Email Marketing with Cresca: A Practical Start

Most onboarding documentation explains what each feature does. This explains what to do first, in what order, and why that order avoids work you would otherwise have to redo.

Before you import anything

Do not import your full contact list on day one. You will import bad addresses, then build segments on top of them, then have to unpick both.

Instead, look at the list you have. How many addresses are more than two years old with no recorded engagement? How many have hard-bounced in a previous tool?

Those contacts should be suppressed before import, not after. An invalid address that gets mailed is worse than one that does not exist, because repeated attempts to addresses that are no longer valid is one of the fastest ways to damage a sending reputation.

If you have engagement history, use it. Import your recently engaged contacts first and hold the older ones in a separate list until you have a re-permission campaign ready.

Set up authentication before your first send

This is the step teams skip and later regret. Publish the SPF include, the DKIM selector and a DMARC record for your sending domain, then send a test message and read the full headers to confirm spf=pass, dkim=pass and dmarc=pass.

Set DMARC at p=none initially with a reporting address. Do not begin at enforcement; you will almost certainly find a sending source you had forgotten about, and discovering it during a failed send is worse than discovering it in a report.

Do this before your first real campaign, because a first send from an unauthenticated domain can establish a poor reputation that takes weeks to correct.

Start with one automation, not a campaign

Counter-intuitive but correct. A welcome sequence or a post-purchase sequence will outperform any single broadcast, because it runs constantly and reaches people at the moment they are most interested.

Build one. Not a complex graph: a trigger, a short delay, three or four emails, and an exit condition. Test it with a test contact, check the delay arithmetic, and confirm it stops when someone converts.

Then leave it running and watch it for a week before building a second.

Then send your first campaign

Send to a segment, not your whole list. Choose the contacts who have engaged most recently, which gives you the highest chance of a good first impression on the mailbox providers and a reliable signal about your content.

Write it yourself or generate a draft and edit it. Check it on mobile. Confirm every link works.

Send to yourself first: this one step catches most errors.

Use clicks, not opens

Open rates are inflated by client-side image proxying and prefetching, and are not comparable across audiences with different client mixes. Two people with different mail clients can produce the same recorded result from completely different behaviour.

Track clicks and conversions. If you are testing subject lines, test on a small engaged segment where you can see downstream behaviour, and treat the result as directional rather than definitive.

A first-month sequence

1. Week one. Audit your existing list. Suppress invalid and hard-bounced addresses. Set up SPF, DKIM and DMARC at p=none, and verify with real headers.
2. Week one. Import your recently engaged contacts only.
3. Week two. Build one welcome or post-purchase automation. Test it with a controlled contact and confirm the exit condition works.
4. Week three. Send your first campaign to a segment of recently engaged contacts. Check on mobile, verify links, send to yourself first.
5. Week four. Review the automation's results, fix anything that misfired, and only then build a second automation.

Common first-month mistakes

• Importing everything at once. Buys a large list and a poor reputation.
• Sending a campaign before authentication is verified. Establishes reputation from an unauthenticated first impression.
• Building five automations before testing one. Multiplies the debugging surface for no benefit.
• Judging the first campaign on open rate. Leads to confident wrong conclusions about subject lines.
• Never cleaning the list again. Contacts decay continuously; hygiene is a recurring task, not a setup step.

Pricing

Start on Free if you are validating, and move up when a limit actually blocks you:

What if you have no existing list

Starting without a list changes the sequence. Authentication still comes first, because your first sends establish how mailbox providers categorise your domain and a poor start takes weeks to correct.

Then the priority is a signup mechanism rather than a campaign. A form connected to a list, with a clear statement of what a subscriber will receive and how often. Contacts who know what they signed up for engage more predictably than contacts who entered through a vague offering.

With a small list, resist the temptation to compensate with volume. Sending weekly to 40 people does not build reputation faster than sending monthly to the same 40; it simply adds unsubscribes. Focus instead on making the welcome sequence good, since with a new list almost every contact will experience it.

What to do in month two

Month one establishes the foundation. Month two is where the compounding starts.

1. Read the automation results properly. Which step lost the most people, and why. Adjust the timing before rewriting the copy.
2. Add one more automation, chosen for the volume of contacts it will reach rather than for how sophisticated it sounds. A cart abandonment or reactivation sequence usually earns its place before a sophisticated branching flow.
3. Segment your list by engagement and compare how the two groups respond. This is the step that makes later sending decisions obvious.
4. Re-check your list hygiene. A month of sends will have produced bounces and complaints. Suppress them.

The short version

Clean before you import, authenticate before you send, build one automation before running campaigns, and send your first campaign to an engaged segment rather than your whole list. Judge results on clicks and conversions. The order matters more than the speed: doing these steps in sequence avoids rework, while doing them out of order means fixing authentication and data problems after they have already affected your sending reputation.

Continue learning

Related Cresca resources

• Email marketing with Cresca
• Explore Cresca features

External references

• Gmail email sender guidelines
• RFC 8058: one-click unsubscribe