Businesses thrive when their customers are engaged and loyal. However, building loyalty isn't something that you can do with a single email here and there. It requires multiple nudges and instances of engagement to convert audiences into loyal customers. That’s where email sequences come.
In this guide, we’ll explore the benefits of email sequences and how you can set them up, along with some examples of email sequences for you to set up.
What is an email sequence?
An email sequence is a series of pre-written, automated emails sent to subscribers or customers over a period of time, often triggered by an action or event.
Email sequences aren’t just about sending messages; they’re about building relationships and guiding people through their journey with your brand. This can help you save time, stay relevant, and increase conversions without constantly hitting send.
What are the benefits of an email sequence?
Email sequences provide you with a host of benefits. Let’s take a look at some of them:
1. Increase revenue
Email sequences are designed to guide customers through a funnel, from awareness to consideration to decision-making. This gradual approach increases the chances of converting subscribers into paying customers.
You can use the sequence to highlight features, benefits, and social proof, such as testimonials or case studies, making a compelling case for why subscribers should make a purchase.
2. Retain customers and build a loyal customer base
Email sequence helps you retain your existing customers by sending them post-purchase emails such as loyalty emails, gamification, etc. You can set up re-engagement emails to send them content to keep them engaged and turn them into loyal customers. The stronger your customer base, the more leads you can generate through referral recommendations and thus scale your business.
3. Save time and efforts
Email sequences streamline repetitive tasks and minimize the need for manual input. After they are set up, they operate automatically, freeing you up to concentrate on other creative areas of your business, such as strategy and planning.
4. Ensure consistent communication
An email sequence ensures that your brand stays at the top of your mind by sending regular and timely communication. It helps nurture relationships and keeps your audience engaged.
To avail of these benefits, you must set up the right email sequence across different user journey stages. That's what we will be discussing next.
8 email sequence examples you can set up
We have presented below a summary of 8 examples of email sequences that you can set up to nurture your business.
1. Welcome/onboarding email sequence
A welcome or onboarding email series is the first email series a new subscriber, customer, or user receives after signing up or making their first purchase. It serves as an introduction to your brand, product, or service, and sets the tone for the relationship moving forward. These emails are designed to engage, inform, and guide the recipient on how to get started.
When you go over to dinner at someone's place, they don't shove the dinner on your face. They walk in, greet, show you around, and make you feel comfortable at their home. Then, before dinner, you are served appetizers accompanied by the conversation, and then after that dinner.
- Van Giesler, email marketing strategist and copywriter
So, onboarding your new subscribers works the same way. Onboarding is your chance to accompany them while they explore your product or services, resolve their issues (if any), highlight your product's pro benefits, and ensure they have a great experience.
Onboarding email sequence example:
📧 Recommended number of emails: 4 emails
⌛ Optimum flow time: 1-2 weeks (space it on based on your product’s complexity)
Email 1: Send an onboarding welcome email thanking your customers for signing up, and introducing the brand and what services you offer. You can also add a double opt-in process at this point if you want to verify these email IDs before you send the rest of the emails.
Email 2: Ask the recipients for more details such as name, location, and designation/company name to finish setting up their accounts.
Email 3: Direct your user to the next steps with your product and discuss how to make the most out of your offering.
Email 4: Talk about a product feature that might be very helpful for the customers when starting out. Explain how it works, and its use case, and maybe provide some case studies as well.
See the full breakdown of the welcome email sequence.
2. Lead nurturing email sequence
This email series is created to nurture your gathered leads using different tools and sources. This series aims to warm the cold leads, build trust, and nudge them to convert. You can also use this series to qualify leads based on your lead scoring criteria.
For example, if a lead is engaging with your email and taking action, as mentioned, this reflects their intent to buy, So you can move them to qualified leads and nurture them using different series.
Cold lead nurturing emails series example:
📧 Recommended number of emails: 4 emails
⌛ Optimum flow time: 2-3 weeks
Email 1: Share useful resources such as ebooks, blog post links, webinars, etc., based on their past interaction with you.
Email 2: Follow up with them to get their feedback on the resources you shared and ask them what else they would prefer.
Email 3: Share customer success stories and case studies to enforce trust and place yourself as an authoritative source.
Email 4: Nudge users to try out your product by giving exciting and relevant deals.
Get the inside scoop into this SaaS lead nurturing sequence.
3. Event/webinar promotion email sequence
If you have an upcoming event, such as a webinar, you can promote and get more registrations and spread awareness about it by setting up an event email sequence. It also keeps registered users updated about the same.
Event promotion email sequence template:
📧 Recommended number of emails: 5 emails
⌛ Optimum flow time: 1 weeks
Email 1: Send a registration acknowledgment email as soon as someone registers for the webinar.
Email 2: Send a reminder email (mention the number of days to go).
Email 3: Send another reminder email when the webinar approaches the due date.
Email 4: Send a reminder email a few hours before the webinar.
Email 5: Send a mail when the Webinar is live and ask them to join.
Learn more about the webinar registration email sequence.
4. Lead magnet email sequence
When a visitor signs up for the lead magnet, it shows that they might be interested in your product or your industry. It offers you a great opportunity to engage with them and turn them into potential customers.
You need to set up a lead magnet email sequence to do that effectively. With this sequence, you can thank them for showing interest in the lead magnets and nurture them towards conversions.
Lead magnet email sequence example:
📧 Recommended number of emails: 3-4 emails
⌛ Optimum flow time: 4-5 days
Email 1: Share the resource within seconds of their demand to avoid friction.
Email 2: Send them a feedback email to collect reviews about the resource.
Email 3: Share relevant resources based on the lead magnet they demanded.
Email 4: Nudge them towards booking a demo call with your team of experts.
Get the full breakdown of the lead magnet email sequence
5. Re-engagement email sequence
A re-engagement email sequence is designed to reconnect with inactive subscribers or customers who haven't interacted with your emails or brand in a while. This sequence helps revive interest,and encourage recipients to take action once again.
Here are two things you need to answer first.
How long does a subscriber need to be unengaged to send them re-engagement emails?
After how many emails should you stop sending them re-engagement emails and unsubscribe them from your email list?
The answer to these questions is: it depends on your industry, target audience, email campaigns, and marketing goals.
A study done by the Active campaign gave mixed results, but overall you should wait 30-60 days to send re-engagement emails. And experts at Active Campaign think you should send at least 3 re-engagement emails before removing users from your email list.
Re-engagement email sequence email example:
📧 Recommended number of emails: 2-3 emails
⌛ Optimum flow time: 1 week
Email 1: Remind people that it has been a while since their last purchase and show them all the latest arrivals in your shop.
Email 2: Share an enticing and relevant offer that compels them to come back and make a purchase.
Email 3: Send a follow-up email if the user still hasn't made a purchase.
Email 4: Create FOMO and urgency using countdown timers, limited deal offers, etc. Use words like “Last chance”, “Selling fast” etc.
Learn more about the idle-win back/re-engagement email sequence.
6. Upsell/cross-sell email sequence
Retaining customers is more cost-effective than acquiring new ones. An upsell/cross-sell email sequence is a strategic series of emails aimed at encouraging existing customers to make additional purchases, either by upgrading to a higher-end product (upsell) or by purchasing complementary items (cross-sell).
Upsell/cross-sell email sequence example:
📧 Recommended number of emails: 4 emails
⌛ Optimum flow time: 2 weeks
Email 1: Show related and premium products related to their purchase.
Email 2: Give discounts and special offers to nudge them to buy.
Email 3: Share social proof such as customer reviews, case studies, etc., to boost credibility.
Email 4: Send a final nudge to get them to convert.
Retain more customers with this upsell/cross-sell email sequence.
7. Feedback email sequence
Customer feedback is non-negotiable if you want to survive in the long run. The better you understand your customer and their pain points, the better you can serve them.
However, not every customer would be willing to share their feedback. That's why you need a feedback email flow to nudge them to share their views.
Feedback email sequence template:
📧 Recommended number of emails: 3 emails
⌛ Optimum flow time: 1 week
Email 1: Send a personalized email asking for the product, event, customer service feedback, etc.
Email 2: If they don't share feedback, nudge them by giving relevant incentives.
Email 3: Send an appreciation email if they've shared the feedback.
Collect user insights using our SaaS feedback email series.
8. Abandoned cart recovery sequence
There are many reasons user abandon their cart:
Your payment process doesn't look secure.
There are too many steps to complete the checkout.
The total cart amount exceeded the user's budget as they couldn't find any coupons.
They were browsing for fun.
Whatever their reason is, you must engage with these users to try to generate sales. Businesses lose a big chunk of revenue to abandoned carts. But, take a deep breath. You can recover this loss using abandoned cart sequences.
Abandoned cart recovery sequence example:
📧 Recommended number of emails: 3-4 emails
⌛ Optimum flow time: 4 days
Email 1: Send an abandoned cart email within a few hours of cart abandonment reminding them about the items in their cart.
Email 2: If they have not checked out the products, send them another reminder the next day.
Email 3: If they still don't take action, send a compelling offer like free shipping or $10 off until a certain time.
Email 4: Create FOMO and urgency by telling them items in their cart are going out of stock fast.
Get the inside scoop of ecommerce cart recovery email sequence.
We have covered email sequences and journeys in detail for every industry like SaaS, ecommerce, real estate, and more in our email flows. You can check out the various funnels to automate with sequences here – email sequences templates and flows.
How to build an email sequence with Mailmodo
In Mailmodo, you can create an email sequence using our visual customer journey builder feature. We will take you step-by-step on creating journeys and tracking their performance.
Step 1: Decide the sequence type, the number of emails, and the email template
Begin with deciding the kind of email sequence you want to create.
Decide how many emails will be in this sequence. For instance, you may have 5 emails in your onboarding email sequence.
Create the email templates for your email sequence. You can either pick and customize a pre-made template or create a new one from scratch.
Step 2: Build your email sequence in Mailmodo's journey builder
Go to the journey tab in the Mailmodo dashboard and click on Create journey.
Here, you can choose a pre-defined email sequence or start from scratch and build a custom one.
Choose the event that should trigger your email sequence, configure that trigger, and then click on Next.
The trigger will already be present. You can then drag and drop the Send campaign option.
Set up the send campaign block by adding the email template you created and adding other relevant details like campaign name, subject line, etc.
You can similarly add other conditions or delays and more action blocks as required.
Click on Next.
Step 3: Review and launch the email sequence
Review the details of the email sequence and edit other required details on the page.
Click on the Publish button in the right corner of the page to make it live.
Step 4: Track the performance of the email series
Once your journey is live, go to the journey's dashboard to track the performance and activities.
The overview tab will show you the overview of the entire sequence. This would include the count of delivered emails, opened emails, unsubscribes, and so on.
The activity log records the journey activity: date, trigger method used, total users in the journey, users in progress (at any stage within the journey), and number of steps completed/failed.
You can also choose to cancel or pause the journey by clicking on the Pause button in the top right corner.
Now, you know how you can set up an email sequence in a few simple steps. Why not try it yourself?
Create your email sequence in minutes
Best practices to build an email sequence that converts
To make the most of sequence emails, we recommend following these seven tips:
1. Get insights from your sales team
Take inputs and insights from the sales team about your customers behavior as they are directly connected with your brand and customers. You can get to know your prospect's journey better during each stage and then integrate these learnings into your email series to move prospects in different pipeline stages.
2. Segment your email list to target specific groups of people
Use data to segment your email sequence. Tailor your emails based on user behavior, interests, or demographics. Segmenting your email list allows for more relevant and targeted messaging that resonates with different groups.
You can create user segments based on different criteria, such as:
| Category | Description |
|---|---|
| Demographic data | Age, gender, occupation, family size, etc. |
| Geographical data | Country, city, pin code, etc. |
| Psychographic data | Habits, values, lifestyles, etc. |
| Behavioral data | Purchasing behavior, user's lifecycle stage, customer loyalty, benefits sought, etc. |
Another behavior-based model you can use is the RFM model - Recency, Frequency, and Monetary. Let’s take a look at the things to consider in this.
Recency: The time interval between the user's last purchase interaction.
Frequency: How frequently do users purchase, open, click on emails, etc.?
Monetary: How much money do users spend?
3. Send personalized emails
Segmentation is the stepping stone to creating personalized emails that appeal to individual emails. Segment's State of Personalization 2021 shows that 69% of consumers appreciate personalization as long as it's based on data they've shared with a business directly. Personalization helps your audience feel like the message was created specifically for them, which increases engagement and conversion rates. Hence, it is your chance to showcase and build connections with users. Personalize your emails with name, birthday, purchase history, etc.
4. Maintain adequate intervals in email series
You must not overwhelm users with too many and too frequent emails. Doing so will only push subscribers away from your emails, no matter how compelling your subject line or your email is. So, ensure that you send emails at intervals to give users time to absorb the previously sent email.
5. Use team members' names in the email
Introducing your team and mentioning their name in the email sign-off can help make your email look more trustworthy and credible. Even the sender address should be in the name of a human and not your brand. This will encourage users to reply to emails as they will believe that there is a human on the other end.
6. Always test your emails
Preview your emails and your email sequence to identify any issues with rendering, deliverability, or triggers. You should also A/B test your emails by making variations of a single email and sending it to segments of your audience to decide which one performs better.
7. Track your performance consistently
Without tracking the performance of your email sequence, your hard work, time, and efforts will go in vain. So, track the right metrics, such as click-throughs, conversions, etc., based on your end goal.
Monitoring your email performance by conducting an email marketing audit will help you understand which campaign is performing and which isn't. You can then work on improving the performance to nail your future campaigns.
Wrap-up
Email sequences are a powerful tool for automating communication, nurturing leads, and driving conversions. Whether it’s for welcoming new subscribers, reengaging inactive customers, or encouraging upsells and cross-sells, email sequences help maintain consistent, personalized interactions without requiring constant manual effort.
By leveraging the right strategies and understanding your audience’s needs, you can effectively boost engagement, increase sales, and streamline your marketing efforts with the use of relevant email sequences.
To level up your email series, check out our collection of email flows across different industries. Here, you'll get the best pre-made email sequence templates you can use immediately.
