Startups, is your email strategy driving growth, or just gathering dust?

Did you know that 59% of marketers say email drives their highest ROI, yet most startups treat it as an afterthought. Ok, ok, I heard you. I know that you know that email works, and you are busy building awesome products and don’t need another ‘did you know’ post! 

So let me get straight to the point and share some actionable checklists that you can use to streamline your email strategy. I aim to get you thinking about how to engage your customers to drive meaningful conversations through email to drive a long-term relationship, because a robust email strategy has been proven to work!

Let's accept that startups come from an entirely different ecosystem than a well-established brand. At a hyper-growth phase, the main aim is brand awareness, acquisition, and ultimately sales. If thought through well, a boot-strapped and resource-crunched start-up, can aim for organic growth through a well-established email strategy.  

Why Startups Need an Email Strategy (or, well, at least a basic one)

So, where do you begin from? While building your business, you may have come into contact with people or companies that showed interest in your products along the way. Whether it was a very early stage investor, a friend, an ex-colleague, mentors, VCs, etc., or you already have a fair idea of your ideal target customer. At a trade show, you accumulate name cards from visitors who may have some early-stage interest, curiosity, or collaboration potential. Let’s not miss your site visitors who have willingly given their email addresses in exchange for valuable information on your site. These highly heterogeneous mixes of contacts could become your starting point for gathering leads and building your email database. This precious list of emails becomes your starting point for creating a snowball effect to build email databases.

Like your product, not one size fits all in marketing. Personalisation and custom-tailoring messages go a long way in building meaningful conversations with your contacts. Thoughtful strategy will help you focus on where you want to acquire new leads, or have a thought-provoking discussion that helps retain your audience, and take the opportunity to showcase your product's benefits that help solve critical business challenges. Just a little bit of effort goes a long way!

Some common mistakes startups usually make are 

• Sporadic sends without proper audience segmentation. (emailing a finance executive about technical specs of your services- mail lands in bin or worse, tagged as ‘blocked!’) 

• Infrequent email sends or just too many!

• Emails that look and sound like spam (sorry, but host providers may automatically label them as spam).

• Incoherent, inconsistent message flow, randomization of messages.

• Unsure of the conversation flow and when to make the final proposal. 

• Not looking at the right matrix to evaluate the effectiveness of your email strategy.

Key Components of a High-Impact Email Strategy

• Audience Segmentation: We know that in this highly heterogeneous mix of audiences, one size fits all fails to achieve a desired outcome. A highly personalised email strategy considers the audience type according to the industry, geography, product familiarity, audience seniority, and stage in the funnel, and then builds an entire chain of communication email content right from onboarding, to nurturing, enticing, and conversion. It may sound like a lot, but to maximise the most out of crunched resources, priortising high-value clients is a good way to take the first look in email marketing. For example, create a simple matrix that maps your customers based on high vs. low value on one axis, and level of product familiarity on the other. 

• Metrics That Matter: Open rates, CTR, conversions - Track only the metrics that matter. A considerable number of emails sent with a low open rate might mean the irrelevance of the message to the recipient. What the post click conversion rate, unsubscribe rate, and mql rate tell a lot about the lead quality, bounce rate. The inbox placement rate is just one metric that guides your email strategy.

• Personalization & Automation: Why not get creative with your messaging and include a video in emails? Email is typically seen as a text-to-text, one-way messaging platform. Incorporating a hook with a call-to-action, infographics for visual appeal, using a first-person voice, adding GIFs, humor, and trivia as a subline.

• Test and Iterate: I couldn’t emphasis more the test-learn-optimise loop. A broad-level strategy might cut across companies of all levels, but a customised approach needs first-hand data to establish best practices that work for your company. A gut feeling approach may help you take the first step, but moving on with experimenting with the timing, subject line, content form, content type, headlines, images etc will help you take data-driven, informed decisions. 

Some common pitfalls to avoid

• Overloading subscribers with too much information. Once you’ve defined your goal, stick to it—and build a clear narrative around it. Don’t start with your hobbies or recent private yacht trip when introducing yourself to someone new. Lead with what matters. Make it relevant, purposeful, and aligned with the impression you want to leave.

• Don’t fall for sales offer trap - while making a sales pitch to every email sent may be tempting, placing yourself in the recipient’s mind and empathising with the email reader will help you define the messaging and proposition. 

• Unethically gathering email database - I've been cleaning up my inbox by unsubscribing from many emails I don’t even remember signing up for. Most of them are outdated or irrelevant—and they just clutter my inbox, making me worry I’ll miss something important. Remember: open rates are influenced by how often your emails are opened, not by the size of your database. A bloated list doesn't help performance. To improve deliverability and avoid the spam folder, use a double opt-in process. It ensures your audience actually wants to hear from you—and keeps your list clean and engaged.

Finally,

 

Startups can’t afford to treat email marketing as an afterthought. With the right strategy—focused on segmentation, personalization, and clear communication—email becomes a powerful tool to drive growth, engagement, and trust. Avoid the common traps of spamming, irrelevant content, and vanity metrics.

1. ​​Start with a clean, relevant email list—quality beats quantity.

2. Segment your audience by role, funnel stage, and familiarity, etc. with your product.

3. Personalize your content to build real conversations, not just clicks.

4. Focus on key metrics like open rate, CTR, and conversions—not just send volume.

5. Test, learn, and iterate—your strategy should evolve with data, not assumptions.

6. And most importantly, improvise as you grow—just like your business.