Most crypto teams build a newsletter and wonder why nobody opens it.
The format is the problem. A weekly round-up competes with every other round-up in an inbox. A message triggered by something the reader just did competes with nothing.
Lifecycle beats broadcast
The messages that work are sent because of behaviour, not because it is Thursday.
Onboarding. Someone signed up and has not completed setup. A sequence that gets them to their first meaningful action is usually the highest-value email a crypto product sends, because the drop-off between registration and first use is enormous.
Transactional. Deposits, withdrawals, confirmations. These get opened at close to 100%, which makes them the most valuable real estate you own — and most teams waste it on a bare receipt.
Security. New device, withdrawal request, password change. Users expect these, and their absence is noticed.
Stalled. Someone got partway through verification and stopped. A single well-timed message recovers a meaningful share of them.
Education. Users on a fraction of your feature set, nudged toward the part they have not found.
Transactional emails are underused
A withdrawal confirmation gets opened. Every time. By someone who is paying attention because money is moving.
That is the best-attended message you will ever send, and most products use it to print a transaction ID.
There is room in it — tastefully — for the thing that helps them next. Not a promotion. Something genuinely useful about what they just did or what they could do with it.
Deliverability is earned slowly
Landing in spam is usually self-inflicted, in one of two ways.
Reputation. Sending to a list that never opted in, or blasting a cold domain from day one. A new sending domain has to be warmed gradually — small volumes to engaged recipients, increasing over weeks.
Content patterns. Crypto messaging trips filters that other categories never encounter. Urgency, price language, anything about returns, certain wallet terminology. The filters have learned what scam email looks like, and unfortunately a lot of legitimate crypto marketing looks like it.
Authenticate properly with SPF, DKIM and DMARC. Mail people who engage and prune those who do not. Deliverability is a function of whether people want your mail.
Consent, recorded separately
Transactional messages about someone’s own account are a different category from marketing, and treating them as one is both a trust problem and a deliverability one.
Capture consent explicitly, per message type, with a record of what was agreed and when. That record cannot be reconstructed later, and the question does eventually come up.
Your legal team decides what consent you need where you operate. We build the system to hold whatever they specify.
Segment on behaviour
Most crypto email is sent to everyone. The lists that perform are cut by what people actually do: verified versus not, funded versus not, active versus dormant, by product used, by region.
A message to the 8% of users who stalled at one specific step outperforms the same effort spread across everyone, by a wide margin.
What to report
Per message: delivered, opened, clicked, and what the recipients did afterwards inside your own product.
Open rates have become unreliable since privacy protections started pre-fetching images, so treat them as directional. Clicks and downstream behaviour are what to read.
Common questions
Does email marketing work for crypto products?
Lifecycle and transactional email works well; broadcast newsletters mostly do not. The messages that earn their place are triggered by something the user did or failed to do - an incomplete onboarding, a first deposit, a security event, a feature they have not discovered. A generic weekly newsletter is the format most crypto teams build and the one that performs worst.
What emails should a crypto product send?
Onboarding sequences that get a new user to their first meaningful action, transactional confirmations for anything involving money, security notifications for logins and withdrawals, re-engagement for users who stalled partway through setup, and education for features people are not using. Each is triggered by behaviour rather than sent on a schedule.
Why do crypto emails land in spam?
Poor sending reputation, usually from importing a list that never opted in, and content patterns filters associate with scams - urgency, price claims, wallet-related language. Warming a sending domain properly, authenticating with SPF, DKIM and DMARC, and keeping engagement high by mailing people who actually want it are what keep you in the inbox.
How should consent be handled?
Explicitly, recorded, and separately for each type of message. Transactional messages about someone account are a different category from marketing, and conflating them is both a trust problem and a deliverability one. Record what was consented to and when, because the question does come up and reconstructing it afterwards is not possible.
Does Corum8 build email and CRM systems?
Yes - lifecycle sequence design, transactional infrastructure, CRM integration, consent handling and the reporting on what each message actually did. We build the systems as well as writing the messages.
