What Is Email Marketing?

Email marketing is when email is used to promote a company, its products or its services. Spain's LSSI defines a commercial communication as any form of communication aimed at promoting, directly or indirectly, the image, goods or services of a company, organisation or person engaged in a commercial or professional activity.

The newsletter is one of its formats: a regular mailing to a list of subscribers, with its own entry in this glossary. Others are welcome emails, one-off offers and automated sequences, which belong to marketing automation and lead nurturing.

It all starts with a list of addresses. In the EU, Article 13 of Directive 2002/58/EC only allows email for direct marketing to recipients who have given prior consent. Spain implements this in Article 21 of the LSSI and Germany in Section 7 of the UWG. There is an exception for customers: a business that obtained the address when selling a product or service may use it to market its own similar products or services, provided the customer can object simply and free of charge when the address is collected and in every message.

Messages are sent with a tool that manages the list, unsubscribes and statistics. Since 1 February 2024, Gmail has required all senders to authenticate their domain with SPF or DKIM and to keep the spam rate reported in Postmaster Tools below 0.30%. Anyone sending more than 5,000 messages a day to Gmail accounts also needs SPF, DKIM and DMARC and, in marketing messages, one-click unsubscribe. The technical mechanism behind one-click unsubscribe is described in RFC 8058, from January 2017.

Then comes measurement. The open rate has become less reliable: according to Apple, Mail Privacy Protection prevents senders from seeing whether a message was opened. The feature does not extend to links, so clicks can still be measured.

Sending without consent has legal consequences. In Spain, sending commercial email without meeting Article 21 of the LSSI is a minor infringement, with a fine of up to 30,000 euros. If the sending is mass, or insistent and systematic towards the same recipient, it is serious, with a fine of 30,001 to 150,000 euros. In Germany, Section 8 of the UWG lets competitors and trade and consumer associations demand that the infringement be removed and not repeated, and under Section 13 they should send a formal warning (Abmahnung) before going to court.

Delivery is also at stake. According to Google, email that does not meet its requirements might not be delivered as expected or might be marked as spam, and unauthenticated messages can be rejected.

And decisions depend on metrics. A campaign judged by its open rate tells you nothing about recipients who use Apple's protection, because the sender cannot see whether they opened the message.

• Ask for consent explicitly and record when and how it was given, because the GDPR requires that consent can be demonstrated.
• Include a simple, free way to unsubscribe in every message.
• Authenticate the sending domain with SPF, DKIM and DMARC.
• Split the list into segments and send each one what it asked for.
• Judge campaigns by clicks and conversions rather than opens.

• Buying address lists or writing to contacts who never gave consent.
• Hiding the unsubscribe link or making the process cumbersome.
• Disguising the sender's identity, which the LSSI and the UWG expressly prohibit.
• Treating the open rate as an exact figure.
• Using the customer exception to promote products that are nothing like what the customer bought.