Email Marketing Automation: What to Build First
Marketing Ops · Cyber Elite Team
Marketing automation platforms make it possible to build dozens of different flows, but building all of them at once, before any single one is actually tuned and performing, is a common way early automation efforts underdeliver. A smaller set of well-built flows, prioritized in the right order, tends to outperform a large set of shallow ones. Here’s a sensible order to build in.
Welcome series should come first because it reaches the most engaged moment
A new subscriber or customer is at their most engaged with a brand right at the point of signup or first purchase, which makes the welcome series the highest-leverage flow to get right before building out less time-sensitive automations. A generic, unbuilt welcome experience wastes the single most receptive moment a business gets with a new contact.
Abandoned cart and browse abandonment flows have a clear, direct revenue case
For any business with online transactions, cart and browse abandonment flows target people who have already shown strong purchase intent, which typically makes them among the highest-converting automated flows available. Building these early tends to produce the clearest, fastest return of any automation investment.
Post-purchase flows are commonly skipped but shouldn't be
A lot of early automation effort goes into pre-purchase flows, welcome and abandonment, while post-purchase flows, order confirmation beyond the transactional basics, review requests, replenishment reminders, cross-sell suggestions, get built later or not at all. These flows support retention and repeat purchase, which is usually cheaper to earn than new customer acquisition.
Win-back and re-engagement flows should come after the fundamentals are solid
Automations aimed at reactivating disengaged contacts are valuable, but they work best once a business already has strong welcome and post-purchase flows establishing what “good engagement” looks like for that list. Building win-back flows before the fundamentals are in place tends to produce weaker results than the same effort spent finishing the higher-priority flows first.
Our piece on where marketing automation and CRM overlap covers how this fits into a broader martech stack.
Our marketing automation team builds flows in this order rather than launching everything simultaneously.
