For Clients

Email marketing setup: what you need before you brief a designer

Email marketing setup process illustration featuring email service provider configuration, domain authentication, subscriber list management, brand assets preparation, and email campaign design tools before launching marketing campaigns.
Team TBM
Team TBM
Jul 22, 20263 min read

Email marketing briefs stall when clients hand over a scope before the infrastructure exists to support it. That’s not a designer problem. It’s a sequencing problem. So before you book that kick-off call, here’s what needs to be in place.

Choose your ESP first

Your email service provider (ESP) determines what the designer can actually build. Templates are platform-specific: a design built inside Mailchimp cannot simply be moved to Klaviyo or HubSpot without being rebuilt from scratch. That’s why your platform choice has to come first.

Create your account, connect a custom sending domain (not a free Gmail or Yahoo address), and configure your sender profile. Once those steps are done, the designer has a real environment to work within. Without them, any mockup is still a guess.

Authenticate your sending domain

This is the most time-sensitive step, and the one most clients skip until it’s too late.

Three DNS records protect your sending reputation:

  • SPF (Sender Policy Framework) tells receiving servers which mail services are allowed to send on your behalf.
  • DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail) adds a cryptographic signature to outgoing emails so recipients can verify they haven’t been tampered with.
  • DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance) tells servers what to do when SPF or DKIM checks fail.

Google and Yahoo required all three for bulk senders starting February 2024. Microsoft Outlook enforced the same standards from May 5, 2025. Without authentication, your beautifully designed campaign goes to spam regardless of how good it looks.

Allow at least 48 hours for DNS changes to propagate, and generally several weeks for your sending reputation to fully stabilize. Start this process early. A domain that is generally at least 30 days old and pointing to a live website will have a smoother setup.

Have a real, permission-based list

Your designer needs to understand your audience to make smart decisions about layout, hierarchy, and CTA placement. That doesn’t mean you need thousands of contacts. However, it does mean the list must be real and consented.

Configure your suppression lists before any campaign goes out. CAN-SPAM (US law) requires a clear opt-out mechanism in every email. GDPR (if you have EU contacts) requires documented consent. Neither framework demands a compliance deep-dive right now: just confirm the basics are in place before the first send.

A clean list with 200 genuine subscribers is far more useful than a bloated import of unverified contacts.

Package your brand assets for screen

Print design and email design are different disciplines. CMYK color profiles, for example, don’t translate to screens. Your designer needs everything formatted for digital from the start.

Bring them:

  • Your logo as an SVG or PNG with a transparent background (both light and dark versions if you have them)
  • Brand colors in HEX codes (not CMYK or Pantone)
  • Your web font, plus a confirmed web-safe fallback
  • A tone of voice document or writing sample that reflects how you communicate
  • Your company’s physical postal address, which is required by law in every email footer under CAN-SPAM

When these assets are ready, the designer spends time designing, not hunting for files or guessing at your brand standards.

Once your ESP is configured, your domain is authenticated, your list is clean, and your assets are screen-ready, the creative brief becomes a short, focused conversation. Most of the hard decisions are already made. The designer can move fast because the foundation is solid.

If you’re setting up email marketing and want a team that handles both the strategy and the design, The Blue Mango works with clients at exactly this stage.