How to set up email marketing for a small store

How we checked what a store has to set up

Most of what decides whether a shop’s email gets read is settled before a single message is written. The address the mail leaves from, the permission standing behind each name on the list, and the line between the messages a store owes a customer and the ones it chooses to send are all setup decisions rather than copywriting ones, and the platforms that send store email publish that setup in their own help documentation.

The six steps below are read from those documents and ordered the way they have to be executed, because each one constrains the next. The domain decides what the shop is allowed to send, the permission decision decides which automations can be built on top, and the split between owed and optional mail decides what an unsubscribe actually stops.

Each step is described from published setup documentation rather than from an account this site ran. The procedures, record counts and propagation times quoted below come from those pages, checked on the date at the end.

Six steps, in the order they run

Start with the domain the mail leaves from

The first decision is the address rather than the template. Mail sent from a free mailbox reads as a person writing, and mail sent from the shop’s own domain reads as a business, which is the shape the receiving side is looking for. Mailchimp’s domain guidance makes the recommendation directly: where a sender uses Gmail or Yahoo, the advice is to move to an address on a private domain such as the shop’s own website.

Owning the domain is half of it, and showing the receiving mailbox that the shop may send from it is the other half. Klaviyo’s setup documentation walks that route in order: choose the domain, let the platform generate the records, publish them at the DNS provider, then verify and activate. The set it generates is up to three CNAME records or four NS records for authentication, plus a single TXT record that proves ownership of the domain.

Two details are worth knowing before this step is scheduled. Propagation is not instant, and the same documentation allows up to 48 hours for DNS records to update once they are published, so a domain claimed the day before a launch is a domain that may not be ready. The finishing touch is a policy record: the platform offers to write a DMARC record at a policy of none, described there as recommended for meeting the sender requirements of the inbox providers.

Decide what the store will accept as permission

The second step is a policy rather than a setting, and it governs how every message after it is allowed to arrive. Single opt-in adds an address the moment it is typed. Double opt-in puts a confirmation step between the two, and MailerLite describes the second as a two-step process with a specific effect: only once the subscriber clicks to confirm are they added to the active list, and until then they sit in an unconfirmed state rather than being mailed to.

The platforms recommend the confirmation step without requiring it, and their reasoning is about the list rather than about the law. MailerLite’s own summary is that bots are kept off the active list, that declining to send to bots and spam addresses protects sender reputation, and that open and click rates rise as a result. Mailchimp’s double opt-in guidance arrives at the same point from the other side and notes that the method can help improve open rates.

For a shop, the practical version of this decision is where the addresses come from. An address handed over to complete an order was given for that order, and a confirmation step is what turns it into a subscriber while leaving a record that the person asked for the mail.

Split the mail the store owes from the mail it chooses to send

Klaviyo’s domain setup is organised around send types, and that split is the useful part of it for a shop. A marketing domain, a transactional domain and a service domain are set up separately, each carries its own pair of DKIM selectors, and each message routes through the active domain for its type. The separation exists because the two kinds of mail are not the same promise: a receipt for an order is owed, a promotion is offered.

The distinction decides what an unsubscribe does. Someone who leaves the newsletter has not asked to stop hearing that a parcel shipped, and a shop running both streams through one list ends up either writing to people who asked it to stop or failing to send mail it owes. Working out which of the shop’s messages belong on each side is a short list, and it is worth writing down before the first campaign because the list changes rarely and the mistake is slow to unpick.

Begin with the list the shop already has

The first list is imported rather than bought. A store that has been trading already holds the addresses of everyone who ordered, and those are the people most likely to open a second message from it. What has to travel with them is the permission, because the confirmation state is the part a platform acts on: MailerLite holds an unconfirmed subscriber out of the active list, so an import that lands unconfirmed is an import that cannot be written to until each person confirms.

That is why the signup on the order page is worth more than the size of the list behind it. An address collected at the point of sale arrives with the customer’s own action behind it, and every later campaign is then measured against people who asked for it rather than against a file.

Write the two emails that run without you

Two automations carry most of the return in a small store, and both fire on an event rather than on a calendar. The first is the welcome, sent when someone confirms. The second is the message that follows an order left unfinished. Neither is a campaign: they run for each customer at a moment the customer created, and they are written before the first broadcast because a broadcast to a list with no welcome behind it spends the interest without answering it.

The permission decision from step two reaches into this one. Mailchimp ties its abandoned-cart messaging by text message to the double opt-in setting, which is the general shape of the constraint: an automation is a kind of sending, so the rule governing the list governs what may be built on top of it.

Read the numbers that decide the next change

The setup ends with a measurement, and the useful one is not the size of the list. What moves a store forward are the figures the sending platform reports per message: how many arrived, how many were opened, how many were clicked and how many people left. MailerLite’s case for the confirmation step connects two of those directly, crediting the absence of bots and dead addresses with the higher open and click rates it reports.

The action that follows is usually subtraction rather than addition. An address that has never opened anything is the kind of name the confirmation step exists to keep off a list, and the platform will write only to people in an active state. Sorting the list by who opened rather than growing it is the change a small store makes most often.

What changes with the size of the store

The six steps do not move, but which of them takes the most work does.

If the shop takes a handful of orders a week

The domain and the permission decision are the whole of the setup at that size, and the two automations are enough to run for months. Segmentation, a campaign calendar and a schedule of any kind can wait, because every message goes to a list small enough that the store knows who is on it.

If the list already exists and nobody can say where it came from

This is the case the confirmation step was built for, and it cannot be applied backwards. Permission is recorded when an address arrives rather than stamped on afterwards, so a list inherited from an older system has to be re-earned. The platform’s description of an unconfirmed subscriber, held out of the active list until the person confirms, is also a description of what a re-confirmation looks like.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

Mailchimp (mailchimp.com), checked 16 September 2026: the double opt-in help page for how a confirmation step is described, what the platform says it does to open rates and where the abandoned-cart text messaging sits against it, and the domains guide for the recommendation to send from a private domain rather than a free mailbox.

Klaviyo (klaviyo.com), checked 16 September 2026: the branded sending domain setup page for the send types it separates, the record set a domain needs, the ownership TXT record, the DKIM selectors, the DMARC record it offers to write and the 48-hour propagation window.

MailerLite (mailerlite.com), checked 16 September 2026: the double opt-in help page for the two-step description, the unconfirmed state a subscriber is held in, and the case it makes that keeping bots and dead addresses off a list protects sender reputation and lifts open and click rates.