Today we share insights from Teodor Mincu, founder of MessengerOS, a comprehensive email and SMS marketing platform, about proven email marketing strategies.
With extensive experience in email marketing implementation and strategy, Teodor shares his expertise on creating high-converting campaigns, improving deliverability, and building engaged email lists. Whether you’re an e-commerce brand looking to boost sales or an affiliate marketer promoting offers, this interview is packed with actionable tactics to enhance your email marketing strategies.
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Q: How did you start in this field, launching MessengerOS and the consultancy you are offering?
Teodor: MessengerOS started almost three years ago because I wanted to create a platform that would help developers send better transactional emails.
Typically, SaaS platforms send transactional emails without much concern for opens or clicks. They don’t track whether an email address is incorrect or if the recipient didn’t receive the message.
This creates numerous problems. The recipient might call the company saying, “I didn’t receive the email. What happened?” Then the developer has to search through logs to identify the issue. Without a platform to detect hard bounces or email errors, troubleshooting becomes difficult. From this starting point, our first customers requested the ability to send bulk emails.
They would say, “It’s good to send transactional emails, but I want to send newsletters. How can we do that?” So we built the newsletter component.
Later, customers approached us saying, “We want to send automated emails, one per week. We want to filter by contact data, such as a person’s name, or whether they opened a previous email.”
This led us to develop the automation module, so everything evolved based on our customers’ requests. This is how we built what is now almost a complete email and SMS marketing platform.
Yes, we also offer SMS, but the volume isn’t as high because SMS is more expensive and more intrusive. People are reluctant to bother recipients with text messages, or they may not have GDPR consent to send marketing information via SMS. That’s why not everyone uses this channel, at least in our part of Europe; perhaps it’s more popular in the US.
Our clients also began asking, “How can I do this? How can I do that? What’s the perfect timing? What’s the perfect subject line?” While providing stellar customer support, we’ve learned all these email marketing strategies over the past two and a half years, what to do, how to increase deliverability, and how to respect regulations. Now we function as both a consultancy and a platform service.
Q: What tactics do you see working for e-commerce brands, newsletters, and emails promoting those offers?
Teodor: The highest-converting emails in e-commerce are usually automated emails, which follow special flows unique to e-commerce that don’t typically occur in service businesses.
For example, abandoned cart reminders, post-purchase emails, feedback requests, or welcome emails when someone subscribes to your newsletter or creates a new account and agrees to receive marketing emails. You might send an email sharing your company’s story or offering a discount.
This applies if you have an online store.
If you’re an affiliate promoting products from different stores, you’ll need a list of subscribers who want to receive those emails, otherwise, they’ll mark them as spam or unsubscribe.
So you need this subscriber list, and then you should send more than just one type of email, such as sales emails with offers. You should also provide educational content and nurturing content.
For example: If you’re selling shoes, it’s beneficial to send emails explaining how to maintain those shoes for longer wear.
This kind of email is interesting and keeps people subscribed to your newsletter because it provides value!
If customers follow your shoe maintenance advice, their shoes will last longer. Of course, you can incorporate cross-selling, suggesting complementary products like pants or socks to go with these shoes.
This nurturing content isn’t directly focused on selling. You can add product recommendations at the end after delivering value, after the recipient has consumed the valuable information you’re sending. And of course, you need good offers. What makes a good e-commerce offer?
A substantial discount, not just 5%. During a sale, you might offer higher discounts to generate a higher volume of sales. If you only offer a modest 5% discount or something similar, it’s nice but probably won’t create a significant spike in sales.
You can also leverage special events from everyday life.
For example, tomorrow is May 1st. You can create offers related to that.
Or with summer approaching, you can start promoting summer products. This way, your marketing relates directly to your subscribers’ lives.
Q: How many emails should be sent before you send that selling email?
Teodor: Well, it depends. Some experts suggest a ratio of three nurturing emails to one sales email, but of course, you need to have enough content.
Some marketers ask, “What should I send? I can talk about shoe maintenance, but what else?”
You should create a plan and determine how many nurturing emails you can develop. Create an email marketing calendar for a month, for example: “I’ll send this nurturing content on Tuesday. Next week, I can send the sales email, and then return to nurturing content.”
It’s a process of trial and error. The frequency depends on how much valuable nurturing content you can provide, not just filler text.
I’ve noticed, generally speaking, that nurturing content typically has a higher open rate but a lower click rate because you’re not directly selling anything.
When you send an offer, it will have a lower open rate but a higher click-to-open rate. Fewer people will read it, but those who do are somewhat interested and are more likely to click. From that point on, conversion depends on the website and the offer—it’s outside the email’s domain.
Q: What elements make an email convert better, like subject lines, timing, or content? Can you use ChatGPT for that?
Teodor: Yes, of course we can use AI tools. It depends on how creative each of us is. I don’t recommend copying and pasting or using automatic ChatGPT prompts without reviewing the output from ChatGPT or other AI platforms. These tools are very helpful for advancing our content creation, but they shouldn’t replace us entirely, because you don’t know exactly what they might generate.
If you do use ChatGPT, don’t forget to instruct it: “Please write in my voice.”
For example, if you have an Eastern European language background like me, be aware that perfect English might sound inauthentic. If I send you an email and you know me, yet the language is suddenly perfect English, it might seem strange.
You can use ChatGPT to help draft content for your emails. You might ask: “What interests people about shoes? Give me some topics,” and then take those topics, combine them, add personalized elements, and then send the email.
You can also include two or three products at the end, which works well for a nurturing email rather than a sales email. In a sales email, you can reduce the AI-generated content and focus more on promotions or sale items.
Deliverability is another critical factor, it’s an entirely different knowledge domain. Assuming your emails land in the inbox or Promotions tab (which is still the inbox, not the spam folder), you’ll be competing with other promotions and emails.
The advantage is that emails are sorted chronologically.
If I send it today at 12 o’clock, it will appear at that time, not sorted by topic or other criteria. People who check their email regularly will likely see it.
It becomes a competition between subject lines. If a subscriber has three emails with three different subject lines, you as the sender want your email to be opened.
So the subject line needs to be powerful, compelling, or clearly on-topic.
I avoid generic subject lines and recommend including at least one specific word related to your product, like “shoes” in our example.
Otherwise, it’s too vague, recipients might think it’s about something completely different, not your store but perhaps another industry. We’re biased when we write things like “Huge discount for today” without specificity.
Q: Are those promotional words allowed? I know some platforms block emails if you use “discounts” and “deals.”
Teodor: Our platform doesn’t block them, but spam filters might block or redirect your email to the spam folder if you use too many hyped words in combination or have a high density of such terms. I’m not referring to industries like casino marketing, which face significant spam filtering challenges, I don’t have experience in that sector, but I imagine it’s difficult to bypass spam filters.
You need to test different approaches. I can’t definitively say whether including the word “free” in your subject line will get you blocked or sent to spam—it varies.
If we’re discussing deliverability, the subject line should be concise.
Remember that probably 80-90% of people open emails on their phones, which we sometimes forget. Phone screens are small, so recipients will only see the first three or four words of your subject line, that’s your hook.
If you have important information that won’t fit in those first few words, I recommend putting it in the preview line, which appears under the subject line. Rather than placing crucial information at the end of a long subject line, include it at the beginning of the preview line. This way, on mobile devices, readers will see both hooks.
On desktop, the preview line appears after the subject line, which shouldn’t be excessively long anyway. People should be able to see your key message regardless of device.
Q: Do people usually open emails on desktop?
Teodor: Yes, a significant percentage still do. In B2B contexts, the percentage might be smaller, but even in B2B, professionals like myself need to stay updated on everything, so I have all my communications accessible on my phone.
Q: Is domain reputation important in email marketing strategies?
Teodor: Yes, both domain and IP reputation are important.
The sending domain, which may differ from your website domain, can send through various IPs. That IP and domain combination might suffer if not managed properly.
We don’t have exact metrics, no one explicitly states: “If you have a 1% open rate, your reputation will suffer.”
We just know it’s a best practice to maintain good engagement metrics.
Q: For a brand, should it use the primary domain or a subdomain for sending emails? What’s considered good practice?
Teodor: It depends on the context. If you’re working with an engaged subscriber list, you can use your primary domain.
Personally, I don’t see a significant difference because we don’t know exactly how email providers like Yahoo, Gmail, or Hotmail (which dominate B2C email) evaluate this distinction. If I use a subdomain and experience a 1% decrease in deliverability, does that mean the main domain will remain unaffected? I’m not certain.
If I were Yahoo, I would likely transfer reputation between a domain and its subdomains since they share the same ownership. If someone is sending spam from a subdomain, I’d probably penalize the main domain as well. Some experts recommend using different approaches.
Q: When you say “use different,” do you mean different domains entirely?
Teodor: No, I was referring to using different subdomains.
However, if you want to truly separate your sending reputation, I would recommend using an entirely different domain, get another domain completely separate from your primary one.
Q: But would recipients trust you if you use a different domain? If you’re a brand promoting a product, will customers trust you if you’re not using your official domain?
Teodor: If you’re a global brand like Coca-Cola, you probably wouldn’t take this approach. But it’s worth noting that most recipients don’t actually see the domain initially.
They see either the brand name, like “Coca-Cola”, or a person’s name from the company. With proper email setup, recipients only see the actual domain after opening the email.
Now, if Coca-Cola sends you an email from “myCoca-Cola” or similar, and the content seems legitimate (not asking for credit card information or other suspicious requests), would you immediately question its authenticity? You can modify the domain in various ways, changing the top-level domain from .com to .org, or adding prefixes like “go,” “get,” “myCoca-Cola,” or “getCoca-Cola.”
Recipients typically won’t assume it’s fake based solely on the domain unless the content raises red flags, such as requests for payment information.
Q: Do you think people check domain names to verify if emails are legitimate? I’ve been seeing many fake emails lately.
Teodor: Yes, but usually only after opening the email.
Once you’ve opened it, you’ve already read the subject line and possibly seen the content.
If something seems off, like a perfume brand with one letter missing from the name, or luxury products offered at suspiciously low prices (like a designer perfume for just 10 euros), that’s when people typically check the domain.
Q: Do you also check the sender information after opening emails to verify legitimacy?
Teodor: Yes, but by that point, you’ve already opened the email.
If the content doesn’t match expectations, for example, if an email appearing to be from your bank asks for passwords instead of containing typical banking information—that’s when I investigate further. Of course, I’m somewhat biased because I work in this field, so I’m cautious about which emails I open.
Sophisticated phishing attempts need to be very convincing to bypass spam filters.
Major providers like Yahoo and Google have robust protection against phishing, but if you’re using a basic email system without advanced spam protection, the best practice is to be skeptical of anything that seems too good to be true.
Q: What precautions should people take with email attachments?
Teodor: Avoid opening attachments, especially executable files or similar formats. Image files like PNGs are generally safer. It’s unusual to receive attachments from unknown senders, so exercise caution in those situations.
Regarding domains, you can use a different domain for email marketing strategies. Some might worry: “But it’s my brand—people will think it’s fake.”
However, many brands use variations like adding prefixes such as “get,” “go,” or “do” to their domain. You don’t necessarily need to change the extension from .com to something else, but adding something to the beginning is generally acceptable.
Q: What about affiliates promoting offers from other brands? Should they use domains related to the product area they’re promoting?
Teodor: You can be successful in affiliate marketing without engaging in deceptive practices or misappropriating the target brand’s identity. If I’m an affiliate for Coca-Cola, I don’t need to use their logo.
I can simply write, “Best Coca-Cola offer: Buy 100 bottles for $3.” This is transparent and legitimate, it’s simply presenting an offer.
You don’t need to use the brand’s domain; you might position yourself as a discount club or similar. People appreciate good discounts, and there’s nothing suspicious about that approach.
Q: Regarding email promotions, what’s more effective? Having one email with multiple offers and links from the same domain, or sending separate emails with just one or two links per email, similar to a listicle format?
Teodor: It depends on the data you have about your recipients. If you have detailed information—for instance, knowing that certain customers have viewed fashion items while others have shown interest in toys, I would segment your audience and initially send targeted emails (toys to those interested in toys, etc.) and measure the results.
Of course, if I have an exceptional offer, like a 50% discount on shoes, I might try sending it to someone primarily interested in toys. I personally buy toys for my children, but I might also purchase shoes if there’s a significant sale. The conversion rate will likely be lower with less targeted sends, but you’ll still generate some orders and revenue. It ultimately depends on how much customer data you have available for segmentation.
I had a discussion with a client who sells products for pregnant women.
I asked, “Why are you sending to your entire list? These products aren’t relevant to all women, and certainly not to men.”
She responded, “You’d be surprised—men often purchase clothing and other items for women.”
Perhaps only 1% of men will convert, but if you’re seeking additional revenue, email remains the most cost-effective marketing channel. It’s certainly more economical than pay-per-click advertising.
Conclusion and Coming Next
That wraps up the first part of our enlightening conversation with Teodor Mincu on email marketing strategies. We’ve covered the fundamentals of effective email campaigns, content creation, and deliverability best practices.
In Part 2, we’ll dive deeper into unsubscribes management, list-building tactics, domain reputation, and advanced email marketing strategies. Teodor shares his expertise on email marketing strategies, avoiding the spam folder, measuring success metrics, and leveraging AI tools effectively.
You won’t want to miss these invaluable insights that could transform your email marketing results!
If you’d like to connect with Teodor or learn more about MessengerOS, you can find him on
LinkedIn
You can also visit the MessengerOS website, where you’ll find the Free 1:1 Email Marketing Feedback button to schedule a call directly with him.
Stay tuned for Part 2 of this interview, which will be coming soon to Champions of Performance Marketing!
Here is the entire video interview, if you can’t wait to see it:)
Author: Julia Draghici
Julia is the CEO of CPV Lab and CPV One ad trackers. She has 15+ years experience in the software industry, from development to management. For more than 6 years she is helping marketers get the best out of their marketing campaigns by using a performant ad tracker. Passionate about entrepreneurship, business and performance marketing, Julia loves helping people!
