Email Workflows: Best Practices and Examples that Turn Leads into Sales

An email workflow is an automated sequence of messages that starts when a contact meets a trigger, then adapts to that person’s behavior until they reach a goal or exit condition.

Unlike a one-size-fits-all email blast, a workflow can use consent, fit, intent, timing, and engagement signals to decide what each subscriber receives next. That makes email workflow automation useful for nurturing qualified leads without asking a marketer to send every message by hand.

Email workflows: What are they, and why are they important?

To begin discussing what an email workflow is, we first need to call into focus something you probably already know: Every single one of your potential customers is a unique individual with a distinct set of needs. Because of this, you absolutely cannot hope to engage with your leads by adopting a one-size-fits-all approach to outreach. (While such messages might still resonate with some of your potential customers, they would likely fall flat among the vast majority of your leads.) Instead, you need to take into consideration who your potential customers are and what they’re looking to get out of doing business with your company when developing messages for your outreach campaigns. In doing so, the messages you send out have a much higher chance of resonating with a given individual.

A workflow connects an enrollment trigger to messages, waits, conditions, and actions. It should also define branches, suppression rules, and an exit condition so a contact stops receiving irrelevant follow-up.

This, in essence, is what email workflows are all about providing a series of targeted, timely, and personalized email messages to specific customers based on a set of criteria as defined by your marketing and sales teams. Typically, such criteria take into consideration a given lead’s personality traits and the actions they’ve taken with regard to your company.

As we’ve alluded to, your main goal when creating email workflows is to get your qualified leads to convert into paying customers. This is done by providing relevant, engaging, and valuable content to these leads, in turn strengthening the relationship between them and your company. Now, the prospect of creating email content that resonates with individual leads might sound rather intimidating. However, one of the main components of an email workflow is automation. Though your marketing and sales teams will need to spend time developing the content for your outreach, as well as defining the criteria for sending these messages, your email workflow system will handle the actual distribution of the messages. To summarize: Implementing email workflows allows you to develop targeted content for a variety of prospective customers, and to automate the delivery of this content once a given lead has engaged with your brand in a certain way. In the following section, we’ll dig into the main things you’ll need to do in order to create an effective email workflow.

Best practices for creating an effective email workflow

While technology has made it possible for just about anyone to set up an email workflow, this doesn’t mean such workflows should be completely absent of the “human touch.” In fact, it’s this “human touch” that ultimately transforms your run-of-the-mill email drip campaign into an engaging and valuable experience for a company’s prospective customers. Here, we’ll go over the steps to take while creating an effective email workflow that improves the relevance of your outreach.

Regularly analyze and update your database

As we alluded to earlier, email workflows focus mainly on strengthening engagement among your company’s qualified leads. What we mean to say here is: You need to define what you consider a “qualified lead” before you take any further steps in creating an email workflow.

To do so, you’ll want to look back and analyze two overarching aspects of your existing customers (as well as your target customers):

• Their consumer persona
• The actions they take when engaging with your company

By looking at your current customers’ information and engagement history, you’ll have a much better idea of who to target with future email campaigns, and what to include in these campaigns to improve their chances of conversion. What’s more, you’ll also gain a better understanding of the journey your customers take when purchasing from your company, allowing you to create multiple outreach strategies to add to your “playbook.” In turn, you’ll be in a better position to hit individual customers with relevant and engaging content at a time that’s optimal for that customer. Another advantage you’ll gain by referring back to your current customer database is that you’ll be able to update your definition of a “qualified lead” as time goes on. This, in turn, will ensure that you continue to update your email workflows in conjunction with your updated definition of a “qualified lead.” Once you know the exact type of consumer you’re looking to target with a given email workflow, you’ll be ready to move on to the next step of the process.

Keep the database healthy by honoring unsubscribes, suppressing ineligible contacts, and following current Gmail bulk-sender requirements when the program meets bulk-sender thresholds. Treat opens as directional because privacy features such as Apple Mail Privacy Protection can affect that signal.

Identify and define a goal for the sequence

Though we’ve made it clear that your main goal for implementing an email workflow in the first place is to ultimately increase your conversion rate, each workflow will serve a more focused “mini-goal” of sorts. For example, you might create an email workflow with the aim of building trust among a given customer segment. This workflow campaign, then, might include educational material that helps leads overcome a minor obstacle in their lives, without asking them for much in return (besides their contact information, of course). Delivering such material free of charge serves a number of purposes:

• It helps you build trust among your new leads
• It showcases your expertise to your new leads
• It prepares your new leads for your main offering (which they may not have considered purchasing otherwise)

Other examples of “mini-goals” for your email workflows include:

• Getting leads to dig deeper into your solution
• Getting leads to convert to paying customers
• Getting paying customers to recommend your services to others in their network

Creating goals for each of your email workflows allows you to focus on walking your leads through their individual journeys as customers. In contrast, focusing your workflows on your main goal of making sales will ultimately cause many of your qualified leads to abandon their journey before they’ve even come close to converting. Additionally, by focusing on your defined “mini-goals,” you’ll be able to assess the effectiveness of each of your workflows in isolation. This, in turn, will allow you to determine which workflows may need tweaking as you move forward. Without these mini-goals in place, it would be near-impossible to tell which of your email campaigns have (or have not) played a role in any changes to your overall conversion rate.

Creating and mapping content

Your goal for a given workflow is to deliver the right content to the right person at the right time. By tailoring your content, and the delivery of this content, to the needs of your individual leads, you stand a much greater chance of striking a chord within these individuals, and of getting them to convert. As discussed earlier, the content you provide via email can take a variety of forms, such as:

• Informational content regarding the services you provide
• Educational content to help leads solve a problem
• Press releases and other announcements for current customers to share within their network

When creating content for your email workflows, you should always:

• Keep your short- and long-term goals in mind
• Have a clear vision for how the content in question will allow you to reach these goals

For example, in delivering informational content about your product or service to leads at the top of the sales funnel, your aim is to focus their attention on the value your offering brings to the table. Such content can attain this goal by explaining why your product or service is a better option for a given lead than that of your competition. Additionally, your content should be delivered in a logical manner that nurtures your leads through the buyer’s journey with little friction or confusion. To illustrate, an effective workflow may look like this:

• Email #1 empathizes with a lead, describing the problem they’re currently facing and explaining the numerous ways in which it can be solved
• Email #2 digs deep into the specific solution the company offers, offering information regarding how others have utilized the solution successfully
• Email #3 calls on the lead to purchase the company’s solution, reiterating the feeling of triumph they’ll feel upon using it

Rather than jumping right into a sales attempt (and likely faltering), email workflows allow you to create a “slow burn” of sorts, in which you unroll the presentation of your offer in an unobtrusive, non-threatening manner. In doing so, you’re less likely to alienate your leads, and more likely to earn the next interaction in the process. Now, the illustration above is an example of the series of emails that will be sent if everything goes according to plan. However, not everyone who receives Email #1 will actually end up opening it. In such cases, a follow-up email will automatically be sent after a specified period of time, which may refer back to the fact that the individual had signed up for the mailing list but had yet to open the introductory message. If you refer back to the first image in this article, you can see how individual workflows can be implemented based on a number of actions taken by the lead, such as:

• Opening an email message
• Clicking on a link within the message
• Making a purchase after clicking on said link

By differentiating the content being sent to each of your leads based on how they interact with your email content, you can create a more individualized experience for potential customers.

Standardize reusable email components

Even though you’re going to be creating a number of individualized, targeted emails throughout your various workflows, each of them will certainly have a number of commonalities. For example, freelancer Gina Horkey’s emails offered a useful example of consistent structure across distinct messages:   Though both of these emails are unique in terms of content and purpose, they clearly have a few similarities, as well:

• The header image/logo
• The font style
• The “Pre-S” message (a staple of Gina’s emails)

Additionally, all of Gina’s emails offer the following postscript:

You don’t need to create every part of your email workflows from scratch, in fact, you shouldn’t do so. Though the main purpose and message of each of your emails will be different, you want to ensure that important information (such as branding, contact data, etc.) remains consistent throughout each email you send out. One way to support such consistency is to use workflow templates. Not only will this ensure consistency throughout your outreach content, but it will also save you time and energy (as you won’t need to format each and every email you send out). You can also use partials to ensure branding and style remains consistent throughout your emails, as well. Essentially, partials are code snippets that apply to every email within a given workflow, making the elements of the code visible within each of the applicable emails. Again, consistent branding is important in order to create a seamless experience for your leads as they go through an email drip campaign. More importantly, you want to ensure each of your emails contains the same contact information and other company-specific data, so as not to confuse your leads. By using templates and partials, you minimize the chances of important information being left out of an email due to human error or other such glitches.

How Fieldboom implements email workflows

As we’ve touched on throughout this article, the main purpose of creating multiple email workflows is to create a number of drip campaigns that meet the needs of a variety of leads. Knowing this, we at Fieldboom developed a “Choose Your Own Adventure”-like workflow that allowed our potential customers to decide what type of content they receive from us. The way it worked was as follows:

• An individual subscribes to our mailing list
• They’re sent a “kickoff” email asking them to choose their purpose for engaging with Fieldboom (either getting more leads, generating customer feedback or creating a better company culture)
• They’re then placed on track to receive content relevant to their specific needs (rather than being sent the exact same content regardless of their needs)

Here’s how our workflow looks in Campaign Monitor:

We used Campaign Monitor’s marketing automation features to determine which link someone clicks on in our initial email and we segmented them based off that:

Not only has this allowed us to provide valuable content to those who engage with our brand, but it’s also enabled us to fine-tune our target customer personas (since we’re able to collect information relating to their needs right from the get-go).

Don’t stop at the inbox

For leads, prospects, and customers, email workflows tailor the next message to their needs and actions. For your team, they make the buyer’s journey easier to observe and reduce the manual work required to deliver a relevant follow-up.

But your workflows should not stop at email. By integrating email processes with the processes that drive other teams, you can create systems in which handoff and pickup happen automatically.

A high-intent click may need to create a sales task. A demo booking may need an owner, preparation checklist, and reminder. A customer feedback response may need triage, investigation, approval, and a documented closeout.

Marketing automation workflows work best when those cross-team handoffs are designed as carefully as the emails themselves. The email platform remains the delivery system, while the operating workflow makes ownership, timing, evidence, and exceptions visible.

Process Street is a Compliance Operations Platform for running that operating layer. Teams can document standards, run repeatable work, automate handoffs, and keep an auditable record in one product with built-in AI.

The same approach can support workflow process software, standard operating procedures, employee onboarding, and business process management.

What triggers an email workflow?

A workflow can start with a form submission, list enrollment, product event, lifecycle-stage change, date, page visit, purchase, or another explicit condition. The best trigger is specific enough to make the first message immediately relevant.

How long should an email workflow be?

Use the fewest messages and branches needed to reach the goal. Stop when the recipient converts, becomes ineligible, opts out, or reaches the defined exit condition.

How often should email workflows be reviewed?

Review critical workflows on a schedule and whenever the offer, audience, consent rules, sending requirements, or downstream process changes.

Have you implemented email workflows within your content distribution? How has doing so transformed the way your company operates? Let us know in the comments below.

This guest post was written by Josh Brown, who was Content & Community Manager at Fieldboom, an all-in-one lead capture and customer feedback company.