Email Marketing Tips for Startups

Founder: Imran Patel
Location: San Francisco Bay Area
Stage: Seed
Website: syftdata.com
Social: LinkedIn, X

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Joe Cunningham is an email marketing B2B consultant and copywriter. He’s edited hundreds of marketing emails and newsletters for Stacked Marketer, Affiliate Summit, and Traffic & Conversion Summit. He’s also a regular contributor to MarTech, Marketing Technology News and Community.

Given his expertise, I asked him to be the guest author of this edition of the Vibe Your SaaS newsletter. Email may be harder than ever, but it remains a low-cost, high-impact workhorse channel for startups that need to move the needle without a big marketing budget.

Going into email marketing with a “blast” mindset. You don’t like getting blasted with hard sales pushes and irrelevant messages…no one does. If you go into email marketing with a relationship-building mindset, your messages will have a better shot at being thoughtful and well-received.

That, and not being clear on how your target customer uses email. Not everyone wants to read newsletters, and that’s OK.

Most of the annoying or irrelevant emails you receive on a daily basis can be traced back to poor strategy and execution, which often stems from a “we gotta get the word out” approach.

Like any business strategy, email marketing needs clear objectives, KPIs, and a consistent and reliable plan of action. And every email you send needs to support those objectives and KPIs.

I’d suggest taking a list - offer - message approach:

Oof, great question. Instead of thinking too hard about “segments,” think about groups related to your business: current customers, prospects, stakeholders, etc. Create segments around that, and create offers and messaging accordingly. It doesn’t have to be complicated, but it should be clear and obvious who’s in your segments and why.

You can also email people in your list and ask them what problems or priorities they’re currently focused on, and group them accordingly.

I built a mini content workflow in Claude. It goes like this:

If you’re a product-led SaaS startup that just finished a series A round and you’re sending cold emails to book demos…do you really need authenticity? Eh, probably not. But if you’re a founder-led business and you’re sending newsletters to build trust and authority, then yeah, authenticity probably matters.

Train your LLMs on ICP data, with numerous examples of content and call transcripts that best reflect your voice, use examples of best-performing posts, emails, video scripts, etc., whatever you’ve got.

But even that isn’t perfect. LLMs still have a way of using ad-speak and “weasel words” (meaningless, empty words) that don’t support your purpose or help your audience. So use ChatGPT or Claude to help you crank out campaigns, but let the qualified human on your team do the editing and humanizing.

Research and relevance. The best cold emails I’ve received are the ones that did their homework. They took time to understand my business (or they’re deep in the business I do), and they have a relevant reason for connecting with me. Also, you don’t have to ask for a meeting right away. Instead, you can treat it like an intro. You’re just introducing yourself, starting a conversation, and you have credible results and proof to back up who you are.

Look at who’s engaging, and who’s unsubscribing. Are they in your ICP? Are they customers or prospects? Those two things will tell you more about your email performance from a business perspective than open and click rates will.

I would also recommend tracking bot activity. Lots of ESPs will “open” an email before the recipient ever does (Apple Mail is notorious for this) to confirm it’s not spam, and that can inflate your open rates a lot. So filter out bot activity whenever possible, because it will give you a more accurate and honest view of your engagement.

Create an email campaign brief that fits your business. (You can use mine as a baseline, if you like.)

Your brief should cover the basics: Objectives and KPIs, segments or lists, senders, and, of course, offer and messaging.

Once you create your brief, you can even have Claude or ChatGPT fill it out for you. I love this because it helps me outline messaging and brainstorm ideas faster. 10/10 recommend.

On The Gregory and Paul Show, we break down the latest in startups, SaaS, AI, and whatever the internet is debating this week.

🎙️ Episode 022 – The Meme History Episode with Charlie Light

On this episode of the Gregory and Paul Show, we dive into meme history with Charlie Light, the creator behind some of the biggest parody accounts on X. We get into finance memes, long-form satire, ghostwriting, building viral characters, stock-pump weirdness, the Wendy’s era, VC Brags mythology, and who in tech can actually take a joke. If you’ve ever wondered how parody accounts work, why certain memes hit, or how ghostwriters quietly run half of Twitter, this is the full breakdown..

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I'm a former creative director, 3x head of marketing, and founder of Vibe Your SaaS. I help early-stage startups build real momentum with strategic clarity, AI-driven execution, and zero BS. I like fast bicycles, strong coffee, and posting sarcastic jokes and memes on the internetz.

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