Email deployment: definition and best practices in 2025

Reading Time: 7 minutes

Email deployment is the process of sending your carefully crafted marketing messages to a targeted list of recipients using specialized platforms or software.

For instance, you might deploy a newsletter to 2,000 subscribers, an automated welcome series to new signups, or abandoned cart reminders to recapture lost revenue. 

To build a winning email deployment strategy, you must segment your audience, personalize content, optimize send times, and analyze performance metrics. A best-fit email deployment platform can help you do all of this.

Join us below to discover the ins and outs of email deployment, including best practices and a few platform recommendations to get started. 

What is email deployment?

Email deployment involves distributing emails to recipient lists using specialized platforms to optimize timing and volume to maximize engagement.

You can think of it as the operational phase of email campaigns, where you send messages to recipients. The process will typically involve:

• Managing recipient lists
• Scheduling deliveries
• Transmitting crafted content
• Ensuring technical delivery
• Monitoring performance metrics

Email marketing campaign deployment intertwines with marketing automation by enabling triggered sends based on user behavior and automated workflows.

For instance, when a customer abandons their shopping cart, your email platform can trigger a personalized reminder email, deploying it at an optimal time to encourage purchase completion.

Merging deployment with automation will help you build the best email marketing campaigns to drive sales and increase ROI. 

Key components of email deployment

There are four key components to email deployment: 

1. Email platforms

Your email platform is the backbone of successful email deployment. It provides the infrastructure for creating, sending, and tracking email campaigns at scale. List management features, template builders, A/B testing capabilities, and analytics will help optimize your efforts.

Here’s a glimpse of the Omnisend dashboard, showcasing an account overview:

2. Email list segmentation

Segmenting your email list means dividing recipients into targeted groups based on demographics, behavior, or preferences, helping to ensure that each email campaign reaches the most receptive audience.

3. Scheduling and automation 

Automation workflows and scheduling build efficiency into your email deployment by triggering timely messages without requiring manual intervention for each send. For instance, you could set your email platform to deploy emails based on user actions or predefined intervals.

4. Personalization

Personalization helps you create more compelling experiences through dynamic content and customized offers based on subscriber data. A good example is using a recipient’s purchase history to tailor product recommendations in your email campaigns.

How email deployment works

Email deployment involves preparing content, managing lists, sending emails, and following best practices to ensure effective delivery and engagement with recipients.

Preparing the email campaign

Email deployment begins with setting clear campaign goals, such as driving sales, increasing engagement, or sharing information. 

You can then select an email template that supports these objectives and add compelling content, an attention-grabbing subject line, persuasive body copy, and strong calls to action (CTAs) to bring your campaign to life. 

Customizing the template with your unique content and branding will create a cohesive and impactful campaign ready for deployment.

Email list preparation

List preparation before deployment boosts email deliverability rates and ensures consent compliance for more effective campaigns and better overall performance.

Preparing your email list includes:

• Removing inactive subscribers
• Eliminating invalid email addresses
• Verifying and updating contact information 
• Segmenting your recipients for targeted messaging
• Ensuring proper consent and opt-in status for all subscribers for CAN-SPAM and GDPR compliance

Omnisend’s List Cleaning tool helps you maintain a healthy email list by identifying and removing invalid, spam, and disposable email addresses, improving deliverability, and reducing marketing costs.

Sending the email

Sending the email is as simple as pressing a button in your email marketing platform to send it immediately, schedule it, or automate the campaign. But before that, it’s best to send a test email to yourself to ensure correct formatting. 

Omnisend makes sending a test email easy:

The actual deployment process involves your email platform sending your campaign to subscriber inboxes with the following steps:

• Preparing the email content and recipient list
• Dividing the recipient list into smaller batches
• Initiating the sending process through its Mail Transfer Agent (MTA)
• Connecting to recipients’ email servers using SMTP
• Authenticating the sender using DNS records (SPF, DKIM, DMARC)
• Tracking real-time metrics like opens, clicks, and bounces

Best practices for successful email deployment

Follow these best practices to deploy your email campaigns effectively:

Deliverability best practices

All your campaign-building efforts will be for nothing if they have poor deliverability. 

The good news is that most email deliverability issues are easy to fix. For example, you can clean your subscriber list of invalid addresses and send emails at the best times alongside a schedule to prevent overloading inboxes and triggering spam actions. 

Use these tips to improve email deliverability:

• Maintain a clean and engaged subscriber list by regularly removing inactive or invalid addresses
• Implement proper authentication protocols like SPF, DKIM, and DMARC to verify your sender identity
• Create relevant, valuable content that encourages recipient engagement, as ISPs use engagement metrics to determine inbox placement
• Optimize your email design for various devices and clients to ensure a positive user experience
• Consistently monitor your sender reputation and adjust your strategies based on performance metrics
• Use segmentation to target audience groups with personalized content and increase the likelihood of engagement and positive recipient behavior

A/B testing for email campaigns

A/B testing in email deployment lets you compare two versions of a campaign, determining which performs better.

When building A/B tests, you should focus on one variable at a time to assess its impact accurately — such as email design, call to action buttons, or subject lines. 

Regular A/B testing as part of your email marketing strategy will help you make informed decisions based on real user behavior, leading to more successful campaigns.

With Omnisend, you can set up an automatic winner selection from your A/B test based on chosen metrics and configure it to automatically send the winning version to your remaining recipients after a specified period.

Avoiding spam traps and blacklists

Focus on maintaining a clean email list by regularly removing inactive subscribers and invalid addresses and implementing double opt-in methods to ensure subscriber legitimacy. 

A warm-up process is crucial when deploying emails at a large scale, especially when switching to a new platform. It involves gradually increasing sending volumes to establish a good sender reputation with email service providers (ESPs). 

Email design and opt-out features can also influence spam. Optimize content to avoid spam triggers by maintaining a healthy text-to-image ratio and provide clear unsubscribe options to prevent frustration-driven spam reports.

Never purchase or rent email lists, as these often contain spam traps, and regularly check your domain and IP against known blacklists. If blacklisted, work with your ESP to resolve issues and improve your reputation through good email practices.

Email deployment platforms 

Your choice of email deployment platform significantly impacts your marketing capabilities, from basic email sending to advanced automation and segmentation tools. 

The platform’s pricing structure and scalability options also influence your long-term costs and ability to grow your email marketing efforts as your business expands.

Popular platforms include Omnisend, Mailchimp, and Campaign Monitor, each suiting different business types. Here’s what you need to know:

1. Omnisend

Omnisend simplifies ecommerce email marketing with powerful features that are suitable for both novice and experienced marketers.

Its user-friendly interface offers customizable templates and a drag-and-drop builder, making campaign creation effortless. 

Pre-built workflows automate crucial customer touchpoints, while shoppable emails with dynamic discount codes boost sales. Deep integration with major ecommerce platforms ensures seamless operation.

Advanced users can leverage sophisticated multi-channel automation, complex segmentation based on customer behavior, and data-driven personalization to create highly targeted, effective marketing strategies. 

Pricing

Omnisend offers a free plan and paid plans from $16/month:

• Free: Up to 250 contacts, 500 emails/month, and 500 web push notifications/month
• Standard: From $16/month with up to 500 contacts, 6,000 emails/month, and unlimited web push notifications
• Pro: From $59/month with up to 2,500 contacts, unlimited emails/month, unlimited web push notifications, and at least 3,933 bonus SMS/month

These prices make Omnisend a highly accessible email platform. 

2. Mailchimp 

Mailchimp is a versatile email marketing and automation platform for small to medium-sized enterprises and ecommerce companies. 

It makes it easy to create personalized email campaigns with basic automations, and its strength lies in its extensive integration capabilities (300+ integrations) and AI-powered tools for content optimization. 

However, while it offers a comprehensive suite of features expected in a modern email marketing tool, Mailchimp may lack the specialized functionality your business needs if it has complex deployment requirements or is experiencing significant growth. 

Pricing

Mailchimp offers a free plan and several paid plans: 

• Essentials: From $13/month for 500 contacts, three seats, and a 10x plan’s contact limit for email sends
• Standard: From $20/month for 500 contacts, five seats, and a 12x plan’s contact limit for email sends
• Premium: From $350/month for 10,000 contacts, unlimited seats, and a 15x plan’s contact limit for email sends

For comparison, Omnisend’s Pro plan costs just $170/month for 10,500 contacts.

3. Campaign Monitor

Campaign Monitor is a top email deployment platform for small startups and larger enterprises, including ecommerce stores.

It offers a slick email campaign creation experience with features like free responsive templates, A/B testing, time zone sending, and email marketing automation capabilities with custom triggers and workflows.

Campaign Monitor’s big limitation is its simplistic automated workflows. It lets you create automated email campaigns triggered by subscriber actions, dates, or segment changes, but it is less advanced than Omnisend. 

Omnisend can incorporate email, SMS, and push notifications into a single automation workflow. You can also add conditional splits and A/B testing into your workflows to test the effectiveness of your automations. 

Pricing 

Campaign Monitor has three paid plans:

• Lite: $12/month with 2,500 emails/month
• Essentials: $29/month with unlimited emails and time zone sending
• Premier: $159/month with unlimited emails, advanced segmentation, send time optimization, plus premier support