Email Marketing

Email marketing is the practice of sending campaigns, newsletters and automated messages through your own list to people who have given permission. It is also called mail marketing or e-mail marketing.

Unlike social media, you reach the audience through your own list rather than through a platform algorithm. There are three core types of sends: a campaign that goes out on a set date, a regular newsletter and automation triggered by user behavior.

Newsletter topics are often drawn from the same calendar as newsletter content production. The value of the method lies not in the number of sends but in getting the right message to the right person.

You get started with email marketing by building a permission-based list, splitting it into segments and sending each segment messages that fit it. The first step is consent and list hygiene, because sending to problematic records from the start carries both compliance and deliverability risk.

In its sender guidelines, Google also advises against buying addresses from other companies and recommends sending only to recipients who signed up. Next, the sending domain is authenticated, templates are built and the measurement setup is put in place. Sending starts with active recipients, and volume increases gradually.

Digitruva first audits where records came from, their consent status and their match with İYS, Türkiye's Message Management System, then rolls out priority automations. Subject lines and send times are tested with A/B tests, and the results feed into the next calendar.

The two cover different ground. KVKK, Türkiye's Personal Data Protection Law, governs the processing of personal data, while Law No. 6563 on electronic commerce governs commercial electronic messages. İYS is the system where consent and opt-out records are kept.

The duty to provide a privacy notice applies even where explicit consent is not required. In decisions of the Personal Data Protection Board, bundling marketing consent with other purposes in a single text and making it a precondition of service has been found unacceptable. On the messaging side, the basic rule is prior consent.

The burden of proving consent falls on the sender, and consent and opt-out records must be kept in sync with İYS. When an opt-out request comes in, sending must stop within the period the legislation sets. Check current deadlines against the regulation text and İYS announcements. This general information is not a substitute for legal advice.

The legislation defines certain cases that fall outside the prior consent requirement. Messages about the use and maintenance of goods or services already purchased, and notices about subscriptions, payments and deliveries, may fall into this category.

Adding promotional content to such a message, however, can void the exemption. Separate rules also apply to recipients who are merchants and tradespeople, but these recipients' İYS registration and right to opt out still need to be checked.

Whether a person counts as a merchant is not always clear from the list. In Board decision No. 2022/861, the Personal Data Protection Board stated that lawyers cannot be considered merchants or tradespeople and that a business email address found online is not thereby available for marketing. So recipient type must be verified record by record. The exemption is decided per message type, not applied to the whole list. Before acting, consult the current regulation text and your legal counsel.

If the records are missing or misconfigured, messages may land in spam instead of the inbox or may not be accepted at all. The SPF, DKIM and DMARC table on this page summarizes what each record verifies.

The Gmail sender guidelines require SPF or DKIM from everyone who sends to Gmail. Senders of 5,000 or more messages a day need SPF, DKIM and DMARC together, and marketing messages must also offer one-click unsubscribe. The spam rate should never reach 0.30% and should ideally stay below 0.10%.

The records alone do not guarantee the inbox, because list quality and recipient engagement also shape sender reputation. When you change sending platforms, the DKIM key is regenerated, so the records should be updated before the migration.

Measurement should center on clicks, conversions, revenue and list health, not open rate. Because of privacy features, open data does not fully reflect real reading, and Google states in its Gmail guidelines that it does not track open rates.

To see the contribution on the website, links are tagged with campaign URL parameters such as utm_source, utm_medium and utm_campaign. The utm_content parameter can separate two links in the same email. Values should be consistent and lowercase, because differences in capitalization split the reports.

Digitruva connects this setup to GA4 conversions and also tracks bounces, complaints and unsubscribes. If the landing page after the click is weak, work on raising email conversions comes next.