Digital Marketing: Building lasting relationships

This article first appeared in Digital Edge, The Edge Malaysia Weekly on October 13, 2025 – October 19, 2025

Social media advertising and new marketing channels may offer broader reach and visibility, but email marketing should not be overlooked. It remains the most cost-effective way of engaging with a business’s customer base.

Beyond cost, Jeffri Shahul Hamid — founder of Enginemailer Sdn Bhd, a Malaysian integrated cloud platform for email marketing and database management — says that email marketing enables businesses to better understand their customers and build lasting relationships with them. “Everybody can send an email but as a business, managing and growing your subscriber base is every company’s biggest asset. You just don’t realise it’s your biggest asset.”

The key message is quality over quantity but Jeffri points out that many local businesses still see email as a quantity game, where the focus is on quick returns and not long-term value. “Email marketing is like planting a seed. It takes time to nurture and here is where consent and compliance come in.”

Social media, public relations (PR) campaigns or ads are tools to build awareness, says Jeffri. Once users show interest, they will eventually provide their email addresses and grant permission to stay in touch, and that is where the email journey begins.

“As a small and medium enterprise (SME), you’re probably running paid ads on social media to collect leads. If you don’t start marketing directly to those leads using email, then every time you want to run a new promotion, you end up paying Facebook, Google or LinkedIn again just to reach the same people,” he says.

However, once they are in the email list, companies can reach out to customers for free. Customer nurturing and retention is the reason why he thinks email remains relevant.

“Even if you don’t have a database today, it’s okay. If you’re consistently collecting leads through your social channels, landing pages, business cards and existing customers, and putting them into one system, you will have a strong, permission-based audience you can grow with. That is the gap we are trying to fill for our users.”

As one of the oldest online communication channels, email has long been dominated by larger marketing platforms. To stand out, Enginemailer had to first ensure it could match the essential baseline functions that customers have come to expect.

“After establishing fundamentals, it led us to the first step in our proposition, which is giving everybody unlimited subscribers. We are not going to charge you based on the size of your database,” says Jeffri.

Most email marketing platforms charge based on how many subscribers a company has, which might create pressure for firms to constantly delete data to keep a low subscriber count and avoid a more expensive pricing tier.

“But that’s your first-party data, customer information that you rightfully own [and would like to keep, right?]. So what happens? You subscribe to a plan, cancel it, upload another list and cancel that. You’re not solving your actual problem,” Jeffri points out.

He envisions Enginemailer as a platform where businesses can store unlimited customer data and manage it effectively. It also helps clean and organise the information by removing duplicates and standardising data formats.

“However, over time, we realised that despite giving businesses unlimited subscribers, many didn’t have the data to begin with. So, we started building new unique selling propositions (USPs) centred around the original USP, which is giving unlimited subscribers.”

Enginemailer offers businesses a range of tools, including business card scanners to digitise contacts; landing pages to collect emails through forms, downloads and promotions; as well as integration to import contacts from other platforms. These features enable businesses to consolidate their subscribers into a single platform.

To further validate its service and extend its reach to global audiences, Jeffri says Enginemailer was listed on AppSumo last year.

AppSumo is an online marketplace that provides discounted software products, particularly aimed at start-ups, entrepreneurs, small businesses and digital marketers.

“Fortunately, I think we got about 4.8 out of a 5 rating on AppSumo,” says Jeffri.

Reflecting on the experience, he shares that listing Enginemailer on the platform is not for the faint-hearted, as products are subject to global customer reviews that can be brutally honest and highly critical. “The two months were dreadful because we had all sorts of questions now, not from Malaysians, but all over the world. Everyone has his or her own way of wanting things. But it upgraded the product into something that is now ready to pursue a global audience.”

Enginemailer now enjoys a healthy mix of international and local user sign-ups, though on a day-to-day basis, international users tend to be more active, he says.

From the outset, building trust was crucial, particularly as the platform manages sensitive customer data. One of the main challenges, highlights Jeffri, was establishing robust internal controls to guard against both spammers and scammers.

“Spammers just buy databases and send bulk emails. They are relatively easy to deal with. However, scammers are trickier. They are not just willing to spam; they are also actively trying to deceive people and willing to pay you to do it.”

Scam emails can lead to internet protocols (IPs) getting blacklisted, which affects other customers using Enginemailer as their service provider.

“At the same time, you need to provide the easiest drag-and-drop editors so that even non-IT users can create newsletters without getting multiple calls a day asking how to do it,” he says.

Drag-and-drop editors are user-friendly interfaces that allow users to create and design websites or emails by visually dragging and dropping elements onto a template, rather than writing code.

Another critical issue is deliverability. Sending 100,000 emails is easy but scaling this up to hundreds of millions raised concerns for Jeffri on matters such as inbox placements, spam filtering, best practices and educating users on these things organically through the product.

Otherwise, if users sign up and their emails go straight to spam, they won’t pay for the service, says Jeffri.

Regardless of the challenges that arose, Enginemailer has been well received by international audiences according to Jeffri. However, he says that Malaysian businesses still need a bit of a push when it comes to adopting Enginemailer’s services.

“From a technology adoption standpoint, Malaysians — if you ask me personally — are still about five to 10 years behind where the real world is. When it comes to emailing and platforming, we still have people who are scared to press that button.”

Ultimately, email is here to stay, with Jeffri seeing personalised email marketing as a gateway to communicate with audiences.

“As we move forward, I think email marketing is going to become even more targeted because there’s a shift happening from traditional marketing emails to automation emails.”

The growing integration of back-end systems in automation emails, such as customer relationship management, e-commerce platforms and loyalty programmes, enables businesses to send personalised messages triggered by user data.

For example, a customer’s birth date stored in a loyalty system can automatically prompt a birthday voucher email a month in advance.

“The targeted and automation emails are definitely getting better conversions, click-through rates and open rates compared to the mass emails. And as businesses become more and more automated, the number of automation emails is just going to go up,” says Jeffri.

Moreover, he sees the importance of email-based systems in the nation’s digital transformation beyond just for marketing.

“If someone gets a traffic fine, the government can email the notice instead of relying on physical mail. Or when it comes to passport renewals, the rakyat can be notified via email that their passport is about to expire, prompting timely renewals. Ultimately, emails can be used for government reports, reminders, documentation and citizen engagement.”

The next step is integrating artificial intelligence (AI) into these systems to unlock intelligent automation, he says. For example, surfacing the last 10 meeting minutes before a call or prompting a reply to an overlooked email from a supervisor.

“The AI at Work initiative by the government and establishment of the National AI office, I think it’s a great platform because the vision is to make Malaysia into an AI hub. But I think the AI at Work initiative goes beyond just using GenAI [generative AI] to ask questions or translate this for me.”

Jeffri adds that it is about leveraging AI for deeper, more meaningful automation that enhances productivity. He emphasises that upskilling users, especially within the government, to use AI beyond basic commands is a significant undertaking but a necessary one to unlock AI’s full potential in the workplace.

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