Email marketing and CRM

What an email marketing agency does.

An email marketing agency plans, writes, builds and sends the emails a business uses to stay in touch with its audience. That includes automated flows that respond to what someone does, regular newsletters and campaigns, list management, deliverability and reporting.

CRM marketing goes a step further. It uses what you know about each contact, such as what they bought, where they came from and how sales has followed up, to decide what they should hear next. We treat email and CRM as one job, because each one only works as well as the other.

When to invest in email and CRM.

Email and CRM usually pay off when you've already got customers or leads and aren't doing enough with them. Common signs include a list that hasn't been contacted in months, leads that wait too long for follow-up, customers who buy once and never hear from you again, or a CRM nobody trusts.

They're less urgent if you have very few contacts or the basics of your offer are still changing. In that case, we'd start by setting up a simple welcome flow and clean data capture, then build from there as the list grows.

The flows most businesses need first.

Automated flows keep working once they're built, so they're usually the best place to start. Which ones you need depends on the business.

Getting your CRM data right.

Email results depend on the data underneath. If contacts are duplicated, fields are empty or nobody agrees on what counts as a qualified lead, automation just makes those problems move faster.

We start by reviewing how contacts enter the system, what gets recorded and how sales uses it. We then agree on definitions and clean up what's needed. When the data is reliable, it can also help your paid media, because ad platforms can learn from which leads actually became customers.

Deliverability and consent.

An email only works if it reaches the inbox. We review sender authentication such as SPF, DKIM and DMARC, list quality, sending patterns and spam complaints. Major mailbox providers have tightened their requirements for bulk senders, so these basics matter more than they used to.

Consent matters as much. Rules differ by market, and Canada's anti-spam law (CASL) and the U.S. CAN-SPAM Act ask for different things. We build consent capture and unsubscribe handling into the setup, and we leave legal interpretation to your qualified reviewer.

How we measure email and CRM.

Open rates have become less reliable, partly because of mail privacy features that can trigger opens automatically. We still watch them for signs of trouble, but we judge results on clicks, conversions, revenue or qualified leads, along with list growth, unsubscribes and spam complaints.

Flows and campaigns should also be measured separately. Where possible, we use holdout groups to see whether an email changed behavior or just reached someone who would have bought anyway.