7 creative email automations for non-ecommerce brands

When the subject of email automations comes up, many non-email marketing folks think of the good old abandon-cart email (“You’re so close to getting a great product!”). Yes, email automation is particularly great for ecommerce brands. But they’re also useful for brands in almost every other vertical, including CPG and B2B.

Below are some of my favorite automations for non-ecommerce brands: 

• The welcome series.
• Post-purchase reviews solicitations.
• “Where to buy.” 
• Post-coupon engagement.
• Quiz follow-ups.
• Lead nurturing.
• Re-engagement.

Before I discuss each in more detail, a reminder is that automations work best with — and often depend on — audience segmentation and personalization. If you’re unsure your CRM’s audience segmentation is clean and distinct,  prioritize that initiative before trying automation.

1. The welcome series

A well-crafted welcome series will give you lots of information about your user. Use your welcome series to introduce different themes to see which are most engaging to the user, then tailor your follow-ups accordingly.

For instance, if you’re a CPG toothpaste brand, consider setting up modules to help users tell you their relevant interests. Think tartar control, teeth whitening, toothpaste for kids, etc. Use those interests to build audience segments with their own email journeys.

I’ve seen plenty of brands that use welcome emails but stay generic. This doesn’t achieve much for either the brand or the user. People will almost always respond best to more personalized emails.

2. Post-purchase product review requests 

Product-wise, it’s a lot easier for ecommerce brands to track purchases than it is for CPG brands, but CPG brands can get strong indicators of product interest — for instance, the user navigates to a particular product page on the brand site. 

In those instances (and especially if the page is visited more than once), we’ve had success setting up automations that go out around two weeks after those page visits, asking users to write a product review.

Dig deeper: Why it’s time to rethink your feedback emails and how to do it right 

3. ‘Where to buy’ 

For CPG brands or franchise retailers without an ecommerce component, “Where to buy” automations are great, value-providing follow-ups for users who view product-specific pages or content. 

4. Post-coupon engagement 

One trigger I recommend for brands leveraging coupons in their email campaigns is to set up “where to buy” or review request emails an appropriate amount of time (which may vary by product) after folks engage with or redeem a coupon on a site or in an email. 

Dig deeper: Declining customer feedback and loyalty, growing AI skepticism

Again, unless you’re piping in third-party offline data to know whether a customer made a purchase, you can’t be sure that a coupon was redeemed. Still, it’s an extremely strong indicator of purchase likelihood.

5. Survey or quiz follow-ups

Using quizzes or surveys, especially as part of the welcome series to gather information about your new subscribers, is a great way to engage users early on. 

It also provides great material for automating follow-ups. If, say, you’re an outerwear CPG brand, using a product page trigger to send a personalized survey (e.g., “Tell us more about your perfect fishing day” for someone who visits a page of hip waders) can give you another layer of information about your users for further relevant sends. 

For example, if someone says their best fishing day is ice fishing on a lake in Minnesota and you sell cold weather gear, you’ve got lots of material for great trigger-based automations touting your products’ benefits in the winter.

Dig deeper: 6 must-have, underused email marketing automations

6. Lead nurturing

This one doesn’t have to be specific to B2B. It can apply to big-ticket items that require tons of consideration and don’t normally happen online (think: buying a vehicle). 

Based on different lead statuses in your CRM (MQL, SQL, visited a “make an appointment at the dealership” page, etc.), you can trigger emails to go out based on product or service of interest. 

Be sure to work with your sales team so they have plenty of time to do outreach before handing it back to marketing. We have seen occurrences where a cold sales lead reactivates months later with an automated email to test interest. This is a signal for the sales team to get involved again.

7. Re-engagement

In this day and age, with Gmail and Yahoo spam guidelines in place, I recommend getting aggressive about removing unengaged subscribers — particularly new ones — from your active campaigns and putting them in their own unengaged list. 

With those guidelines in place, it’s easier (and more justifiable) to build standalone re-engagement journeys. The trigger could be as simple as “X days after adding them to the unengaged list” — and in that case, that interval is a number you’ll want to test to see what gets the best results.

Dig deeper: How to create a re-engagement strategy that doesn’t insult your subscribers

There’s no bad time to start setting these up in your ESP. Make sure you’re also building a testing strategy to catch any potential hiccups before you roll these out to your subscribers. My hunch is that once you build your automation skills, you’ll spot other valuable use cases for your business.