Email Marketing Voodoo is an independent site about everything email: how to market with it, which services to send it through, and how to make sure it actually reaches the inbox. We write for marketers, small business owners and everyday users who want clear, accurate answers without the sales pitch.
What We Cover
Email touches almost every part of running a business and a fair amount of ordinary life. Our coverage reflects that.
- Email marketing strategy. List building, segmentation, subject lines, send timing, content and the metrics that matter once open rates stopped being reliable.
- Email service providers compared. Plain-language comparisons of the platforms people use to send newsletters, transactional mail and campaigns, including pricing structures, limits and the trade-offs that don’t show up on feature pages.
- Deliverability and DNS records. SPF, DKIM and DMARC explained step by step, along with sender reputation, bounce handling, spam complaints and the authentication rules that major mailbox providers now enforce for bulk senders.
- Newsletters. Starting one, growing one and keeping readers engaged without burning out your list.
- Automation. Welcome series, abandoned cart flows, re-engagement campaigns and the logic behind them.
- Cold email, done legally. Outreach that respects the law and the recipient. That means understanding rules like CAN-SPAM in the US, CASL in Canada and GDPR in the EU and UK, and knowing where they differ.
- Gmail and Outlook help. Practical fixes and how-tos for the two inboxes most people live in, from filters and settings to security and storage.
- Email news. Policy changes, platform updates and industry shifts, explained in terms of what they mean for the people sending and receiving mail.
Who We Write For
Marketers who need to get campaigns into the inbox and prove they worked.
Small businesses that handle email themselves, often with no dedicated technical staff, and need to set up authentication, pick a platform or fix a deliverability problem without hiring a consultant.
Everyday users who want their inbox under control, their account secure and their own messages to stop landing in someone else’s spam folder.
We assume you’re smart and busy. We explain jargon the first time it appears, then get on with it.
The Monthly Email Benchmarks Report
Every month we publish an email benchmarks report built from published industry data. It pulls together figures such as open rates, click rates, unsubscribe rates and bounce rates from reports that email platforms, research firms and industry bodies release publicly.
Benchmarks from different sources rarely agree. Sample sizes vary, industries are defined differently and some providers changed how they count opens after privacy features began inflating them. We don’t hide that. The report shows where each figure comes from, flags methodology differences and avoids blending incompatible numbers into a single neat average.
To be clear about what it is: the report summarises and compares data that others have published. It isn’t drawn from a sending platform of our own, because we don’t have one.
How We Work
Accuracy first. Email rules change. Mailbox providers tighten requirements, platforms adjust pricing and laws get updated. We check claims against primary sources such as official documentation, provider policy pages and the text of regulations, and we update articles when things change.
Honest comparisons. Every email service has strengths and weaknesses. We say what each one does well, where it falls short and who it suits. When we haven’t used a product ourselves, we say so rather than pretending otherwise.
Practical over theoretical. Where a task has steps, we lay them out in order. Where a setting lives in a specific menu, we tell you where.
Corrections. If we get something wrong, we fix it and note the change.
Our Independence
Email Marketing Voodoo is not affiliated with any email service provider or mailbox provider. No platform pays us to rank it, review it favourably or leave it out. Our recommendations are our own.
If a page ever includes a commercial relationship of any kind, we’ll disclose it clearly on that page.
Why “Voodoo”?
Because email deliverability can feel like dark magic. A message sails into one inbox and vanishes into another’s spam folder for no obvious reason. Open rates swing wildly. A single DNS typo can quietly break authentication for weeks.
None of it is actually magic. There are rules, signals and causes behind every result, and our job is to make them visible.
A Little History
This domain isn’t entirely new to the subject. Back in the 2000s it was home to an email marketing blog, written in an era when the inbox looked very different and spam filters were far less sophisticated. The site you’re reading now is a new, independent project, but we like that the name has always belonged to email.
Get in Touch
Spotted an error, have a question we haven’t answered or want to suggest a topic? Use the contact page and tell us. Reader questions shape a lot of what we write next.
Who writes here
Email Marketing Voodoo is written by a small team of writers, each covering their own part of the site, and every article is fact-checked by our standards editor before it is published.
Rachel Donnelly
Rachel Donnelly covers email strategy, design and copy, and newsletters, from segmentation and welcome flows to subject lines, dark mode rendering and newsletter monetization. She reads published benchmark data, platform documentation and real campaign examples closely, and cares most about advice a small team can act on without inflating what a single metric like open rate actually proves. Read Rachel’s articles
Felix Okoro
Felix Okoro writes about deliverability, email platforms, automation and cold email, covering SPF, DKIM and DMARC, Gmail and Yahoo bulk sender rules, ESP pricing and transactional services like SendGrid and Postmark. He checks every claim against official documentation, published pricing pages and mailbox provider guidelines, and flags plan limits, compliance rules and trade-offs readers need to know before choosing. Read Felix’s articles
Megan Thornbury
Megan Thornbury covers email services, email basics and email news, including Gmail, Outlook, Proton Mail and iCloud settings, custom domain email, formal email writing and spotting phishing. She works from official help centres, product announcements and changelogs, and writes plain step-by-step explanations so readers understand what changed and what, if anything, they need to do. Read Megan’s articles
Beatrice Halvorsen, Standards Editor
Beatrice Halvorsen is the standards editor at Email Marketing Voodoo and fact-checks every article before publication against the sources cited, from pricing pages and authentication specs to provider announcements. Anything that cannot be confirmed is corrected, clearly labelled or removed, and she watches for outdated figures and claims that overstate what the evidence supports.