Email Marketing in Odesa, Ukraine

Email Marketing in Odesa — building a systematic channel that brings customers back and generates revenue

Email is the cheapest and most predictable marketing channel still available in Ukrainian business. While advertising on Google and Facebook gets more expensive every month, while organic reach on Instagram drops due to algorithm changes, email stays in your ownership: you own the database, you decide the send time, you see every contact by name. For a business in Odesa and the Odesa region this means one thing — a stable flow of repeat sales, independent from the next ad-cabinet crisis.

I'm Alex Filiuk, Senior digital marketer and designer with 15 years of experience. Over this time I've launched 40+ full email programmes for Ukrainian and international clients — from cafés with a base of 800 contacts to e-commerce projects with bases of 200,000 subscribers. This page covers everything a business owner or marketing lead in Odesa should know before commissioning email marketing: what the process looks like, which ESP services to work with, which triggers to launch first, how to avoid typical GDPR and deliverability mistakes, and why the regional nature of Odesa business gives you advantages, not limitations.

Why email marketing is critical for businesses in Odesa

In Odesa, a city with a population of over 1,000,000, small and medium business faces the same challenge as capital-city companies: customer acquisition cost grows faster than the average ticket. If in 2018 bringing a customer to a shop on Derybasivska street or to a beauty salon on Preobrazhenska cost UAH 50–150, in 2025 it's already UAH 250–600. In this reality, business survives not by constantly “pushing traffic”, but by repeat purchases from existing customers. And that's exactly what email is for.

Email marketing for the Odesa region performs four key functions:

• Retention. A single email brings back a customer who has already forgotten about your offer, returning them to the website or point of sale. Without email, this customer “shuts off” from your ecosystem in 30–60 days.
• Activation. The “abandoned cart” trigger recovers 8–15% of abandoned purchases. The welcome series turns a subscriber into a buyer.
• Nurture. For B2B in the Odesa region (manufacturing, IT, legal companies), email is the channel that maintains contact with a lead throughout the entire 2–6 month deal cycle.
• Analytics. Your base's behaviour in email is an indicator of business health. If open rate falls — you have a problem with product relevance, not with emails.

Strategy: what separates a “newsletter” from email marketing

“A newsletter once a week” is not email marketing. It's an automated spam machine that quickly destroys your domain reputation and finally kills the trust of your base. Real email marketing is a personalised communication system built on segmentation, behavioural triggers, and testing. I start every project with six strategic questions:

1. Who is in your base? How many contacts, how were they obtained, is there double opt-in, what are the sources (website form, lead magnet, point of sale, CRM import).
2. What do you sell and to whom? Local B2C is one strategy. B2B from Odesa region manufacturing — a completely different one. SaaS — a third.
3. What frequency and content type are justified? Once a week with news vs once a day with promo — these are fundamentally different systems.
4. Which business metrics should we move? Revenue, AOV, repeat purchases, lead count, trial activation.
5. What data do we have and what's missing? Integrated CRM, GA4, POS data, on-site behaviour — personalisation depth depends on this.
6. Which triggers come first? Welcome for everyone, abandoned cart for e-commerce, reactivation for any base older than a year.

Without answers to these questions, launching email marketing is gambling. With answers, it's a project with clear KPIs and a payback timeline. If you don't have clear answers yet — at the strategy session we'll go through these six points together and produce a document you can build implementation against.

Database segmentation — the foundation of email channel ROI

The most common email marketing mistake is sending the same email to the entire base. It's like shouting through a megaphone on Independence Square in Odesa, hoping that out of over 1 million residents someone will hear your message. Effectiveness — minimal. Instead, if you know that out of 5,000 subscribers, 800 are loyal regulars, 1,200 just made a first purchase, 1,500 are long-term “sleepers”, 800 have just subscribed, and 700 are a B2B import from CRM — you can build separate communication for each segment.

Basic segmentation approaches I apply for Odesa business:

• Demographic. Gender, age, geography (Odesa city vs Odesa region vs other regions of Ukraine).
• Behavioural. Who opens emails, who clicks, who buys. Who hasn't opened in 90 days.
• RFM (Recency, Frequency, Monetary). Classic retail segmentation — new, active, loyal, sleeping, lost.
• Funnel-based. Lead, MQL, SQL, customer, repeat customer. Especially useful in Odesa region B2B.
• Product interest. What the person browsed on the site, what they bought, which categories interest them.

Segmentation is implemented technically — through tags in your ESP (Brevo, Mailchimp, GetResponse, eSputnik) and integration with CRM via API. Without segmentation, an email programme hits a plateau in 3–6 months and stops growing.

Trigger emails — the machine that generates revenue daily

Regular newsletters generate only 30% of email channel revenue. The remaining 70% comes from automation — emails that fire automatically in response to a customer action. The baseline trigger set I include in any email programme:

• Welcome series. 3–5 emails after subscription. First email — 5 minutes after sign-up, then every 1–3 days. Brand introduction, value demonstration, first offer. Open rate here is usually 40–60% — the highest across the entire lifecycle.
• Abandoned cart. A must-have №1 for Odesa e-commerce. Email 1 — after 1 hour, email 2 — after 24 hours (with a personal promo code), email 3 — after 48 hours (social proof or urgency). Recovers 8–15% of carts — pure money that would otherwise be lost.
• Browse abandonment. If a person viewed a product but didn't add it to cart — that's also a signal of interest. A “you might be interested in” email with a selection of similar products.
• Post-purchase. Thanks immediately after payment, usage instructions in 3 days, review request in 14 days, cross-sell in 30 days. Increases LTV and repeat purchase count.
• Reactivation. A series for contacts who haven't opened emails in 60–90 days. Either we bring them back with an exclusive offer, or we honestly say goodbye and clean the base — that's also important for deliverability.
• Win-back. For customers who haven't bought in 6+ months. Special offer or “what went wrong” survey. In Odesa retail, recovers 5–10%.
• Birthday and anniversary. A greeting with a personal promo code on birthday or first-purchase anniversary. Simple and effective trigger for salons, restaurants, retail.
• Score-based behavioural. Advanced level — the email fires when the subscriber accumulates a certain number of “points” for actions on the site. Implemented only with full CRM.

One properly configured “abandoned cart” trigger for a Odesa online shop with 1,000 transactions a month pays back the entire email programme setup in 2–3 months. It's the fastest ROI in digital marketing.

HTML templates — the technical foundation rendering depends on

An email template isn't “designing a picture”, as imagined by clients who haven't dealt with email before. It's working code that has to simultaneously: render correctly in Gmail (web and mobile), Outlook (including older Outlook 2007–2019, still actively used in Odesa region B2B), Apple Mail on iPhone, Apple Mail on macOS, Yahoo Mail, GMX, Ukr.net, in dark mode, on a phone with a small screen, with images disabled, and at varied content widths.

How I build templates:

1. Design in Figma. Separately for desktop and mobile. We agree with the client — colours, typography, block structure. If branding or UI kit already exists, we keep the template in unified style.
2. HTML-table coding. Yes, in 2025 email templates are still coded in tables — otherwise Outlook doesn't render modern CSS properties. It's not a bug, it's a feature of email rendering.
3. Inline CSS. Most email clients don't support external stylesheets. So all styles — inline, in style attributes.
4. Testing in Litmus or Email on Acid. The services show how your template looks in 30+ email clients at once. Without this test, don't launch the campaign.
5. Dark mode variant. In 2025, more than 40% of clients read mail in dark mode. The template must remain readable on a black background too.
6. Mobile-first. 60–70% of opens in Odesa are on mobile. So the template is first designed for phone, then scaled to desktop.

ESP: Brevo, Mailchimp, GetResponse or eSputnik — what to pick in Odesa

The platform for sending campaigns (Email Service Provider, ESP) is the foundation that determines what you can do at all in email marketing. Here is a brief comparative summary of the four services I work with most often for Odesa region businesses:

• Brevo (formerly Sendinblue). Versatile, with SMS, chat, basic CRM. Free plan up to 300 emails/day. Interface translated into Ukrainian. Ideal for local B2C in Odesa — small shops, cafés, beauty salons that are just launching email and don't want to pay from day one.
• Mailchimp. The world leader among ESPs, the richest template editor, the best Shopify and WooCommerce integration, powerful automations. Downside — expensive for large bases and no Ukrainian localisation. I recommend it for niche Odesa region B2B that mostly works with the international market.
• GetResponse. A Polish service with strong automations, landing pages, webinars on board. Mid-priced. Often the choice for educational projects and online courses — for example, Odesa training centres launching course funnels.
• eSputnik. Ukrainian ESP — the most adequate price-wise, works with hryvnia, has a Viber channel. If it's important for you to minimise foreign-currency spending and you don't want to deal with Western interfaces — this is your choice. I actively use it for Odesa region manufacturing B2B.

Which one to pick specifically for you — we decide at the strategy session, depending on base size, growth sources, automation depth and budget. Replacing an ESP later is 3–5 weeks of work, so it's better to make the initial choice correctly.

GDPR and Ukraine's Personal Data Protection Law

Email marketing in Ukraine in 2025 is regulated simultaneously by two legal regimes: GDPR (for working with EU residents' data) and Ukraine's Personal Data Protection Law (for Ukrainian citizens' data). Ignoring this isn't an option — fines are real, and a domain block from an ESP for violations can close the channel forever.

What I configure on every project:

• Double opt-in. Every new contact confirms subscription via email — both a GDPR requirement and protection from spam traps.
• Consent checkbox in the subscription form with a link to the privacy policy. Not pre-checked (a mandatory GDPR requirement).
• A separate privacy policy on the site clearly stating: what data you collect, why, how long you store it, with whom you share it, how to be deleted.
• Unsubscribe button in every campaign — mandatory. A hidden link at the bottom in 8pt doesn't count.
• Personal data processing register — an internal company document, mandatory for Ukrainian legal entities.
• DKIM, SPF, DMARC setup in your domain DNS — beyond deliverability, this is also a security requirement.

If you plan to work with clients from the EU, US or Canada — this is not optional. GDPR fines start from tens of thousands of euros.

A/B testing — what separates an expert newsletter from an amateur one

Without A/B tests you do email marketing blindly — like shooting with your eyes closed. With A/B tests, every campaign gives you a new insight that improves the next one. It's a system of continuous micro-improvements, which compound into a 2x conversion growth over a year.

What I test systematically:

• Subject lines. The most important. The same email with different subjects can show a 50–100% open rate difference. I test length, emoji, personalisation, voice.
• Preheader. The “echo” text next to the subject. Often plays a bigger role than the subject itself.
• Send time. Morning or evening? Weekday or weekend? For Odesa region B2B — 9:30 or 14:00? We verify empirically.
• CTA. Button text, colour, placement. Small things that affect click-through by 20–40%.
• Email structure. Long email vs short, with image vs without, single CTA vs multiple.
• Audience segment. The same email to different segments — how do they react?

Each new campaign is a mini-experiment. After 3–6 months you have your own database of insights about your audience that no competitor has.

Common email marketing mistakes — and how to avoid them

Over 15 years of work I've seen dozens of cases where business in Odesa (and across Ukraine) invested in email and got no result due to typical mistakes. Here are the key ones:

• Buying “cold” bases. The worst thing you can do with email. It's both a violation of the law, and the death of domain reputation, and spam complaints, and ESP blocking. Never buy bases — build your own.
• Importing an old base without cleaning. If you have a base collected 3 years ago and never communicated with it — don't import as one block. Run a reactivation chain, remove dead addresses, and only then start mass campaigns.
• One email for the whole base. Without segmentation, email turns into spam. Even the simplest split into “new / active / sleeping” triples effectiveness.
• Mailing without a clear CTA. An email “just to look” is no good to anyone. Every email should have one main action we want from the reader.
• Ignoring mobile layout. 60% of emails are read on phone. If the template is built only for desktop — you're killing most of your audience.
• No DKIM/SPF/DMARC. Without them emails go to spam, and you don't understand why. It's 30 minutes of DNS work — and the deliverability difference is colossal.
• Metrics “verbally”. “The newsletters are doing well” isn't a report. Without UTM tags, GA4 and CRM integration, you don't know how much email actually generates.

Cases: email programmes for Ukrainian businesses

My portfolio includes 130+ projects, of which ~40 involve full email marketing build-outs — from strategy to triggers and HTML templates. Among them are clients from various categories: e-commerce, education, beauty, IT, manufacturing, B2B services. I've worked with Odesa companies, with clients from Kyiv, Lviv, Odesa, and from the USA (New York, Los Angeles) and Europe. This lets me see how local Odesa region businesses compete with national and international brands — and how the email channel becomes their tool in that competition.

If you want concrete examples — go to the “Projects” section or get in touch via the contact form: I'll pick 5–10 most relevant cases for your niche and show not just final metrics but the working process — strategy, segmentation, ESP screenshots, templates, A/B tests.

What you receive after project completion

• Email marketing strategy document — segmentation, content plan, trigger list, KPIs, send schedule.
• Configured ESP — Brevo, Mailchimp, GetResponse or eSputnik — with imported base, segments, subscription forms and double opt-in.
• Configured technical domain parameters — DKIM, SPF, DMARC, reputation monitoring.
• HTML templates — welcome series, regular newsletter, core triggers. Custom, mobile-first, dark mode.
• Live automations — welcome, abandoned cart, reactivation, post-purchase, win-back, birthday.
• Configured reporting — UTM tags, GA4 integration, email revenue dashboard.
• Document with playbooks — frequency, voice, subject-line guidelines.
• Post-delivery support: 30 days free — questions, minor revisions, technical consultations.

My other services for businesses in Odesa

Email marketing is part of an ecosystem. If you're planning a serious digital launch or a communications redesign, a complex approach is worth considering:

• SEO — so organic search keeps supplying new audience to the email base.
• Google Ads — paid traffic that quickly grows the base via lead magnets.
• SMM — social media and email work in tandem: each amplifies the other.
• Conversion optimisation — so your site turns more visitors into subscribers.
• CRM systems — for correct data transfer to the ESP and proper segmentation.
• Web development — from a landing page to a full e-commerce with subscription forms and a blog.
• Ad creatives — so lead magnets and promo emails look attractive.
• Business consulting — positioning strategy before investing in communications.

Email marketing in other Ukrainian cities

I work not only with businesses from the Odesa region. If you have offices in several cities or are planning regional expansion — we'll build a system that scales. Among other locations I actively work with:

• Kyiv — national brands, IT companies, chains
• Lviv — creative business, gastronomy, IT
• Odesa — retail, tourism, e-commerce
• Dnipro — manufacturing, B2B, technology companies
• Kharkiv — IT, education, engineering

The full list of locations is on the “Service Areas” page.

Ready to discuss email marketing for your business in Odesa?

If you have a specific request — fill in the contact form or write to email/Telegram (contacts in the website footer). The first consultation is free, up to 60 minutes long. We'll discuss your business, the current email situation, revenue goals and an approximate budget. After that I'll send a detailed proposal with a fixed price — no surprises and no hidden fees.

I'm ready to build email marketing for your business in Odesa that will deliver repeat sales, retain customers and generate predictable revenue for years. Not a “newsletter to tick a box”, but a working channel that pays back in 2–4 months and lives many years.