Email automation with deliverability sorted before the first send
Most email problems are not creative problems. They are authentication, list and infrastructure problems, and they are invisible until you look at where your messages are actually landing.
What is email automation?
Email Automation is the setup of automated email a business sends without writing each message: transactional notifications such as receipts and reminders, and lifecycle sequences triggered by behaviour. It includes authentication, templates, consent handling and monitoring. It suits Australian organisations whose email volume has outgrown a person clicking send.
Get a fixed written quote- Typical timeline
- 2 to 6 weeks
- What drives cost
- How many sequences you need, whether transactional email requires developer work in your application, the state of your current authentication.
- Best for
- Businesses sending receipts, reminders or sequences at volume
- You own
- The sending domains, the platform accounts, the templates and the data
- Built with
- SPF, DKIM, DMARC, subdomain separation, responsive templates, delivery monitoring
Your handover
Transactional and marketing email should not share a reputation
Transactional email is the mail a person is waiting for: an order confirmation, a booking reminder, a password reset, an invoice. Marketing email is the mail you decided to send. They have different urgency, different consent basis and, crucially, different complaint rates. If both go out over the same sending identity, a promotional campaign that irritates people can degrade the inbox placement of the receipts your customers actually need.
- 01Authentication audit and remediation plan
- 02SPF, DKIM and DMARC records configured and verified
- 03Separated transactional and marketing sending domains
- 04Validated and suppressed contact list with consent evidence
- 05Responsive, accessible template set with plain text alternatives
- 06Built and tested automated sequences with exit rules
- Seed inbox placement test results
- Delivery, bounce, complaint and DMARC monitoring
- Sending policy and runbook for your team
Marketing mail goes through a platform your marketing team can operate without a developer
So we separate them. Different subdomains for sending, often different platforms, with reputation monitored independently. Transactional mail goes through infrastructure tuned for immediacy and reliability, with retries and a queue that survives an outage. Marketing mail goes through a platform your marketing team can operate without a developer. Reporting is separated too, because mixing a 99 percent delivery expectation with a campaign open rate produces a dashboard that tells you nothing.
The other reason to split is diagnosis. When something goes wrong, and eventually it will, you want to know whether the problem is one stream or both. Shared infrastructure turns a simple question into a week of guessing.
Editors get a small set of pieces that always look right rather than a blank canvas that usually does not.
Authentication: what SPF, DKIM and DMARC actually do
SPF publishes which servers are allowed to send for your domain. DKIM signs each message so the receiver can verify it was not altered and genuinely came from you. DMARC ties the two together, tells receiving mail servers what to do when a message fails, and sends you reports on who is sending as your domain. Without all three configured and aligned, your mail is treated with suspicion, and anyone can send email that appears to come from your business.
The major mailbox providers stopped treating this as optional
The major mailbox providers stopped treating this as optional. Bulk senders to Gmail and Yahoo are expected to authenticate with SPF and DKIM, publish a DMARC record, offer one click unsubscribe in the message headers, and keep spam complaints below a low threshold. Australian businesses that were quietly getting away with a partial setup have been discovering this the slow way, through delivery rates falling without an obvious cause.
Our setup work covers the full chain: aligned SPF and DKIM on each sending subdomain, DMARC published in monitoring mode first so we can see every sender before enforcement, then moved to quarantine and reject once the legitimate senders are accounted for. Almost every audit we run finds at least one forgotten system sending as the main domain, usually an old form handler or an accounting tool nobody thought of.
- Dedicated sending subdomains for transactional and marketing streams
- SPF, DKIM and DMARC configured and aligned, with reporting enabled
- DMARC moved to enforcement only after legitimate senders are identified
- One click unsubscribe headers on bulk sends
- Bounce and complaint handling wired back to suppression
- Delivery, bounce and complaint monitoring with alerting on a threshold
How the engagement runs
How an email automation build runs
The order matters here. Authentication and data come first, templates second, sequences last. Building beautiful sequences on an unauthenticated domain with a questionable list is how businesses end up wondering why a campaign with a 40 percent open rate produced nothing.
- 01AuditCurrent sending sources, authentication records, list origins, bounce and complaint history
- 02Domain and infrastructureSending subdomains created, SPF, DKIM and DMARC published, platform connected
- 03List hygieneValidation of existing contacts, removal of role addresses and hard bounces, consent evidence reviewed
- 04TemplatesResponsive, plain text alternative included, dark mode checked, accessible structure and real alt text
- 05Content and sequencesMessages written, timing agreed, exit and suppression rules defined
- 06Seed testing and warm upPlacement checked across major providers, volume ramped on new sending domains
- 07MonitorDashboards for delivery, bounces, complaints and DMARC reports, with a 30 day review
Two decisions on your side that keep the project moving
We also insist on a seed test before any volume send. That means a set of real inboxes across the providers your audience uses, checked for placement rather than delivery. A message can be delivered and sit in the promotions tab or the junk folder, and the platform will report both as a success.
What the Spam Act 2003 requires of Australian senders
Three obligations, and they apply to automated messages just as they apply to a message you type by hand. First, consent: express, where someone actively agreed, or inferred, where an existing business relationship makes it reasonable. Second, identification: the message must clearly say who is sending it and include accurate contact details that stay accurate. Third, unsubscribe: a functional, low cost opt out that keeps working and is actioned promptly, within five working days.
The same consent framework carries across to SMS, since the Spam Act covers both
The mechanics matter more with automation, because a sequence keeps sending long after the person who set it up has moved on. We build consent as a stored field with a source and a timestamp rather than an assumption, keep suppression global so unsubscribing from one stream is honoured across every stream that shares that consent basis, and test the unsubscribe path on every template rather than the first one.
It is also worth knowing where the boundaries sit. Purely factual messages and genuine transactional notices are treated differently from commercial messages, but a receipt with three product recommendations underneath it is no longer purely transactional. We flag those cases during design rather than after a complaint reaches the ACMA. The same consent framework carries across to SMS, since the Spam Act covers both.
Templates that render everywhere and stay accessible
Email rendering is still the least forgiving front end environment in existence. Support for modern layout is uneven, older Windows clients interpret markup in ways that were unusual twenty years ago, and dark mode inverts colours in ways that can make a logo disappear or turn body text into an unreadable grey. We build templates against that reality rather than against how they look in one designer's client.
Accessibility applies here too
Accessibility applies here too. A meaningful subject line, a logical heading structure, real text rather than an image of text, sufficient contrast, descriptive link text and alt text on every image that carries meaning. Around a fifth of Australians live with disability, and a proportion of your list will read your email with a screen reader or at 200 percent zoom. An email built entirely as a single image is unreadable to them and is also treated poorly by spam filters, so the accessible version is the commercially better one.
Templates are handed over as modular blocks your team can rearrange without breaking the layout, in the same spirit as the component thinking we apply in interface design. Editors get a small set of pieces that always look right rather than a blank canvas that usually does not.
When email automation is not what you need
If your list is small and warm, a personal email from a real person will outperform anything automated, and it costs nothing to send. Automation earns its place when volume makes consistency impossible, not before. We have told clients with 300 contacts to keep doing what they are doing.
The rest of the answer
If your problem is that nobody opens your email, more automation will not fix it. That is a relevance problem, a list problem or a reputation problem, and the diagnosis is worth doing before the build. We often start with an audit alone, and sometimes it concludes that the correct action is to stop mailing two thirds of the list, which improves everything else immediately.
And if the messages you need are genuinely time critical, such as a shift change, an appointment in an hour or a delivery arriving now, email is the wrong channel regardless of how well it is built. Those belong in SMS or push. Retailers and service businesses usually end up with a mix, sequenced deliberately so a customer does not receive the same notification three ways. If the wider lifecycle also needs designing, that is marketing automation rather than this page, and it is the larger of the two projects.
How we scope it
Four ways to scope your Email Automation project
We do not publish package prices, because the same brief can be a short build or a long one. These are the shapes the work usually takes. Tell us which one sounds like you and you will get a fixed written quote that spells out exactly what it covers.
First workflows
The two or three processes costing the most time now
Fixed written quote, agreed before work starts
- Authentication audit and remediation plan
- SPF, DKIM and DMARC records configured and verified
- Separated transactional and marketing sending domains
Connected stack
The systems you already pay for, talking to each other
Fixed written quote, agreed before work starts
- Everything in First workflows
- Validated and suppressed contact list with consent evidence
- Responsive, accessible template set with plain text alternatives
- Built and tested automated sequences with exit rules
Operations platform
Operations running on automation you can see and audit
Fixed written quote, agreed before work starts
- Everything in Connected stack
- Seed inbox placement test results
- Delivery, bounce, complaint and DMARC monitoring
- Sending policy and runbook for your team
Automation care
Watching, fixing and extending as the processes change
Rolling monthly, quoted in writing
- Every workflow monitored, with alerts that reach a person
- Fixes when an upstream system changes its behaviour
- New workflows added from your backlog each month
- Rolling, cancel with 30 days notice
These are shapes, not menus. Most quotes end up somewhere between two of them, and we will say so when the honest answer is the smallest one. Describe the problem and we will tell you which it is.
Questions buyers usually ask
Frequently asked questions
Ownership and handover
Who owns the sending domain and the email platform?
You do. DNS records live in your domain, the platform account is registered to your business, templates and sequence logic are exportable, and your contact data is yours. We operate as a user inside your account. If you change agencies, nothing about your sending infrastructure has to change with it.
Can you set up transactional email from our own application?
Yes. That usually means integrating a sending service into your product or website, building templates the application populates, and handling queuing, retries and bounce processing so a failed send is visible rather than lost. It pairs naturally with API work if the triggering events are not already exposed by your system.
Detail and edge cases
How quickly can automated email be live?
Usually 2 to 6 weeks. Authentication changes are fast to make but DNS propagation and DMARC monitoring need a little patience, so we allow a couple of weeks in monitoring mode before enforcing. If a new sending domain is involved, warm up adds time because volume has to ramp rather than start at full rate. Template and content production often sets the real date.
What affects the cost of an email automation project?
How many sequences you need, whether transactional email requires developer work in your application, the state of your current authentication, and whether we are writing content or implementing yours. Migration from another platform adds effort. We quote in writing after an audit, and the sending platform subscription is billed to you directly by the vendor.
How do we know if we are compliant with the Spam Act 2003?
The practical test is whether you can evidence consent for every contact, whether every message identifies you accurately, and whether unsubscribes are honoured promptly and across all your sending. Our audit checks those three and reports on where the gaps are. We are not lawyers, so where a case is genuinely borderline we say so and recommend you take advice rather than guess.
We are a clinic sending appointment reminders. Anything different?
Yes. Reminders are transactional in nature, but health information carries extra sensitivity under the Privacy Act 1988, so we keep clinical detail out of message bodies and reference the appointment rather than the reason for it. Practices regulated by AHPRA also need to keep promotional content out of clinical communications. We scope those constraints alongside broader practice requirements rather than treating them as an afterthought.
Related services
Get your email audited before your next campaign
Send us your domain and the platform you use. We reply within one business day with what we find and, if there is work to do, a fixed written quote.