Email: the channel you own, and the one you can lose

Email is the only marketing channel a pizza shop genuinely owns. No platform can raise its price, change its algorithm or suspend the account. That ownership is real, but it is conditional: it lasts exactly as long as your deliverability does, and deliverability is lost through habits that feel harmless at the time.

Deliverability first, creative second

A beautiful email in the spam folder has an open rate of zero. Before anything else, get the plumbing right, because it is a fixed amount of work that then protects everything you send afterwards.

1. Authenticate properly. SPF, DKIM and DMARC on your sending domain. Gmail and Yahoo now require this for bulk senders, and mail without it is increasingly not delivered at all.
2. Use a subdomain for marketing. Send campaigns from a subdomain, keeping your primary domain’s reputation insulated from marketing volume.
3. Warm up gradually. A new sending domain going from zero to twenty thousand emails in a day looks exactly like a spammer, because that is what spammers do.
4. Keep complaint rate under 0.1% and hard bounce rate under 2%. Above those thresholds, providers begin throttling regardless of content.
5. Make unsubscribe trivial. One click, honoured immediately. Hiding it converts unsubscribes into spam complaints, which are ten times more damaging.

List health beats list size

Operators are attached to list size and it is close to a vanity number. A list of 4,000 engaged addresses outperforms a list of 20,000 containing 16,000 dead ones, and the dead ones are actively harming the live ones by dragging your sender reputation down.

Run a sunset policy: engaged in the last 90 days gets normal cadence; 90–180 days gets reduced cadence; 180–365 gets one reconsent attempt; past 365 with no engagement gets suppressed from routine sending. Keep the records for direct mail, which does not care about opens.

What to actually send

The mix that works for pizza is roughly a third useful, a third occasion, a third offer. Pure offer streams burn out: the customer learns to wait for the discount and stops opening anything else.

Design for the phone and the preview pane

The overwhelming majority of restaurant email is opened on a phone, often in a preview. That has concrete consequences: the subject line and preheader do most of the work, the primary action must be above the fold without scrolling, images must degrade gracefully when blocked, and a single-column layout is not a limitation but the correct answer.

One call to action per email. Two competing buttons reliably outperform neither.

If the email needs to be scrolled before the customer knows what you want them to do, it has already failed.

The metrics worth watching

Open rate has been unreliable since Apple Mail Privacy Protection began pre-fetching images, and treating it as truth will mislead you. Use it only for relative comparison within the same audience over time.

The numbers that matter: click-to-order conversion, revenue per thousand sent, order rate lift over a holdout, and unsubscribe rate per send. Revenue per thousand sent is the honest workhorse: it captures list quality, creative quality and offer quality in one figure.

Questions