A to Z Guide to Email Marketing Automation Strategy

Before we get started with your email marketing automation strategy, let’s take a look at 👇🏼

• What Is Email Marketing Automation? [+Automated Workflow]
• Why Email Marketing Automation Matters? [10 Benefits]
• How Does Email Automation Work?
• Examples of Email Marketing Automation Campaigns
• How To Create an Email Marketing Automation Strategy? [6 Best Practices]
• 5 Top Email Marketing Automation Tools
• Boost Email Campaign Success with Authenticity
• Let’s Wrap Up
• FAQs
• All you need to know about Email Marketing on CUFinder

📢 What’s the biggest challenge you face in your business❓❓❓

When we consider the issues that most businesses struggle with, at the top of all is attracting & nurturing potential customers and converting them into loyal customers. In addition, businesses typically need to collect valuable data about their prospects, such as contact info or email addresses. However, they don’t get the opportunity to use this information to achieve their marketing goals.

So, what’s the solution❓❓❓

Email marketing automation strategy is designed to solve these challenges. 😊

In this guide, we’ll uncover the world of email marketing automation, the best practices to build & streamline workflows, top tools to boost email marketing efficiency across your teams, and other things.

Let’s get right into it 🏁

What Is Email Marketing Automation? [+Automated Workflow]

In the world of digital marketing, there are many tasks that need to be done routinely and based on recurring situations daily or several times a day. These repetitive tasks prevent marketers from focusing on their long-term strategies and goals.

One of the challenges of an email marketer is to manage these tasks in the best way possible, with optimal time and cost.

The primary purpose of marketing automation is to automate these repetitive tasks, saving you valuable time while improving your relationships with your prospects.

Okay, now let’s delve a little deeper into the definition of email marketing automation strategy 👇🏼

Email Marketing Automation is a comprehensive strategy that uses technology to create workflows & triggers based on predefined criteria or user actions. This automatically completes specific tasks instead of manually sending individual emails.

In other words, with email marketing automation, you can send automated, personalized, and targeted messages to specific segments of your target audience without manual effort at the right time.

In marketing automation, you hear the word “workflow” a lot. Curious to know what an automation workflow is in email marketing? Let’s first clarify what a workflow is.

If we were to give a simple definition of workflow, we could say 👇🏼

A Workflow is a series of automated email sequences triggered by specific actions or behaviors in your email list.

Workflows are related to user behavior. For example, you can create a workflow that automatically sends a welcome email to users when they sign up for your email newsletter or another workflow that tracks the purchase progress of users who have abandoned their shopping carts via email.

Here are some of the most popular automated workflows 👇🏼

1. Welcome workflow
2. Thank you workflow
3. Winback workflow
4. Abandoned cart recovery workflow
5. VIP celebration workflow
6. Onboarding workflow
7. Webinar email workflow
8. Giveaway workflow
9. Referral workflow
10. Customer feedback workflow

Why Email Marketing Automation Matters? [10 Benefits]

3 out of 4 businesses use marketing automation (Hubspot). Automated marketing emails drive a 320% increase in revenue compared to non-automated emails (Campaign Monitor).

So, it’s no surprise that email marketing automation is a vital and helpful tool for marketing teams. But the story doesn’t end there.

Let’s review ten benefits before we dive into how an automated email marketing strategy works👇🏼

1. Personalization

Email marketing automation helps marketing teams communicate highly personalized & targeted messages to their ideal qualified leads.

You can segment your email lists based on different criteria across your customer groups. This ensures that each of your target groups or audiences receives content relevant to their behavior, preferences, or stage of the buying journey.

2. Lasting Branding & Connections

Permanent branding is one of the most considerable advantages of using email automation.

Automation allows businesses to spend more time consistently branding, messaging, and connecting with their audience.

The objective of an automated email campaign is not just to send many emails, but also to nurture and convert potential customers. Nurturing means introducing your brand as a valuable & reliable company.

3. Email Strategy Fine-Tuning

Sending bulk emails to your entire audience is a big mistake, and it’s not only harmful!

With email marketing automation, you set a goal for each message you send. By setting a purpose, you ensure that every email you send is beneficial or at least not annoying to the recipient.

4. Relevant & Timely Messaging

Send triggered marketing emails based on specific events or actions of your customers. This ensures that recipients receive emails at specific times, such as when they’re about to make a purchase or are ready to take a specific action.

This can help optimize the timeliness of your campaigns, increasing the relevance of your content, as well as the likelihood of your audience engaging throughout the email marketing funnel.

5. Chance of Error Reduction

When it comes to human work, you should always consider the possibility of errors such as misspellings or misspelling the recipient’s name. 

These errors are unforgivable in email marketing. One significant benefit of email marketing automation is the huge reduction in such errors.

6. Scalability

Another significant advantage of email automation is its scalability, making it suitable for businesses of all sizes.

Whether you own a small or large startup, you can tailor your email marketing automation to your specific needs and grow your business.

7. Cross-Channel Integration

Email marketing automation allows for integrating multiple marketing channels such as social media, SMS, and web platforms, giving you a seamless experience across your entire marketing ecosystem. 

This ensures consistent messaging, improves customer experience, and helps you engage with your audience across touchpoints.

8. Time Efficiency

Email marketing automation reduces the manual effort involved in running email campaigns. 

Once an email automation campaign is set up, automated workflows handle all the repetitive tasks, allowing marketers to focus on marketing strategies and creativity.

9. More Engagement

Email automation provides an easy & fast way to connect with your targeted customers and, when appropriate, encourage them to buy more.

First, you should create and send useful and relevant content that is both in the interests of your company and your prospects, and as you go, you will see a higher level of engagement.

10. Email List Segmentation

Use automation in email marketing as an opportunity to segment your email list based on customers’ interests and behavior in the campaigns.

How Does Email Automation Work?

The first step to automating email marketing processes is to create an automation workflow.

Each automation workflow has a “starting point” where conditions are defined. If the conditions defined at this point occur, we say that the starting point is triggered. This is exactly where the email automation workflow begins.

Examples of these email automation starting points include submitting an opt-in form, subscribing to a newsletter, adding a product to the shopping cart, and completing a purchase. 

In fact, this starting point of email automation is the input to the various stages of the automation workflow, and until it occurs, the remaining stages will not be executed.

After you’ve specified the starting point, the automation path continues accordingly.

The subsequent processes can occur linearly and one after the other. Simply put, each stage of the workflow has different scenarios, and these scenarios are related to a very simple question: Does this condition hold? If the answer is “yes,” the process continues in the “yes” branch, and if the answer is “no,” the process continues in another branch.

Let’s break this down a bit. 🔨

In the image below, you can see an example of a simple workflow that defines conditions and then divides into two branches. Which branch the subscriber enters depends on whether the defined condition occurs or not. 👇🏼

Email automation is divided into three general categories based on their starting point and how the workflows are triggered 👇🏼

1️⃣ Behavioral-Based Automation

This type of email automation is related to a potential customer’s specific behavior or action that the subscriber takes on email campaigns. 

For instance, email marketing activities (opening or clicking on a specific campaign), viewing specific landing pages, abandoning a shopping cart, etc., are examples of prospect behavior, each of which can trigger automation.

2️⃣ Demographic-Based Automation

Subscribers’ demographic characteristics are those you store in your customer database. This information is (or almost) constant over time. This data can include date of birth, job title, industry, age, location, gender, type of device used, etc.

For example, you can create a birthday email and automatically send it to your subscribers on birthdays.

3️⃣ Time-Based Automation

Final automation is sent after a specific time has passed or a specific event has occurred.

For example, automation that reminds subscribers of product renewals, anniversary of collaboration, or first purchase of products by subscribers, etc., can be a subset of this category.

Depending on what the final result of each of these automation is, you can define different tasks for them:

1. Add contacts to the new list
2. Send automated emails
3. Analyze lead scoring 

You can also specify a “scheduling” for your tasks in email automation. For example, you can define that an email be sent to the lead right after they subscribe or sent 1 hour later. Then, the follow-up email will be sent 2 days later.

Let’s continue this topic with an example 👇🏼

We mentioned earlier that your customers’ purchases can be considered one of the automation workflow triggers. If this purchase has occurred for the first time, you can encourage them to repeat purchases by sending a discount code and plan on their loyalty to your brand in the long term.

On the other hand, if this purchase has occurred several times, you can segment them into your loyal customer list to have a campaign tailored to them, such as sending gifts, special discounts, additional services, etc.)

Are you curious about how to create a workflow related to the mentioned process? Let’s start at its beginning 👇🏼

1. A prospective customer enters the workflow by purchasing a product or service (now you know that in this situation, we call it a workflow trigger).
2. The workflow checks whether the user is making a purchase for the first time.
3. If so, an email with a discount code or coupon will be sent to them. 
4. But if not, the user is added to the loyal customers list.

You can see a sample screenshot of this workflow below 👇🏼

The story can get even more interesting if you use your new loyalty list (created through the workflow above) as a starting point for another automated workflow! You can be as creative as you want and build different workflows. 

Examples of Email Marketing Automation Campaigns

Here are the four types and most common examples of automated marketing email campaigns 👇🏼

1. Welcome Email

An automated welcome email is a business’s first interactive message a new subscriber receives right when they’re most interested & excited about your brand. The purpose of welcome emails is to welcome the new audience to the list and encourage them to engage with the company further. 

You can send emails with testimonials or reviews, brand stories, and social media links. You can see how it works in this image below 👇🏼

2. Abandoned Cart Email

Sometimes, a prospective customer may add items to their cart but abandon it during checkout. An abandoned cart email is a message sent to customers to remind them of the products they’ve placed in their cart. 

Sending an abandoned cart recovery email can increase the completion or success rate of these unfinished carts by up to 69%. 👇🏼

3. Order Confirmation Email

Order confirmation emails are one of the post-purchase email automation that can be used for transactional emails. 

An order confirmation email is sent immediately after a customer places an order. This is a chance to provide the customer with essential purchase details to review.

You can see an image of the simple process of this order confirmation workflow below 👇🏼

4. Thank You Email

A thank you email is sent after a visitor signs up or makes a purchase. This is a strategic way for a business to foster a personal relationship with the customer.

Use a thank-you workflow whenever your customers buy something from your brand; just be sure to include the benefits they’ll receive for purchase, details or links to where they can track their order, and guides that help them learn how to make use of your products. 👇🏼

🎁 Bonus suggestions: 

Are you curious to know how to write a professional thank you email? Look no further; just follow our article. ________________________↗

You may also be interested in learning how to create the best email templates for your campaigns. Please read our guide. ___________________________________________↗

How To Create an Email Marketing Automation Strategy? [6 Best Practices]

In this section, we’ll cover some of the best practices for creating an effective email marketing automation strategy. These aren’t dependent on your email marketing platforms or features you use but on your strategy. 

1. Create a Prep Checklist for Each Campaign

The more detailed your email automation campaign is, the better your chances of success will be.

To this end, before creating the campaign, you should list what you want to achieve from a successful & particular email marketing automation.

Make sure your checklist for preparing an email automation campaign includes the following:

1️⃣ Define your goals: Start by clearly stating your objectives. Understanding your goals is the foundational step that establishes a roadmap guiding the entire email marketing automation process. 

2️⃣ Outline measurable & trackable objectives: To measure the performance of your campaign accurately, outline trackable objectives for your campaign, including tracking email open rates, clicks, and conversions.

3️⃣ Research Audiences & segment: Research your target audience and segment them into specific groups based on their preferences, needs, and interests. Doing this step will ensure that you create targeted, timely, and relevant content.

4️⃣ Schedule & send messages: When sending and setting up your messages, set a specific schedule for sending relevant and targeted content to your audience.

5️⃣ Identify the value proposition: Determine a unique value proposition for each common segment of your target audience based on targeting, pain points, etc.

2. Segment Your Target Audience

By segmenting your email list based on subscriber information and sending emails to targeted groups, your target audience will receive relevant & informative emails. Ultimately, campaigns related to subscriber interests will have better results (Higher open rates & increased click-through rates (CTR)).

According to Mailchimp, segmented campaigns have a 14.31% higher open rate and a 100.95% higher CTR than unsegmented campaigns.

Choosing the criteria for segmenting your target audience is also tricky and requires a lot of research. Some of these criteria include the following:

1️⃣ Demographics, segmenting based on basic information about people (age, gender, etc.)

2️⃣ Survey & test results, segmenting based on people’s preferences and interests

3️⃣ Geographic location, segmenting based on contacts’ location, time zone, and place of purchase

4️⃣ B2B, B2C, and C2C businesses, segmenting based on different types of businesses

5️⃣ Purchase history, segmenting based on products purchased by customers

6️⃣ Amount spent, segmenting based on customers’ payment history (VIP buyers, brand loyal customers, etc.)

7️⃣ Website behavior, segmenting based on user behavioral data (pages visited by users, pages not visited, etc.)

8️⃣ Last purchase time, segmenting based on buyers’ purchasing frequencies, 

9️⃣ Personal interests, segmenting based on information derived from customers’ interests

3. Develop a Comprehensive Customer Journey Map

One of the most important steps in email marketing automation is designing automated journeys for your prospects. These journeys are developed based on the prospects’ interactions with your business.

As such, create a buyer journey map that outlines your customer’s path from discovering your brand to converting and purchasing. 

You need to put yourself in your customer’s shoes and plan out the steps they’ll take before making a purchase. Think about how you can guide them along the way to conversion.

Start by identifying key touchpoints where automated emails can help move leads through the sales funnel.

Let’s illustrate this strategy with an example 👇🏼

If your prospect submits their email through a form on your website but doesn’t immediately make a purchase, try to convince them to buy. To do this, send emails that show the benefits of your product or service and explain how it solves their problems and meets their needs.

You’ll need to map out your customer journey at this point to plan and execute your campaigns precisely. This roadmap will help you strategically send automated emails at the right times to nurture prospects & encourage them to convert.

4. Track Behavior and Build Customer Profiles

Understanding your potential customers is key to setting up an automated workflow during their journeys and meeting their needs. 

You can use the web tracking & analyzing tools like Google Analytics. These tools can show you what your visitors are doing in real-time, including viewing landing pages, products, or updating their carts.

So, how can you use this information?

1️⃣ Focus on top-performing landing pages & products to create targeted campaigns or special offers.

2️⃣ Identify visitors who are interested in specific products and send them personalized messages or discounts to persuade them to buy.

3️⃣ Build detailed customer profiles by tracking behavior before and after a sale to tailor your messages & offers by their preferences & actions. 

5. Conduct A/B testing

A/B testing is very vital for refining your email marketing automation strategy. Rather than sticking to one idea, implementing A/B testing allows you to compare two versions of the same message to determine which one is best with your audience.

Here are a few great ideas for A/B testing you can try right now:

1️⃣ Compare subject lines with different discounts to see if your audience prefers percentage discounts (%) or dollar savings ($).

2️⃣ Try the impact of using emojis in subject lines by the same message with and without them.

3️⃣ Personalize subject lines with your subscriber’s name and test against non-personalized ones to indicate the difference.

4️⃣ Test different versions of subject lines with urgency by including & excluding limited-time offers.

5️⃣ Evaluate variations in email content or test different form designs to discover which one leads to better clicks or orders.

6. Choose the Right Email Marketing Automation Software

If you want to be successful in email marketing, you need to have access to a powerful & advanced email marketing automation tool.

In other words, the success of your email marketing process depends on the tool you use.

When choosing a platform to work on, look for key features such as flexible workflow design, segmentation, customization, easy integration, and more.

Here’s a quick checklist for picking a robust email automation tool that includes:

1. Ready-to-use email templates
2. Forms & landing pages building
3. Email scheduling
4. A/B testing
5. Automated customer journeys
6. Sending time optimization
7. Dynamic content generation
8. Advanced segmentation
9. Reporting & tracking
10. Personalization options

The best thing about the automation tools is that they help you automate everything from soup to nuts, i.e., from collecting leads and nurturing them to sending marketing emails and tracking them.

If you’re looking for the right tool for your business to start your email campaigns, keep reading. 👀

In the next section, we’ll introduce the top 5 professional email marketing automation tools.

5 Top Email Marketing Automation Tools

Marketers who use automation tools are over 46% more likely to report an effective email marketing strategy (Exploding Topics). 

If you want to know which email automation tools are the best in 2025, we list these five according to their unique features. 👇🏼

1. HubSpot

The name is enough. HubSpot is best known for its CRM features among marketers and is widely used as an efficient & routine marketing automation tool.

The platform lets you create dynamic & targeted lists, segment your email recipients based on where they’re in their lifecycle, route qualified leads, and set up internal notifications.

HubSpot’s key features include:

1. Dynamic email list building
2. Lead routing
3. Segmentation
4. Drag-and-drop editor 
5. Personalization
6. Fast time and easy to use 

2. Mailchimp

Mailchimp was once a simple newsletter tool, but it has gradually evolved into a professional & sophisticated email marketing automation platform over time. This email automation platform meets the needs of businesses of all sizes.

Mailchimp supports the latest features related to sign-up forms, surveys, and websites that are suitable for designers and creative agencies.

Mailchimp’s key features include:

1. Advanced segmentation
2. Forms & landing pages builder
3. Reporting & analytics
4. 24/7 email & chat support
5. Behavioral targeting
6. 100+ pre-built journeys

3. ActiveCampaign

This automation tool is great & efficient for automating your marketing emails that has some very surprising predictive sending features. It helps you send your email at the right time when your contacts are most likely to open it.
Furthermore, ActiveCampaign has features like a visual email automation builder, conditional content blocks, highly personalized emails, along with over 135 triggers.

ActiveCampaign’s key features include:

1. Predictive sending
2. Email & landing page templates
3. Personalized email signatures
4. Built-in CRM
5. A/B testing
6. 900+ automation recipes

4. Zoho

If you want to collaborate between your sales & marketing teams, and are looking for a perfect CRM with professional automation capabilities, Zoho is a solid option. 

This automation platform is a big name among sales professionals and marketers that offers unique features to manage, connect with, convert, and follow up with prospects.

Zoho’s key features include:

1. Personalized email to add bugs
2. Time tracking
3. Customizations
4. Lead scoring
5. Form & landing page builder
6. Simple & comprehensive CRM integration

5. GetResponse

GetResponse is a great & amazing marketing automation tool for influencer marketing, and especially the best option for businesses that frequently host webinars & collaborative online events.

GetResponse offers advanced & full-featured automation such as email sender, segmentation, triggered campaigns, tagging ,and data updates. You can also get access to a CRM on its paid plan.

GetResponse’s key features include:

1. Webinar hosting
2. Websites & landing pages
3. Signup forms & popups
4. Unlimited newsletters
5. Email & landing page templates
6. Quick transactional emails

Boost Email Campaign Success with Authenticity

Trust is the foundation of any successful & right marketing campaign (email marketing). This trust is built on the authenticity & accuracy of your communications.

Ensuring that your emails are genuinely relevant & helpful to the recipient, that your email lists are clean & up-to-date, and that your messages are sent from verifiable sources all contribute to the authenticity that can make or break your email marketing efforts.

So, how do you get email credibility? 👉🏽 CUFinder’s Email Verification tool is your best bet.

Now, we should say that CUFinder has an entirely free service called Email Verifier. This service takes your email lists in bulk and measures their correctness with different tools. This service’s accuracy & quality are guaranteed up to 98%, and you can safely enter the emails it verifies into your CRM & sales tools. 

Run your email campaigns with the least amount of email bouncing and get the best results from your marketing efforts.

Ready to give it a go? 🏃

Click here to try and enjoy! 😉

Let’s Wrap Up

Email marketing automation strategy is one of the most powerful approaches to omnichannel marketing to connect with your target audience. It allows you to send relevant & personalized messages to your subscribers. These are based on their needs, behavior, preferences, interests, pain points, and more.

In this guide, we’ve discussed what email marketing automation is, why it matters, how it works, as well as some advanced practices or strategies to optimize your email campaigns.

We’ve also shared four examples of different & common types of email marketing automation—these range from welcome and post-purchased email series to abandoned cart and thank you email series. Use our samples for inspiration when building your own email automation workflows.

On top of that, take advantage of email marketing automation tools like HubSpot or Mailchimp to amplify your efforts and achieve your goals.

Also, use CUFinder’s free Email Verifier to ensure accurate, credible, clean email lists, reduce bounces, and improve results.

FAQs