How to Do Email & SMS Marketing: A Step-by-Step Workflow
- How to Do Email & SMS Marketing: A Step-by-Step Workflow
- Step 1: Choose Your Platform and Set Up Sending Infrastructure
- Step 2: Build Your List the Right Way
- Step 3: Segment Before You Send Anything
- Step 4: Map Your Core Automations
- Step 5: Write and Design for Each Channel Differently
- Step 6: Set a Sending Cadence and Calendar
- Step 7: Test, Send, and Monitor Deliverability
- Step 8: Report, Analyze, and Iterate
Running an effective email and SMS program comes down to eight sequential steps: infrastructure setup, list building, segmentation, automation mapping, channel-specific copywriting, cadence planning, testing and monitoring, and reporting. Skip a step or do them out of order and you end up with the most common failure pattern practitioners see — a business sending campaigns into a poorly-prepared list with no automation underneath it, wondering why results are flat.
This workflow applies whether you’re launching a program from zero or rebuilding one that’s underperforming. Work through it in order.
Step 1: Choose Your Platform and Set Up Sending Infrastructure
Pick an Email Service Provider and, if you’re adding SMS, either a dedicated SMS platform or a unified platform that handles both (Klaviyo and Omnisend are common choices for ecommerce; ActiveCampaign and HubSpot lean more toward general marketing automation). The right choice depends on your business model, your existing tech stack, and your budget — we cover the tradeoffs between specific tools in more depth elsewhere in this series.
Before you send anything, authenticate your sending domain with SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records. This tells mailbox providers your emails are legitimately coming from you, and skipping it is the single fastest way to land in spam regardless of how good your content is. If you’re adding SMS in the United States, register for 10DLC (if using a long code) or secure a toll-free number or short code, and complete carrier registration — unregistered numbers get throttled or blocked outright.
Step 2: Build Your List the Right Way
List building has to happen through genuine opt-in — never purchased, scraped, or appended lists. Effective opt-in mechanisms include:
- On-site signup forms with a clear value exchange (discount, guide, early access) rather than a bare “subscribe to our newsletter” ask.
- Checkout and post-purchase opt-in checkboxes for both email and SMS, kept unchecked by default in jurisdictions that require it.
- Point-of-sale SMS opt-in for physical retail — a keyword text-to-join campaign works well here.
- Gated content or lead magnets that attract subscribers who are genuinely interested in what you sell, not just chasing a discount.
Every opt-in point should clearly state what the subscriber is agreeing to and how often they’ll hear from you. Vague consent creates downstream problems — high unsubscribe rates, spam complaints, and in SMS’s case, compliance exposure.
Step 3: Segment Before You Send Anything
Before your first campaign goes out, set up foundational segments: new subscribers, engaged subscribers (opened or clicked recently), disengaged subscribers, and — if you sell products — purchasers versus non-purchasers. As data accumulates, layer in behavioral and RFM-style segments (recency, frequency, monetary value of purchases).
The habit to build here is treating segmentation as a prerequisite to sending, not an optimization you’ll get to later. A single-segment “send to everyone” program trains your list to ignore you because irrelevant messages arrive at the same rate as relevant ones. Segmenting from day one, even crudely, sets a much higher ceiling for everything that follows.
Step 4: Map Your Core Automations
Automations are the highest-leverage work in this entire workflow because you build them once and they run indefinitely. Prioritize these in order:
Welcome Series
Triggered the moment someone joins your list. Introduces your brand, sets expectations for what they’ll receive, and typically includes an incentive to make a first purchase or take a first action.
Abandoned Cart / Browse Abandonment
For ecommerce, this is often the single highest-converting automation in the entire program. Trigger an email shortly after abandonment, followed by a shorter SMS nudge if the cart is still unconverted after a set window.
Post-Purchase Follow-Up
Order confirmation, shipping updates, and a follow-up sequence that requests reviews, suggests complementary products, or simply reinforces the purchase decision.
Win-Back / Re-Engagement
Targets subscribers who’ve gone quiet for a defined period, with content or an offer designed specifically to reactivate them — and a clean sunset path for those who still don’t respond, since a bloated list of disengaged addresses drags down your deliverability.
Step 5: Write and Design for Each Channel Differently
Email and SMS require genuinely different copywriting approaches — treating them the same is one of the most common mistakes in the field. Email has room for a subject line, preview text, visual hierarchy, and a longer arc of persuasion. SMS gives you a tight character window and a single shot at the message landing — no visual hierarchy to lean on, no second paragraph to recover a weak opening.
For email: front-load your subject line with the actual value or urgency, keep preview text as a genuine second line of copy (not a repeat of the subject), and design for mobile-first rendering since most opens now happen on a phone. For SMS: get to the point in the first sentence, always identify your brand by name since there’s no inbox branding to lean on, and include a clear, singular call to action — SMS is not the channel for multiple competing links.
Step 6: Set a Sending Cadence and Calendar
Build a content calendar that balances promotional sends against value-driven, non-promotional content. A program that only ever sells burns out its list fast — engagement drops, unsubscribes climb, and deliverability suffers as a result. A reasonable starting cadence for email is several sends per week depending on your business type and audience appetite; for SMS, far less — SMS tolerance for frequency is much lower than email’s, and over-texting is the fastest way to spike opt-outs and carrier complaints.
Map your calendar against your actual business cycle — sales periods, product launches, seasonal demand — rather than sending on a rigid schedule disconnected from what’s actually relevant to your audience that week.
Step 7: Test, Send, and Monitor Deliverability
Before any campaign goes to your full list, send a test to yourself and a few colleagues across different email clients and devices. Check for broken links, rendering issues, and — critically — run a spam-score check through a tool like Mail-Tester or GlockApps to catch deliverability red flags before they cost you your sender reputation.
Once live, monitor your sender reputation continuously — bounce rate, spam complaint rate, and inbox placement rate matter more to your long-term success than any single campaign’s open rate. For SMS, monitor opt-out rate and carrier filtering closely; a spike in either signals a problem with frequency, relevance, or compliance that needs immediate attention.
Step 8: Report, Analyze, and Iterate
Move past vanity metrics like open rate as your primary success measure and track revenue per recipient, click-to-conversion rate, and list growth net of unsubscribes. Review automation performance on a recurring basis — flows set up months ago and never revisited are one of the most common sources of quietly declining performance, because the audience, product line, and market conditions around them keep changing even when the automation doesn’t.
At Salterra, every client program gets a recurring performance review cycle built in from the start, specifically because the biggest gains we’ve found in existing programs almost never come from a flashy new campaign — they come from noticing a automation that’s been running unchanged and quietly underperforming for months.
Frequently Asked Questions
What's the first automation I should build?
A welcome series, triggered the moment someone joins your list. It's the highest-open-rate window you'll ever have with a new subscriber, and it sets the tone and frequency expectations for the entire relationship going forward.
How often should I email my list?
There's no universal number — it depends on your audience, industry, and content quality — but the right approach is testing frequency against engagement and unsubscribe metrics rather than guessing. Most businesses find a sustainable cadence of a few sends per week, balancing promotional and non-promotional content.
How often should I text my SMS list?
Far less often than email. SMS tolerance for frequency is much lower, and text messages that arrive too often are the fastest path to high opt-out rates and carrier filtering. Reserve SMS for genuinely time-sensitive or high-value messages rather than routine updates.
Do I need to build email and SMS automations at the same time?
No. It's reasonable to build a strong email foundation first — since email supports more content types and automations — and layer in SMS once you have a compliant opt-in process and a clear plan for where urgency-driven messages add value.
How do I know if my emails are landing in spam?
Run test sends through a deliverability checker like Mail-Tester or GlockApps, monitor your bounce and spam-complaint rates inside your ESP's dashboard, and periodically send to seed accounts across major mailbox providers to check actual inbox placement rather than relying on open rate alone, since privacy features on some clients make open-rate data unreliable.
Terry has 30+ years in software and SEO. He’s the founder of Salterra Digital Services and SEO Spring Training, host of the Roundtable SEO Mastermind, and lead instructor at SEO University — teaching the exact tactics his team uses on client work.
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