Email is the channel that quietly outperforms almost everything else, and it's been that way for years. Litmus estimates that email returns roughly 36 dollars for every dollar spent. The catch is that this number describes email done well, with permission, relevance, and timing. Done badly, email is just a faster way to annoy people into unsubscribing.
The biggest shift in mindset is moving from campaigns to flows. A campaign is a one-off send, like a newsletter or a promo. A flow is automation triggered by something a person does, and flows are where the real money hides. Omnisend's analysis of ecommerce sends in 2024 found that automated emails made up only about 2 percent of sends but drove 37 percent of email-generated sales. You build them once and they work in the background, sending the right message at the right moment to one person at a time.
Start with the welcome flow, because it catches people at their most interested. Someone just handed you their email address, which means they're paying attention right now. Welcome emails consistently post the highest engagement of any message type. GetResponse's 2024 benchmark report, which analyzed billions of messages, put the average welcome email open rate around 83 percent. Use that attention: confirm what they signed up for, set expectations for what's coming, deliver any promised incentive, and start telling your story instead of immediately hard-selling.
Automated emails made up only about 2 percent of sends but drove 37 percent of email-generated sales.
The abandoned-cart flow is the highest-value automation for anyone selling online, and the reason is simple math. The Baymard Institute, which aggregates dozens of studies, calculates an average cart abandonment rate of 70.22 percent. That's not a sign of broken checkout, it's normal human browsing behavior, people get distracted, compare prices, or simply aren't ready. A short sequence reminding them what they left, handling a likely objection, and making it easy to return recovers a meaningful slice of revenue you'd otherwise lose entirely.
Don't stop at the sale. The post-purchase flow is where one-time buyers become repeat customers. Confirm the order, set delivery expectations, and then follow up after the product arrives with usage tips, a request for a review, and a relevant next product. This is also your cheapest path to a second purchase, because someone who just bought from you and had a good experience is far more likely to buy again than a cold prospect is to buy the first time.
None of these flows work if you treat your list as one undifferentiated blob. Segmentation is just sending different messages to different people based on what you know about them: what they bought, how recently they engaged, where they are in their lifecycle, what they clicked. The principle behind every flow above is the same, relevance beats volume. A message that speaks to where someone actually is will always beat a generic blast sent to everyone at once.
A word on consent, since it sets up everything else. Double opt-in, where a subscriber confirms via a follow-up email before they're added, isn't legally required under GDPR or CAN-SPAM, but it remains a recommended practice. It builds a cleaner, more engaged list and protects your sender reputation by filtering out typos and bad addresses. The small drop in raw signups is usually worth the gain in list quality and deliverability.
Deliverability is the part people ignore until their open rates collapse, and the rules got stricter. In February 2024, Gmail and Yahoo rolled out requirements for bulk senders, defined by Gmail as anyone sending more than 5,000 messages a day to Gmail accounts. If you send at that volume, this is non-negotiable, not best practice.
Three requirements matter most. First, authenticate your mail with SPF, DKIM, and DMARC, so receiving servers can confirm the message really came from you. Second, support one-click unsubscribe via the proper List-Unsubscribe headers, with a clearly visible unsubscribe link in the body, and process opt-outs within two days. Third, keep your spam complaints low. Google asks senders to stay below a 0.1 percent complaint rate and says to never reach 0.3 percent, while Yahoo states a 0.3 percent threshold. To put that in perspective, 0.3 percent is just three complaints per thousand emails, so it doesn't take many annoyed recipients to trigger trouble.
The practical takeaway is that deliverability and good marketing are the same thing. Authenticate your domain, make unsubscribing genuinely easy, and only email people who want to hear from you. The senders who get filtered are usually the ones mailing huge lists of disengaged or non-consenting contacts. The senders who land in the inbox are the ones whose recipients open, click, and don't complain.
If you're starting from scratch, build in this order: get your authentication in place first, then launch a welcome flow, then an abandoned-cart flow if you sell online, then a post-purchase flow. Layer in segmentation as you learn what your audience responds to. You don't need a dozen complicated automations on day one. You need a few well-built flows that fire reliably and respect the person on the other end.
Email rewards patience and punishes shortcuts. The businesses that win don't have a secret subject-line formula. They have permission-based lists, a handful of flows that run quietly in the background, and the discipline to send relevant messages instead of frequent ones. Get the foundations right and email becomes the most dependable revenue channel you own.