Every time I tell a small business owner to start an email list I get the same answer. Email is dead, nobody opens anything, it is 2026. A few months later the same person is asking why their reach on a social page dropped by seventy per cent with no explanation.
Those two conversations are the same conversation. This is not about tools or templates. It is about one question: is this channel worth your time or not.
The difference that makes email different
You have two kinds of audience. One you rent and one you own. Followers on any platform are rented: the platform decides who sees you, and it can change that decision tomorrow without telling you and without compensating you.
An email list is owned. The file is yours, and you can take it with you if you change every tool you use. That is the only real difference, and everything else, open rates included, is detail beside it.
To be fair about it, the owned channel is not free. Its cost is that reaching people is now your responsibility, and no algorithm is doing that work on your behalf. That part is what genuinely changed in the last two years and it is discussed far less than it should be.
The rules changed, and this is not a technical footnote
Since February 2024 Google has published requirements for anyone sending at volume. Its documentation defines a bulk sender as anyone sending close to 5,000 messages or more to personal Gmail accounts within 24 hours, and messages from the same primary domain count together even when they go out through subdomains.
If you are a small business you are almost certainly well below that, which means the full authentication regime is not what will stop you starting. But a second rule in the same documentation applies to everybody: user-reported spam should stay below 0.1 per cent and should never reach 0.3.
Apply that to a small sender. Send a hundred emails, have one person mark it as spam, and you are at one per cent. Small volume is not protection, it is exposure. The difference is only that the consequence takes longer to become visible, not that it does not happen.
Microsoft did the same for Outlook. A domain sending 5,000 or more messages to its consumer services is expected to have SPF and DKIM passing and a valid DMARC record, and messages that do not are rejected with a specific error rather than quietly filtered.
What that actually means for you
Not that you should overcomplicate this. It means two things have to be right from the first send, even if you are sending to twenty people.
One: send from your own domain
Not from a personal Gmail address, and not from a domain you will abandon. Reputation attaches to the domain and accumulates over years, so the domain you will still be using in ten years is the one to start correctly with now.
Two: the permission has to be real
The people on the list actually agreed to be there. Not business cards, not numbers scraped out of a messaging app, not a list somebody sold you. A spam complaint is not a moral judgement, it is a number counted against you, and its main source is people who do not remember subscribing.
I wrote a full piece on that part alone, how to build an email list from zero, and the core argument is that a small clean list beats a large questionable one by a wide margin.
When email earns the effort
Not for every business. These are the cases where it genuinely works:
- The purchase repeats. A restaurant, a pharmacy, a consumable, a subscription. Email works on repeat business more than on a first sale.
- The decision takes time. An expensive service or B2B, where the buyer needs two months. Email is what stays present across that gap.
- You have something real to say. A genuine offer or something useful. If you do not, the messages become reminders that you exist, which is the fastest route to a complaint.
- You have abandoned baskets or half-finished steps. That is the highest return in email, and it is covered in how large stores remind you to finish a purchase.
And when to leave it alone
This is the part nobody says, because it does not sell software. Skip email for now if:
- The purchase happens once in a lifetime with no repeat and no referrals attached to it.
- You have fewer than a hundred names and enough customers arriving by word of mouth. Work on something else first.
- You cannot commit to at least one message a month. A list left silent for six months and then revived produces more complaints than sales.
The commitment point is not about discipline. It is about memory. People forget they subscribed, a message arriving after a long silence reads as unfamiliar, and the natural response to an unfamiliar message is to report it.
The smallest version that works
If you decide to start, this is the minimum that is genuinely useful, and it does not need expensive tooling:
- One place where addresses are collected, stating plainly what you will send and how often.
- One automatic welcome message. It is the most opened email any list will ever send.
- One reliable monthly message containing a single useful thing.
- A clear unsubscribe link that works the first time.
People hide that fourth one, and it is the worst available decision. Somebody who cannot find the unsubscribe link presses spam instead. The first removes them from your list. The second damages the reputation of your entire domain.
If you want to grow past that, the sensible order is in the email marketing funnel, and the automation cases that genuinely pay for themselves are in five reasons to use email automation.
Measuring it honestly
Open rate is a weak number since the privacy changes and is reported higher than it really is. Watch clicks and replies, and above both of those, how many people bought after the message.
One ratio matters more than the rest: unsubscribes compared to spam complaints. High unsubscribes and low complaints is healthy and normal. The reverse means the permission itself is broken, and that has to be fixed before another message goes out.
Honest limits
Email will not rescue a weak offer. If people are not buying from you already, a list delivers the same rejection to more people, and the only difference is that you find out faster.
Second, the figures above are platform requirements that apply to Gmail and Outlook. There is no reliable published study of open rates for the Egyptian market specifically, so any number quoted at you as the local average deserves the question of where it came from before you plan around it.
And if what you actually want is to learn this channel properly rather than just switch it on, U Courses has a good treatment of these same rule changes from a teaching angle in their email marketing course guide.