Modern strategies for engagement, deliverability, and lifecycle marketing.
Special Spring Pricing: Regularly, $1,400 is now 50% off—$700. Enroll here (Spring 2026, Live Online).
Email marketing is one of the highest-performing channels in digital marketing—but only for organizations that execute it strategically.
Today’s marketers face increasing challenges: stricter inbox filters, rising customer expectations for personalization, and pressure to deliver measurable ROI. To succeed, your email program must be data-driven, customer-focused, and continuously optimized.
This four-module Email Marketing Masterclass gives you a complete, modern framework to improve performance across every critical area of your email strategy—creative, deliverability, data, personalization, and lifecycle marketing.
Led by best-selling author and email expert Kate Barrett, this hands-on series is designed to help you identify what’s holding your email program back—and show you exactly how to fix it.
You’ll walk away with practical strategies, real-world examples, and actionable checklists you can apply immediately—regardless of your email platform.
By the end of this series, you’ll know how to:
- Create emails that capture attention and drive meaningful engagement.
- Improve deliverability and consistently reach the inbox.
- Use your data to segment, personalize, and automate more effectively.
- Build lifecycle campaigns that move customers from first touch to long-term loyalty.
Whether you’re optimizing an existing program or building a more advanced strategy, this course will help you turn email into a high-performing, revenue-generating channel.
Flexibility to Fit Your Schedule:
Can’t make it to the live session? No problem. We’ll send the workshop video, workbooks, and supplementary materials shortly after recording so you can catch up, revisit, or reinforce your learning.
Module 1: Improving Email Marketing Results with Better Copy, Design, and Strategy.
Email marketing is the foundation of any good multi-channel marketing strategy.
But if you’re finding that your current campaigns are stagnating, results are declining, or you just need a fresh approach to optimizing what you’re currently doing, this class will give you all the core principles you need to maximize your email template performance.
We’ll talk about best practices for both B2B and B2C businesses for email copy, design, and implementation. We’ll cover designing emails for engagement (and different devices) and writing winning subject lines and email copy. You’ll learn when and how often to send emails, gain a useful new understanding of your campaign metrics, and successfully conduct testing that gets results.
Key Takeaways:
- Optimizing your email design and structure: Key design considerations to ensure your emails maximize your audience engagement:
- Creating open-worthy subject lines.
- The anatomy of an email—key sections that every email should have, and that all need to be optimized, regardless of design.
- Optimizing mobile and responsive design to enhance engagement across multiple devices.
- Optimizing your CTA color, placement, and wording to maximize clicks.
- Interactive email to bring your message to life and help subscribers engage there and then:
- Video in email—key dos and don’ts.
- GIFs—the right and wrong way to use them.
- Using interactive email elements to better deliver your content to subscribers and generate engagement.
- Techniques to create copy that converts and connects with your subscribers.
- Understanding core email marketing metrics (beyond open rate).
- Testing as a strategic issue: five steps to creating tests that get results you can use (across channels!).
Module 2: Improving Email Deliverability to Get Your Emails in the Inbox.
Planning, creating an email, and pressing the send button is just the start of the journey to the subscriber. What happens next and how you can help give your emails the best chance of reaching your prospect’s inbox requires consideration across multiple areas of your implementation and strategy.
If you’re seeing diminishing results with a specific email provider or overall, or simply want to know how to maintain high delivery rates, this class is for you.
In this workshop, you’ll learn the difference between deliverability and inbox placement and how you can influence success in both areas for both B2B and B2C senders. We’ll discuss your sending infrastructure, list hygiene practices, spam content, and how engagement impacts your top-line results. We’ll also dive into specific strategies to monitor your campaigns on an ongoing basis and fix problems as they arise, including optimizing your email sends for Hotmail and Gmail specifically.
This module is weighted towards B2C deliverability challenges. However, many elements are very similar in B2B, and the knowledge gained can be applied across both markets.
Key Takeaways:
- Deliverability vs. inbox—placement, what’s the difference?
- Understanding your sender reputation,
- Domain vs. IP reputation.
- Getting your sending infrastructure right (DKIM, SPF, TSL, DMARC, BIMI, etc.).
- List Hygiene:
- Spam traps: what tools give you insight into spam traps and how you can get rid of them.
- Hard bounces, soft bounces, and blocks: what’s the difference, how to analyze them, and how to handle them.
- Positive engagement, negative engagement, and complaint rates.
- The impact of your data collection processes on your delivery.
- The difference between B2B and B2C delivery.
- Gmail / Hotmail (Outlook) specifics:
- What’s the Inbox? Tabs available and how to navigate them.
- Gmail promotions tab:
- How to identify that you have deliverability/Inbox placement issues.
- Pro-active and re-active strategies to enhance your results:
- Proactive: What statistics to monitor and what to look out for.
- Reactive: Engagement pull-back strategy, and what to do for B2B email management.
Module 3: Improving Email Engagement with Personalization and Automation.
A good email marketing strategy is made up of many different types of emails for both B2B and B2C businesses—the more targeted and personalized those campaigns are, the better the results you’ll see.
But, to achieve this, you have to understand—and fall in love with—your data, the foundation of all high-performing email strategies.
Once you understand what data you have available in your business and what you’d love to have in the future (as well as how to get it!), you can begin to see all the opportunities it opens up. You can schedule emails at times that are relevant to your subscribers (based on their behavior, for example). You can personalize your content to suggest products, content, or services that are right for that individual subscriber, at the right time.
In this class, we’ll explore all the different types of data you already have available to you and how you can use this in the best way for your subscribers to create a more connected and personalized journey and messaging strategy.
Regardless of which email platform (ESP) or vendor you currently use (or may decide to move to), this class offers system-agnostic training. The concepts you learn will guide your strategy and help you make platform decisions that better personalize and automate your campaigns.
Key Takeaways:
- Using your data to enhance your messages and meet your goals:
- Understand your data hierarchy and the possibilities it offers to help increase your results.
- Analyzing your current situation to identify what data you have, where, and how it’s used, (potential) issues, gaps, and opportunities.
- How to collect more of the data you need and want from multiple sources.
- Connecting your content to your subscribers to encourage conversion: Segmentation, Targeting, and Positioning your offerings (STP):
- Utilize your data together to create your segmentation matrix.
- Evaluate the overall attractiveness of each segment you want to create to determine which are worthwhile to target.
- Personalizing your messages to speak directly to each subscriber:
- Using dynamic fields to bring your content into each subscriber’s real-life situation.
- Adding dynamic content to adjust sections of copy, images, offers, or CTA buttons depending on who is receiving your email:
- Using live dynamic content that adjusts each time your subscriber opens the email.
- The 5 stages of the customer lifecycle and how you can use this to better understand your subscribers’ needs:
- The 3 key automated campaigns every company should have in place from the start.
Module 4: Emailing Along the 5 Stages of the Customer Journey—Improving Email Results with the Right Content at Each Stage to Drive Engagement.
The nirvana of any good email marketing strategy is to be able to send the right message to the right person at the right time.
By identifying who your customers and prospects are and establishing data points that show where they are with you on their individual journey, you can create a series of automated campaigns to deliver exactly that to your audience.
But if you don’t know where to start when it comes to adding to your automated campaign strategy, and if you don’t understand what your customers need as they progress on their journey with you, this workshop will answer those questions. And what you learn will inspire you to maximize your campaign potential.
In this workshop, we’ll discuss the five stages of the customer journey and how they should inform your email marketing communications. We’ll also look at how you can use your data to identify customers and prospects at each of these stages, how to work out what content to send and when for maximum impact, and how to consider the human side of your messages.
During the class, we’ll also show you how to map your customers’ emotional journey and use that knowledge to create more impactful, engaging emails that get results for both B2B and B2C businesses.
Regardless of which email platform (ESP) or vendor you currently use (or may decide to move to), this class offers system-agnostic learning of concepts you should consider within your strategy and platform considerations to better personalize and automate your campaigns.
This course is a practical session that gives you the techniques and ideas to build your own customer journeys, identify exactly what your audience needs, and determine when and through which marketing channel it is best delivered. You’ll also get lots of examples of different types of campaigns throughout to inspire your content and creative strategy.
Key Takeaways:
- The opportunity automated campaigns can bring for your business:
- Why automated email campaigns engage your audience better than any other campaign type.
- The importance of planning multi/omni-channel campaigns to increase engagement.
- The five stages of the customer journey and how you can use these to understand better your subscribers’ needs at specific times:
- How to map your customers’ emotional journey—enabling you to develop content, targeting, and multi/omni-channel experiences.
- Key email campaigns to consider at each stage of the journey to drive engagement; for both B2B and B2C businesses.
- How to add value for your customers, to help them move to the next stage of their journey.
- Planning your automated campaigns for success:
- The starting point of every automation—your data.
- Creating automated campaign branches.
- Your automated campaign hierarchy.
- Setting your campaign rules.
- Evaluating your automated campaign KPIs, including core KPIs to focus on, and how to analyze your automated campaign series over time.
How to Convince Your Boss Why You Should Take this Class:
Email marketing is at the forefront of delivering on customers’ expectations of personalized communications that deliver on their expectations, with the right content and offers at the right time. This email masterclass series prepares marketers to think through how to turn their email marketing program into a customer-centric, high-performing multi-touch digital experience.
The Presentations:
- The workshop is hands-on and practical.
- The workshop is live so you can ask your questions.
- Can’t attend the live workshop? No problem. All DMAnc.org workshops are recorded, and we’ll send you the recording, workbook, and any supplementary materials within a day of completion after we’ve had time to edit the recording.
- Step-by-step instructions in numbered lists with the links so you can do this yourself.
- Everything is clear with lots of illustrations and examples. You can copy the examples, edit them, and use them in your work.
Download Material:
- Video of the presentation with slides and audio.
- PDF of the complete presentation.
Who is the course for?
Anyone who manages the email marketing and marketing automation strategy for their company, including:
- Email Marketing Managers.
- Demand Generation Managers.
- eCommerce Managers.
- Digital Marketing Managers.
- and Agency Account Managers who manage the email marketing strategy for their clients.
The Presenter:
Kate Barrett
Kate Barrett is the founder of eFocus Marketing, providing specialist email marketing consultancy, management and training services to companies around the world.
With a proven track record and over 16 years’ experience, Kate’s expertise and passion has helped a large range of companies (including Ann Summers, Ordinance Survey, Nissan, Marks & Spencer, Argos and Ted Baker among many others) develop comprehensive strategies, implement, manage and optimize campaigns, as well as solve complex email marketing issues.
Kate is also an instructor for CIM.co.uk and DMAnc.org, keynote/speaker at events, and author of the bestselling book ‘E-telligence. Email Marketing isn’t dead, the way you’re using it is’ (e-focusmarketing.com/book/)
Website: e-focusmarketing.com.
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/katebarrettonline.
Publications:
- eFocus Marketing Blog: https://e-focusmarketing.com/blog/.
- Only Influencers Blog: https://www.onlyinfluencers.com/most-recent-articles/search?query=kate%20barrett.
- Spotler & eFocus Marketing Podcast.
This course was very helpful with understanding the customer journey from start to finish. I learned how we should always be updating our content and adapt throughout.
Very informative class, got into the strategy behind getting your emails through!
Very pleased with today’s workshop! Received a lot of useful information and resources that will help me in my job. Can’t wait for the next one!
Great course for taking email strategy and tactics to the next level.
Fantastic presentation and loads of practical tips! I was engaged the whole time.
A great presentation that covered all the important details about the whole process of email marketing while giving great examples.
Kate did a great job going through each topic in great detail, and I left the presentation with some clear action items on how to improve my email results.
Great presentation, packed with helpful information that can be implemented for quick results! Will definitely recommend it to anyone looking to improve their email marketing with just a short few hours to spare.
Workshop dates and times:
Spring 2026
Module 1: Improving Email Marketing Results with Better Copy, Design, and Strategy.
Tuesday, May 5, 2026, from 9:00 a.m. to 11:00 a.m. PDT.
Module 2: Improving Email Deliverability to Get Your Emails in the Inbox.
Tuesday, May 12, 2026, from 9:00 a.m. to 11:00 a.m. PDT.
Module 3: Improving Email Engagement with Personalization and Automation.
Thursday, May 21, 2026, from 9:00 a.m. to 11:00 a.m. PDT.
Module 4: Emailing Along the 5 Stages of the Customer Journey—Improving Email Results with the Right Content at Each Stage to Drive Engagement.
Wednesday, May 27, 2026, from 9:00 a.m. to 11:00 a.m. PDT.
