Email remains the only channel you own outright. Social reach is rented and search rankings can move; a list is yours. That advantage is squandered by treating it as a broadcast tool.
Build the list properly
Buying or scraping addresses destroys deliverability, and the damage extends to your legitimate mail. Spam complaints from people who never opted in teach mailbox providers to distrust your domain, and recovering that reputation is slow.
Grow it by offering something with immediate use: a specification template, a cost breakdown, a checklist your team actually uses. "Subscribe to our newsletter" offers the reader nothing and converts accordingly.
Deliverability decides everything upstream
An email that lands in spam has no open rate to optimise. Three DNS records do most of the work: SPF, DKIM and DMARC. Without them, a growing share of mail is filtered or rejected outright, and you will read it as poor engagement rather than as a technical fault.
Send from your own domain. A campaign sent from a generic free address looks like the phishing it resembles.
What to send
Useful before promotional, most of the time. A short note explaining something specific, with one link, outperforms a designed template full of sections. If your email would be diminished by being plain text, the content is probably not the point of it.
Frequency matters less than consistency. Monthly and reliable beats weekly and abandoned after six weeks.
The metrics that still mean something
Open rates became unreliable when Apple began pre-loading images for Mail Privacy Protection, inflating opens for a large share of recipients. Treat opens as a rough direction, not a number.
Click-through, replies, unsubscribes and, above all, revenue or enquiries attributable to a send are the ones worth acting on. Replies are the most underrated: an email that invites a response and gets one has done more than a hundred silent opens.
In the region
Consider send timing around the local working week, which begins on Sunday in much of the Gulf, and around Ramadan, when patterns shift substantially. A campaign calendar copied from a European template will land at the wrong times all year.
If you email in Arabic, ensure the template renders right-to-left properly. Many email builders handle this badly, and an Arabic campaign in a left-to-right template reads as carelessness.
Frequently asked questions
How do I reduce unsubscribes?
Send less and better, and set the expectation at signup. A high unsubscribe rate after one send usually means the signup promised something else.
Should I clean the list?
Yes. Removing addresses that have not engaged in a year improves deliverability for everyone remaining.
