How to design an email workflow

There are two types of marketing emails: manual, one-off sends, and automated email comms. One-off sends are great when you have something timely to say. For example, a flash sale, event promotion or email newsletter. Automated emails, on the other hand, are great when you want to take people through a thought-out process. For example, a welcome or onboarding process, or a sales nurture, whereby you want to educate people about your business and solution.

Designing an email workflow

There are several things to factor in before you get straight into the build. These include:

• What are you trying to achieve?
• What have you got to say? 
• Do you have content already created? If so, does it talk to your marketing personas?
• Will you use segmentation? If so, what will you segment? Do you have this data already?
• How will you physically enrol somebody into your workflow? 

Designing an email marketing workflow is relatively straightforward when you have answers to the above questions. But there are additional things to consider:

• What time delays will you use?
• Do you know how your customers engage already?
• Do you know the best days of the week, or times of the day, that your customers open and engage with your email comms?

Using data that you already have is key - it offers a good foundation to build upon, and provides benchmark data for any new comms, so that you know what to work towards.

Building your email marketing workflow

Once you've mapped out your enrollment criteria, how you want to segment email comms, what you want to say and how frequently you want to say it, it's time to get into it.

Here we've designed a very basic e-commerce nurture workflow, using segmentation led by the number of orders a customer has placed (or not placed - see email versions 'A').

Depending on your email marketing software, your workflow could continue to grow, and grow. In addition to one 'IF/THEN' criteria up front, you can include many, many, more throughout. Examples include:

• IF contact opens, send email version A. 
• IF contact opens and clicks, send version B.
• IF contact does not open, send version C.

This approach helps us to test subject lines and whether or not they affect the open rate of our customers. Rather than just sending everybody the next email, we can be smart about how we communicate to people.