Accept that coverage is the constraint
Small teams with large catalogues rarely fail at strategy. They fail at throughput: the majority of the catalogue is never actively marketed, so demand depends on buyers already knowing what to search for.
The goal is not to market everything. It is to raise coverage of the portion that justifies attention, without lowering the standard of what goes out.
Group before you generate
Marketing one SKU at a time does not scale, and marketing the whole catalogue at once says nothing. The workable unit sits in between: a category, an application, or a set of products that share a buyer.
Group by who buys, not by how the warehouse is organised. Products stored together are often bought by entirely different people.
- Group by shared buying role and purchase trigger
- One reusable audience definition per group
- Per-product specifics carried in the copy, not the targeting
Prioritise honestly
Rank groups by margin contribution, stock position and how reachable the buyer actually is. A high-margin category with no identifiable audience is a worse use of a week than a moderate-margin one with a clear buyer.
Set a quality floor and keep it
The failure mode of scale is generic volume: more sends, worse reputation, lower deliverability, and eventually a damaged domain. Every message should carry information the recipient could not have guessed from the subject line.
A practical floor: if a reviewer cannot say what specific fact makes this message useful to this recipient, the draft does not go out.