Absolutely. Although social media is a great tool, email is still king when it comes to marketing. With a ROI of $36 per $1 spent by recent estimates, it’s a brave choice to ignore email completely. It may be that social and other channels play a key part of your marketing mix, but ignore email at your peril, particularly marketing automation, as you’ll be leaving money on the table.

Best practice is generally considered 600px wide, but length can vary depending on email purpose, industry and engagement levels, never be afraid to test. Another size factor is that Gmail clips emails after 105kb, so make sure to keep emails clean of excess code, hidden images or anything else that you don’t need in them.

Google doesn't like to report back which device an email was opened on, so chances are this is going to be the main reason. It also doesn’t feed spam reports back, so make sure you, or whoever is managing your ESP, is signed up to Google Postmaster tools as well.

Conventional wisdom says it should be 60/40 in favour of text, but that’s pretty generic. So although it might be a good place to start from, test! Some industries respond better to image heavy marketing, others want more information, and every audience is different. Make sure you get to know yours.

Probably. Marketing automation is there to make your life as a marketer, or small business owner, easier, so don’t be afraid to try new ideas. Abandoned basket email for retail clients? They’re a no brainer, and are consistently shown to drive revenue. Birthday emails for your B2B audience? Hmm, maybe? Again, it depends on your audience, your content and your brand’s tone of voice. Testing automations is always worthwhile, even well established ones; it isn’t there as a ‘fire and forget’ solution entirely.

Our view is that you should definitely have a CRM once you start getting beyond those first few clients. Many bigger CRMs that seem too expensive offer free starter packages, so you can try them out. Our preferred CRM at Brew Digital is HubSpot, but find the one that has the features you need. If you need help with that research, we're happy to help!