I want to share my experience with D2C (direct to client) brand email marketing. Initially, I was creating HTML emails with react-email and sending them through Postmark's broadcast stream. The open rates were very good - 40-50%, and it had solid deliverability.<p>When we wanted to improve our marketing automation, I decided to try Klaviyo because many people online recommended it. I spent around 500 euros and 3-4 days to integrate it with my custom ecommerce platform. After sending 2 campaigns, the open rate dropped to 15%. Later I discovered Klaviyo put us on a shared IP with not-so-good senders, so my emails were going to spam folder.<p>This made me think - how difficult would it be to build some of Klaviyo's features myself? Especially because I was already collecting customer behavior data like item views and checkout steps.<p>I spent 5 days building a custom solution with:<p>- Simple drag-and-drop email builder
- Dynamic coupon generation with dynamic criterias
- Template variables
- SQL-based segmentation (<-- priceless!)
- Automated flows (abandoned carts, welcome series, etc..)
-SMS integration<p>I connected everything to Postmark and used their webhooks for analytics (opens, clicks, spam). Now I have a good in-house email marketing system that costs only $20 per month on Postmark, and my open rates are back to normal, as the profits too.<p>Sometimes the "simple" (hah) solution is the best one.