden rule is to write your marketing emails as if you were writing to a friend. Plain text emails from a real person look fundamentally different from marketing blasts, and spam filters know the difference. The best thing you can do is keep it conversational and genuine.

But what about companies like Costco that send image-heavy emails and still land in the inbox? They're playing a different game entirely. Their subscribers are paying members who actively engage with every email, which gives them enormous reputation capital. For most businesses, especially smaller ones, plain text or simple layouts with minimal images will serve you much better. As you grow, you can gradually introduce more visual elements.

Optimizing Images for Email

When you do use images, the 70/30 rule is a good guideline: roughly 70 percent text, 30 percent images by physical space in the email. Context matters too — a fashion brand needs product photos far more than a SaaS newsletter needs stock images.

The biggest mistake people make is dragging a full-resolution 25-megabyte DSLR photo straight into MailChimp. That massive file has to load on someone's mobile device, and it's a terrible user experience. Size your images to 600 pixels wide (the standard email width) and run them through a compression tool like ShortPixel to shrink the file size as much as possible. Your subscribers on slow connections will thank you, and the email clients processing your messages will be far less likely to flag you.

SPF, DKIM, and DMARC: Verifying Your Email Identity

If your content is clean and your list is engaged but you're still missing the inbox, the problem might be technical. SPF, DKIM, and DMARC are three DNS-based authentication systems that prove to receiving email servers that you are who you say you are.

SPF (Sender Policy Framework) tells other email providers which IP addresses are authorized to send email from your domain. You only get one SPF record, so if you're using multiple services — say Google Workspace, ActiveCampaign, and Amazon SES — your single SPF record needs to include all three. Free SPF generator tools make this easy to set up correctly.

DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail) works differently. It cryptographically signs each email so the receiver can verify it hasn't been forged or altered in transit. Most email services provide a DKIM key during setup that you paste into your DNS settings. Like SPF, you need DKIM configured for every service sending email on your behalf.

DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance) ties it all together by telling receiving servers which authentication methods to check and what to do if an email fails verification — deliver it, quarantine it, or reject it outright. All three of these are configured as DNS records at your domain registrar.

Sending vs. Receiving: Understanding MX Records

A common point of confusion: all the services we've discussed are about sending emails, and each needs SPF and DKIM records. But only one service actually receives emails on your behalf — your regular company email provider (Google Workspace, Zoho, etc.).

That receiving capability is configured through MX records in your DNS. A lot of people set up a service like Postmark and immediately think they need MX records for it, but they don't. Postmark only sends emails on your behalf. Replies come back to your regular email if you've configured the "from" address to match your company domain. Keep this distinction clear and you'll avoid a lot of unnecessary DNS confusion.

Verifying Your Email Contacts

You've verified that you are who you say you are. Now make sure the people on your list are who they say they are. Think about it — how many times have you filled out a form online with a throwaway email address? Your subscribers do the same thing.

Invalid email addresses on your list hurt your sender reputation because they generate bounces. Tools like Clearout, Bulk Email Checker, and BrightVerify will scan your list and flag invalid addresses before you waste sends on them. Running your list through a verification service periodically is basic email hygiene that pays for itself in better deliverability.

Troubleshooting Deliverability with GlockApps

When you've checked everything — clean content, optimized images, engaged list, proper DNS authentication, verified contacts — and you're still not hitting the inbox, it's time to bring in a diagnostic tool like GlockApps.

Dan's process is methodical. Send your email through GlockApps to see exactly where it's landing across different email providers. Then work through a process of elimination. First, check all the basics: image sizes, spam trigger words, and DNS settings. If those are clean, start testing individual elements. Change the sender name. Change the sending email address. Modify the subject line and preview text.

If none of those changes fix the problem, Dan's last resort is to cut the email body in half and test again. If the truncated version gets through, the problem is somewhere in the portion you removed. Keep cutting that section in half until you isolate the offending content. It might take 20 sends through GlockApps, but once you find the trigger, you know exactly what to avoid in future emails.

At the end of the day, email — much like SEO — doesn't need to be complicated. Don't try to game the system, send genuinely useful content to people who want to receive it, and make sure your technical setup is solid. That's the whole game.

Watch the Full Video

Prefer watching to reading? Check out the full video on YouTube for a complete walkthrough with live demos and commentary.