You may have heard that email is dead. We hear it every year, and yet every year email remains the channel with the highest return on investment in all of online marketing. Studies consistently report a return of $36 to $40 for every dollar invested. No other channel comes close. In this lesson we will look at why that is and what place email has in your company's communication.

Your email database is your property

Followers on social media do not belong to you. They belong to the platform. When Facebook or Instagram changes its algorithm, the reach of your posts drops overnight and there is nothing you can do about it. The typical organic reach of a business page today sits in the low single-digit percentages. You write a post for ten thousand followers and a few hundred people see it.

An email database works differently. The contacts you have collected legally are yours. Nobody can take them away, and nobody puts an algorithm between you and your readers. When you send a campaign to a thousand recipients, a thousand people get it in their inbox. Whether they open it depends on the quality of your subject line and content, and that is exactly what this course will teach you to influence.

What email does better than other channels

Compared to social media and paid advertising, email has several practical advantages:

• You reach people who have already shown interest in you. They gave you their address themselves, so you are not starting from zero.
• You can personalize. In Quanda you greet every recipient with an automatic personalized salutation and tailor the content to what you know about them.
• You can measure everything. For every campaign you see how many people received the email, opened it and what they clicked on.
• Costs are predictable. You do not pay for every impression like you do with ads. You pay for the tool and send as much as you need.

Where email fits in your company's communication

Email is not a replacement for other channels, it is the link between them. A typical customer first meets you on a social network, in a search engine or through a recommendation. Your website and ads bring in new visitors, social media builds awareness. Email steps in when you want to turn a prospect into a customer and a customer into a loyal one.

That is why email tends to be strongest for repeat purchases and long-term relationships. News, tips, reminders, a thank-you after a purchase, an invitation to an event. These are all situations where it makes sense to write directly to an inbox that most of us check several times a day.

What awaits you in this course

In the following lessons we will walk the entire path of an email marketer step by step. First you will build a contact database legally and honestly. Then you will create and send your first campaign in Quanda. You will learn to write subject lines that people open, divide your contacts into segments, set up your first automated series and finally learn to measure and improve your results.

You do not need any prior experience. All you need is a Quanda account, the free trial is fine, and a willingness to try things out as you go. Every lesson ends with a short quiz that helps you check you have the essentials down. Let's get started.

The quality of your database determines your results more than anything else. A thousand people who genuinely want your emails will bring you more than a hundred thousand addresses from a dubious source. In this lesson we will look at how to collect contacts legally, how to get them into Quanda and how to keep your database in good shape.

Consent or legitimate interest

Under GDPR you need a legal basis for sending commercial emails. In practice there are two options:

• Consent. A person has voluntarily and verifiably told you they want to receive emails from you. Typically they subscribed to your newsletter on your website. Consent must be active, a pre-checked box is not enough.
• Legitimate interest. You can send your existing customers offers for goods or services similar to what they have already bought from you. Even here, every email must include an easy way to unsubscribe.

What is not legal: purchased databases, addresses scraped from websites and emails of people who have never heard of you. Beyond a fine, you risk something worse, your sender reputation. When recipients mark your emails as spam, mail servers remember it and start delivering your messages to the junk folder even for people who actually want them.

Double opt-in: double confirmation

The cleanest way to collect contacts is the so-called double opt-in. It works simply. A person fills in a form on your website and you send them a confirmation email with a link. Only by clicking the link is the subscription completed.

Why do the extra work? You gain certainty that the address exists and that its real owner entered it. Typos and addresses someone filled in as a joke never make it into your database. And if anyone ever asks, you have proof of consent in hand. Contacts from double opt-in have the best open rates in the long run, because they are people who truly wanted your content.

Importing contacts into Quanda

You get your existing contacts into Quanda with a bulk import. You will find it in the top menu under "Contacts / Bulk contact import". The process is straightforward:

• Prepare a file in xlsx or csv format. Each piece of data, that is first name, last name, email or company, belongs in its own column.
• Choose the import priority. This tells Quanda what to do when an imported address already exists in the database. It either skips the existing contact or updates it with the new data.
• Map the file columns to the fields in Quanda and do not forget tags. A tag, for example "newsletter" or "customers-2026", will later let you filter contacts into campaigns.
• Finish the import. It runs in the background, so you do not have to wait around, the results arrive by email.

A useful tip: if you turn on automatic salutation creation during the import, Quanda adds a personalized salutation to every contact. Peter Smith becomes "Dear Mr. Smith" and you can then use it in your campaigns with a single click.

Database hygiene

A database is not a warehouse, it is a garden. It needs regular care:

• After every campaign, review the undelivered emails. Fix typos, remove non-existent addresses. Permanently blacklisted contacts, that is addresses where delivery keeps failing long term, can be deleted.
• Leave unsubscribed contacts alone. Quanda excludes them from mailings automatically and you must not contact them again.
• Watch the open-rate contact scoring. For contacts who have not opened your emails in months, try sending a reactivation campaign. If they do not respond, stop sending to them.

A smaller, living database beats a big, dead one. Remember that every time you are tempted to chase contact counts instead of contact quality.

Theory is behind us, now let's get our hands dirty. In this lesson you will create your first simple email campaign in Quanda and go through the whole process from setup to sending. Open Quanda in another window and click along with us.

Creating the campaign and settings

In the top menu, under Email campaigns, choose "Create new campaign". Quanda offers several campaign types, for a start pick the regular campaign. It is designed for a one-time bulk email send, which is exactly what we need now. Name the campaign. Only you and your colleagues see the name, so choose something practical, for example "August 2026 Newsletter".

On the "Settings" page, pay attention to the language selection. It determines the language of the email's auxiliary texts, that is the unsubscribe text or the view-in-browser link. Sending in English, keep English. You can also invite other users from your account into the campaign here. Careful, the settings on this page cannot be changed once the campaign has been sent. When you are done, continue with the "Save and recipients" button.

Selecting recipients

On the "Recipients" page you filter the contacts you want to send the email to. Filtering is based on the tags you assigned to contacts during the import. Check one or more tags and click "Filter". With multiple tags, Quanda asks whether you want contacts that have at least one of them or all of them at once. If you need to filter by other data as well, open the detailed filter.

You add the filtered contacts to the campaign by selecting them. Click the checkbox in the table header and choose "Select all". At the top you will then see three numbers: blue is the number of selected contacts, green the number ready to send and red the number of blacklisted contacts, that is contacts temporarily or permanently excluded from mailings. Unsubscribed contacts do not appear in the list at all, Quanda protects them for you. The page saves automatically, so you can continue straight to the email editor.

Email content in the editor

In the email editor you put together the email itself. You can start from a ready-made template or build your own from blocks for text, images and buttons. For your first campaign we recommend simplicity:

• Your logo at the top, so the recipient knows right away who the email is from.
• The salutation. Click into the text, choose Personalization and insert the personalized salutation. A tag in curly braces appears in the text, which Quanda replaces with the recipient's actual name when sending.
• A short, to-the-point text and one prominent button with a link.
• Leave the unsubscribe link where it is. It is mandatory and hiding it damages your reputation.

Fill in the email subject and the sender name. We will cover both in detail in the next lesson, for now the rule is: brief, specific, no ALL CAPS and no exclamation marks.

Test, mobile check and sending

Never send a campaign without a test. Send a test email to your own address and go through it with a recipient's eyes. Does the subject fit? Do all the links work? Do the images display? Was the personalization replaced correctly?

Then open the same email on your phone. More than half of all people read their mail on a phone, so what looks great on a monitor can be unreadable on a small screen. Check the font size, the width of the images and whether the button can be comfortably tapped with a thumb.

When everything is in order, move on to the send settings. You can send the campaign right away or schedule it for a specific date and time. For your first campaign, try a weekday morning and note down the result. You will gradually fine-tune your timing based on your own data. Click send and congratulations, you have just sent your first campaign.

In the recipient's inbox you are competing for attention with dozens of other emails. The decision whether to open yours is made within a second, and three things decide it: the sender name, the subject line and the preheader. In this lesson you will learn to master all three, plus how to write content that leads the reader to click.

Sender name and subject line

The sender name is the first thing the recipient sees. It must be instantly clear who is writing. A company name works best, or the combination "Name from Company", such as "Petra from Quanda". Use that when you want to give your communication a human face. Above all, do not change the name with every campaign. Recipients get used to it and use it to find you in their inbox.

The subject line is the headline of your email. A few proven rules:

• Stay around 40 to 50 characters. Longer subject lines get cut off on mobile, so the essentials belong at the beginning.
• Be specific. "Three tips to double your open rate" beats "News from our blog".
• Avoid ALL CAPS, rows of exclamation marks and words like "free!!!" or "today only". Spam filters react to them, and so do recipients, just not the way you would like.
• Personalization in the subject line works, but use it sparingly. A first name once in a while is a nice touch, in every email it feels mechanical.
• Do not lie. A subject line that promises something the email does not deliver will raise your open rate once and destroy trust permanently.

Preheader: a second chance at attention

The preheader is the short text shown in the inbox right after the subject line. If you do not set it, the mail client pulls in the first text from the email, often something like "View in browser". That is a wasted opportunity.

Think of the preheader as a continuation of the subject line. The subject opens a question, the preheader develops it. Example: subject "Is your open rate dropping?" and preheader "Walk through the three most common causes and their quick fixes." Together they form one message that gives a reason to click.

Structuring the message

People do not read emails, they scan them. Adapt your structure to that:

• One email, one topic. If you have more to say, send two emails instead.
• The most important information belongs at the top. Do not count on the reader scrolling to the end.
• Write short paragraphs, two to three lines. Long blocks of text on a phone put everyone off.
• Use subheadings and bullet points, they help the eye find anchor points.
• Write in the recipient's language, not internal jargon. Instead of "we have implemented new functionality" write "you can now".

Greeting the reader by name at the start of the email increases the feeling of personal communication. In Quanda you insert it through personalization with one click. The tag in curly braces is replaced with the recipient's actual first name when the email is sent.

One clear CTA

The CTA, the call to action, is the reason you are sending the email. You want the reader to click through to an article, view an offer or register for a webinar. The most common beginner mistake is offering five actions at once. A reader choosing between five buttons usually chooses none.

So the rule is: one main CTA per email. Make it a prominent button, not just a link in the text, and place it so it is visible without scrolling. Write the button text as an action from the reader's point of view: "Read the guide", "Try it for free", "Reserve my seat". A generic "Click here" says nothing about what the person gains by clicking.

Before you send a campaign, ask yourself a control question: "If I had to keep just one sentence and one button from this entire email, which would they be?" If you do not know the answer, the email is not finished yet.

Sending "everything to everyone" is the fastest road to a dead database. When a dog owner keeps getting offers for cat food, sooner or later they unsubscribe or worse, mark you as spam. Segmentation means dividing your contacts into meaningful groups and sending each group only what interests it. In this lesson you will learn to build segments in Quanda and get to know the most common mistakes.

What to segment by

You can segment by two kinds of information:

• Contact attributes. What you know about the person: gender, city, company, job title, date of birth, the source the contact came from. This data is stable and typically comes from a form or an import.
• Behavior. What the person does: what they bought, how long ago they last bought, which emails they open, what they clicked on, whether they filled in your questionnaire. Behavior tends to be more valuable for mailings, because it shows real interest, not just an assumption.

For beginners we recommend starting with three basic segments: new contacts (subscribed in the last few weeks), active readers (they open and click) and inactive contacts (no response for a long time). Even this simple division lets you communicate far more precisely.

How to build segments in Quanda

The basic segmentation tool in Quanda is tags. A tag is a label you assign to a contact, for example "newsletter", "customer", "webinar-2026" or "interest-questionnaires". A contact can have any number of tags. You assign tags during import, manually on individual contacts, or automatically, for example to everyone who fills in a specific active form.

When selecting campaign recipients, you then combine tags. You check one or more tags and Quanda asks whether you want contacts that have at least one of the selected tags or all of them at once. This lets you assemble fairly fine-grained groups, for example "customers who are also subscribed to the newsletter". To filter by other data stored on the contact, such as city or company, use the detailed filter on the recipients page.

Practical advice: come up with a tag naming system before you have fifty of them. A prefix by type works well, for example "source-web", "source-tradeshow", "interest-productA". A year from now you will thank yourself.

Personalization: segmentation in miniature

Segmentation determines who gets the email. Personalization adapts the content to the individual recipient. In Quanda you insert personalization tags in curly braces into both the text and the subject line, and they are replaced with the contact's data when the email is sent. Most often you will use the personalized salutation, such as "Dear Mr. Smith" or "Hello Jane". Combining both approaches, a relevant topic for the segment plus a personal salutation, turns a bulk email into a message that feels like it was written for one person.

What to avoid

Segmentation can also be overdone or done badly. Watch out for these situations:

• Too many micro-segments. Ten segments means ten versions of every campaign. If you do not have the time for that, the content starts getting sloppy and the result will be worse than with two well-served segments.
• Segments without a plan. Do not segment because you can, segment because you have a different message for each segment. If you send all segments the same thing, segmentation adds nothing.
• Outdated data. A segment like "expecting mothers" has a limited shelf life. Regularly check whether the data you segment by is still valid.
• Creepy personalization. Data a company has about you that you never knowingly gave it feels unpleasant in an email. Personalize with what people have entrusted to you themselves.

A golden rule to finish: every segment should receive emails that make you think "this would genuinely interest me in their place". If you cannot say that about a campaign, do not send it yet.

So far you have sent every campaign by hand. Automation turns that work around: you prepare a campaign once and Quanda then sends it to each contact at the right moment on its own. A new subscriber gets their welcome email at midnight on a Saturday, even while you are asleep. In this lesson you will learn when automation makes sense and how to build your first email series in Quanda.

What automation can do

A manual campaign is sent once to a whole group at the same time. An automated campaign is tied to a specific contact's situation and triggers for each person individually. Typical examples:

• A welcome series after subscribing or registering.
• A series of tips on using a freshly purchased product.
• Birthday or anniversary wishes, Quanda has a dedicated campaign type for this.
• An educational series that walks a prospect through a topic step by step, exactly like this course.

The common denominator: the message is tied to the stage the contact is in, not to a date in your calendar. That is why automation is also called nurturing. Instead of a one-off shot, you build the relationship gradually.

The welcome series: the first automation to build

If you automate only one thing, make it the welcome series. A new subscriber is the most attentive reader you will ever have. They have just given you their address, they are interested, and the open rate of welcome emails tends to be two to three times higher than regular campaigns. Making them wait weeks for your next bulk mailing is a waste.

A proven welcome series structure has three to five emails:

• The first email immediately after subscribing: a welcome, a thank-you and delivery on your promise, for example the promised e-book or discount code.
• The second email after two to three days: introduce who you are and how you can be useful. Show your best content.
• The third email after a week: a concrete tip or a customer story that shows the value of your product in practice.
• An optional fourth and fifth email: a gentle nudge to act, such as trying the product or filling in a short questionnaire about what interests the subscriber. You can use the answers directly for segmentation.

How to create an email series in Quanda

You create an automated series in Quanda as an email series. In the top menu, under Email campaigns, choose "Create new campaign", name the series and in the "Email series" section click "Create".

The process is similar to a regular campaign, with a few differences. On the settings page you choose the language of the auxiliary texts and optionally invite colleagues. On the recipients page you select who enters the series, again using tags and filters. In the email editor you then prepare not one email but a whole sequence of messages. In the send settings you set the time intervals between the individual parts, for example the first part immediately and each following one after three days.

Before you launch the series, send yourself all the parts as test emails and read them back to back. A series should be one continuous story, not five unrelated messages.

When to automate and when not to

Automation saves time, but it is not the answer to everything. A good guideline: automate communication that repeats regularly in the same form and is tied to the contact's situation. Welcomes, thank-yous, anniversaries, follow-up tips. Do not automate what is by nature one-off and time-sensitive, that is news, seasonal offers or invitations to specific events.

And one more principle: automation is not "set and forget". Once a quarter, look at the statistics of your series. The world changes, your offer does too, and a welcome email written two years ago may be welcoming newcomers to a company that no longer looks the same.

Sending a campaign is not the end of the work, it is the start of the most interesting part. The numbers tell you what caught your recipients' attention, what they ignored and what to do better next time. In this lesson you will learn to read the statistics in Quanda, interpret the basic metrics correctly and establish a simple evaluation rhythm.

The basic metrics and what they mean

You will find the statistics for every campaign in Quanda right next to the campaign. The key terms:

• Sent and delivered. The number of unique recipients the email was sent to, and the number it was actually delivered to. The difference is the undelivered emails. Their list, including the reasons, is at the bottom of the statistics page.
• Unique opens. The number of recipients who opened the email, each counted once. Alongside it, "total opens" counts every open, so one curious reader can add ten opens on their own.
• Open rate. The share of unique opens out of delivered emails. For a healthy database it typically sits somewhere between 20 and 40 percent. The metric is driven mainly by the subject line, the sender and the quality of the database.
• Click rate. The share of recipients who clicked a link. It speaks to your content and the strength of your CTA. Single-digit percentages of delivered emails are normal, and the trend over time matters more than the absolute value.
• Conversions. How many people, after clicking, did the thing you were after: a purchase, a registration, filling in a questionnaire. The conversion happens on your website, so connect the links in your campaigns to your measurement, for example through UTM parameters and Google Analytics.

One warning: because of privacy protection in mail clients, the open rate is less and less accurate. Treat it as a rough trend and base your decisions mainly on clicks and conversions.

A/B tests: stop guessing

Not sure which of two subject lines will work? Do not guess, test it. Quanda has a dedicated campaign type for this, A/B testing. You prepare two variants, Quanda sends them to part of your database, compares the results, and the winning variant goes out to the rest of the recipients.

For a test to be worth anything, follow three principles:

• Test one thing at a time. If the variants differ in both subject line and content, you will not know what caused the difference.
• Test on a large enough sample. On two hundred contacts, a difference of a few opens is chance, not a result.
• Write your results down. The goal is not to win one test, but to gradually learn what works on your audience.

Start with the subject line, that is where the differences tend to be biggest. Then try the button text, the length of the email or the send time.

An evaluation rhythm

Statistics only make sense when you look at them regularly and in context. A proven rhythm looks like this:

The day after every campaign, go through the basic numbers and the list of undelivered emails. Fix wrong addresses, remove non-existent ones, this is how you care for your sender reputation. Once a month, compare campaigns against each other: which topics and subject lines worked best, which segments performed well. Once a quarter, look at long-term trends, the growth and activity of your database, and the results of your automated series, which otherwise easily slip out of sight.

Write your conclusions down, a plain spreadsheet is fine: date, segment, subject line, open rate, clicks, lesson learned. In six months you will have your own playbook, worth more than any generic statistics from the internet.

What next

Congratulations, you have walked the whole path. You can legally build a database, send a campaign, write a subject line and content, segment, automate and measure. Now it is time to put it all into practice. Open Quanda, plan next month's first campaign and after sending it, come back to the statistics. Email marketing is a craft, and a craft improves only by doing.