By Tom Wozniak, Chief Operating Officer – published on Forbes on 10/13/25
I recently moderated a panel discussion during Affiliate World Europe covering how to get started with email marketing. After the panel, I started thinking about how to summarize a few key topics we covered, along with a few others that we didn’t have time to discuss.
While this article is a high-level overview (much like the panel discussion), I hope it provides a few useful suggestions for anyone considering adding email to their marketing channel mix in 2025 and beyond.
1. Recognize That Email Marketing Is Hard, But It’s Worth The Effort
This was really one of the main takeaways from the panel. Building a successful email marketing program takes time, effort and expertise. This is one likely reason that some companies focus their marketing budget on other channels. While no channel is truly “easy” if you want to drive performance and ROI, it is objectively simpler to launch and ramp a marketing campaign in social, search, display or many other channels than it is in email.
Want to get a search campaign up and running and scale it quickly? The challenge is really about your budget. If you have the money to spend, you can ramp up that campaign fairly quickly. It’s similar in social, especially if you have the content ready. The main ingredient after that is budget. In email, you need to first build a list. Yes, in the U.S., you can buy an email list, but basing your email marketing program on this type of data can be challenging for many reasons. Building an engaged email list over time is more likely to drive long-term success.
A great first step in getting into email marketing is understanding the challenge and recognizing that you’re likely playing the long game. The long-term payoff will make it worth the effort.
2. Understand Your Data
Next up, make sure you really understand the data in your email list. That’s a broad statement, but, depending on the depth of your data, there may be a lot to unpack. How you can leverage the data in your email program will largely hinge on what information you have collected.
Want to personalize your emails to each recipient? You’ll likely want to have a name field in your database. Looking to create targeted content based on past interactions (purchases, info requested, etc.)? You’ll obviously need to have that data accessible in your file. So, it can be good to start by looking at what data you have collected, then also think about what data you might like to have in an ideal world.
You can always change your data collection process going forward—to start adding important information you want to use in the future. Either way, the combination of what you can use today and what you’ll want to use in the future can help you begin building your email list for the future.
3. Identify Your Tech Stack
Here’s where things can get complicated. Building an email marketing program will almost certainly require you to sign up with some technology vendors to give you access to the mechanisms needed at various points to create, send and track your email initiatives.
You can keep it very simple to start. Sign up with a user-friendly email service provider or CRM platform, and you can typically design, send and monitor performance for basic email campaigns. However, depending on how much control you want over your email campaigns, how easy it is to scale and how you can leverage advanced email marketing technology strategies, you may find that those user-friendly solutions will fall short at some point. There’s a reason they’re typically inexpensive and simple to use. They aren’t designed to manage more robust email programs.
So, think carefully about your short- and longer-term goals for the email program you’re building. If you really just want a platform to send out a monthly newsletter, you likely don’t need to overcomplicate your email tech stack too much. But, if you have plans to deploy a variety of targeted email campaigns with a wider reach—and you want to focus on key metrics like deliverability, open rate and the ultimate conversion rate and revenue—then consider that carefully as you begin your foray into email marketing.
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Tom Wozniak heads up Marketing, Communications, and overall Operations as the COO for OPTIZMO Technologies.
