Services — Performance & Digital Marketing
Email Marketing Agency
Ellington & Vale is an email marketing agency working with Indian brands on lifecycle flows, campaign programmes and the list health that determines whether any of it reaches an inbox. Email remains the highest-margin channel most brands own, and it is the one most consistently run on autopilot.
Deliverability is the whole game, and it is invisible
A campaign that lands in Promotions or Spam has failed before a single word of it was read, and nothing in a standard email report will tell you clearly that it happened.
Deliverability rests on things most marketing teams never touch: authentication — SPF, DKIM and DMARC configured correctly on your sending domain — sending reputation, which is built slowly and damaged quickly, and list hygiene, because repeatedly mailing addresses that bounce or never open teaches the receiving providers to treat you as bulk.
The major inbox providers tightened bulk-sender requirements meaningfully in recent years, and authentication that was optional is now effectively mandatory for anyone sending at volume. This is the first thing we audit and it is frequently where the problem already is.
Lifecycle flows, which is where the money is
Campaign sends get the attention. Automated flows produce a disproportionate share of the revenue, and they are built once.
Welcome and onboarding sequences, abandoned cart and browse recovery, post-purchase and replenishment, win-back for lapsed customers, and the transactional messages — order confirmations, shipping updates — that get opened at far higher rates than any campaign and are almost always left as the platform's default template.
A transactional email is a marketing surface a customer actually wants to open. Treating it as a system notification wastes the best real estate in the channel.
For D2C brands this connects directly to the retention economics on our ecommerce marketing page.
Segmentation and relevance
The reason most Indian email programmes underperform is that everyone gets everything.
Segmentation by behaviour, purchase history, engagement recency and lifecycle stage is unglamorous and it is what separates a list that grows from one that quietly erodes. Every irrelevant send costs a little future deliverability, so mailing everyone is not free even when it looks like it.
What we measure, and what we ignore
Open rate is no longer a reliable metric. Privacy protections on major mail clients pre-fetch images, which inflates opens for a meaningful and unknowable share of any list. A programme optimised against open rate is being optimised against noise.
What we report instead: click-to-delivered, conversion rate, revenue per recipient — the number that actually tells you whether a send was worth making — list growth net of churn, and deliverability signals like inbox placement and complaint rate.
Revenue per recipient in particular changes behaviour, because it makes the cost of sending to an unengaged segment visible.
Design, and the constraint nobody plans for
Email rendering is the most hostile environment in digital design. Clients strip styling, break layouts and ignore modern CSS, and a template that looks correct in one may be unusable in another.
The majority of Indian email opens are on mobile, which makes mobile the design case rather than the adaptation. Templates get built to degrade gracefully and get tested across clients before they ship — a step that is routinely skipped and routinely regretted.
What determines the cost
No published rates. Two costs again: our fee, and your email platform's subscription, which is charged by them and usually scales with list size.
Our side: whether this is a programme build or ongoing management; how many flows are being built; whether templates are being designed from scratch; whether a deliverability and migration audit is needed; and send volume.
FAQ
- What does an email marketing agency do?
- Builds and runs the email programme — lifecycle automation, campaigns, templates and segmentation — and maintains the deliverability infrastructure that determines whether any of it reaches an inbox.
- Why do our emails go to spam or Promotions?
- Usually one of three things: authentication not configured correctly on your sending domain, a damaged sending reputation from past volume or complaints, or list hygiene — repeatedly mailing addresses that bounce or never engage. All three are fixable, and all three take time to repair once damaged.
- Is open rate still a useful metric?
- Not on its own. Privacy features in major mail clients pre-fetch images and register opens that never happened, for an unknown share of any list. Click-to-delivered, conversion and revenue per recipient are the numbers worth optimising against.
- How often should we email our list?
- It depends on what you have to say and how the list responds. The honest general answer is that consistency matters more than frequency, and that mailing an unengaged segment repeatedly costs you deliverability with the engaged one.
- How much does email marketing cost in India?
- No published rates. Our fee is separate from your platform subscription — see above for what drives ours.
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