Email marketing campaigns are planned emails sent to a group of subscribers or customers to get one action, usually a purchase. Some are broadcasts you send by hand, such as a sale announcement. Others are automated and fire when someone does something, such as leaving a checkout.
For a seller who buys traffic, the automated ones come first: abandoned cart, welcome and post-purchase. They reach people who already cost you a click, at the moment they are most likely to buy. Broadcasts come after.
If I had one afternoon, I'd spend it on the abandoned cart email.
When you run paid traffic, every email address on your list was bought. Somebody saw an ad, clicked, landed on a page and typed their address into a form or a checkout. You paid for that whole chain, and the email is the part of it you get to keep. A list that sits idle between launches is ad spend you already made and never collected on.
On our about page I described the years I spent as CTO of a direct-response company this way: "Sales that didn't reach the CRM. Recovery calls that didn't fire." The email version of that is the abandoned cart reminder that was set up once, broke when a page changed, and quietly stopped going out. Most of what follows is about getting the right emails to fire reliably, and only then about writing them well.
What is an email marketing campaign?
An email marketing campaign is one email, or a short sequence, sent to a chosen group with a single goal. The goal can be a sale, a second order, a renewal or simply a click to a page. Two kinds cover almost everything you will send.
| Broadcast | Automated (triggered) | |
|---|---|---|
| Who gets it | A list or a segment, all at once | Each person, when they do something |
| When it goes out | The time you pick | Minutes, hours or days after the trigger |
| Examples | Sale launch, newsletter, new product | Abandoned cart, welcome, order follow-up, win-back |
| Work | New copy every send | Written once, then maintained |
Broadcasts get the attention because they are visible: you write them, you hit send, you watch the sales. The automated emails do their work in the background, which is exactly why they break without anyone noticing.
The seven types of email campaigns
Every email platform publishes its own list. This is the one I use, grouped by what triggers the email and what it has to do.
| Type | Trigger | What it has to do |
|---|---|---|
| Welcome | New subscriber or lead | Deliver what they signed up for, then make the first offer |
| Abandoned cart | Checkout started, not paid | Bring them back to the same order |
| Post-purchase | New order | Confirm, set expectations, get the product used, then offer the next step |
| Promotional broadcast | You send it | Sell one offer with a reason to act now |
| Newsletter or content | You send it | Keep the list reading so the next offer gets opened |
| Win-back | No order for a set time | Give a lapsed customer a reason to come back |
| Subscription and rebill | Renewal coming, card failed, card expiring | Keep the subscription paying |
A few notes from the direct-response side. The welcome email for a lead who came through an opt-in page has a different job than the one for a buyer: the lead still needs to be sold, the buyer needs to be reassured. Post-purchase is where an upsell offer that wasn't taken can come back a few days later, once the first order has arrived. And on any offer with rebills, the renewal and failed-card emails protect revenue you have already won, which makes them worth more than another promotion.
Which email campaigns to build first
Order matters more than polish here. Picture a supplement funnel where 400 people a day type their email into the checkout and 300 of them leave without paying. You bought all 400 clicks. Without an abandoned cart email, those 300 addresses sit in a database and nobody hears from you again. A well-written Friday newsletter can't make up for that.
- Abandoned cart. The highest intent on your list: they chose a product and entered their details. Two or three emails over a couple of days, each linking back to the same order. I'd send the first within the hour.
- Welcome. A new subscriber is paying the most attention in the first days. Deliver what the form promised, then make one offer.
- Post-purchase. Telling the buyer what happens next heads off "where is my order" tickets, and it is the natural place for the second offer.
- Subscription emails, if you sell anything that renews.
- Broadcasts and win-back, once the first four run on their own.
Most guides list these as equals. They aren't. The first three run every day on traffic you are already buying, and I'd want them working before I raised a budget.
How to create an email marketing campaign
The steps are the same for a broadcast and for an automated sequence. The difference is only whether step three is a date or an event.
- Pick one goal. One action per email: buy, finish the order, renew, read. An email with three links asks the reader to choose, and many won't.
- Choose the audience. Everyone on the list, or a segment. Customer segmentation is where email starts paying: buyers who declined the upsell, people who bought twice, people who haven't opened anything in 90 days.
- Set the trigger or the send time. For automated emails, the event and the delay. For broadcasts, a time your list is awake.
- Write the email. A subject line that says what is inside, one offer, one link. The "5 C's" checklists you will find (clear, concise, compelling, credible, call to action, in one common version) all point at the same thing: one idea per email.
- Test before sending. Send it to yourself on a phone and on a desktop. Click every link. Check the unsubscribe link works.
- Measure on sales. Tag every link with UTM parameters so the orders it brings in can be counted against the email that brought them.
Inbox placement: what Gmail and Yahoo require
None of the above matters if the email lands in spam. Since 1 February 2024, Google requires anyone sending more than 5,000 messages a day to Gmail addresses to meet a set of rules, and Yahoo began enforcing the same standards that month (Google email sender guidelines; Yahoo Sender Hub; both checked 16 Oct 2026).
- Authenticate the domain. SPF and DKIM for your sending domain, plus a DMARC record (a policy of "none" is accepted).
- One-click unsubscribe. Marketing emails must support one-click unsubscribe and show a visible unsubscribe link in the body. Yahoo adds that unsubscribes must be honoured within two days.
- Keep complaints low. Both set the ceiling at a 0.3% spam rate, and Google recommends staying under 0.1%.
Paid-traffic lists have one problem store lists don't: some of the addresses typed into a checkout or a lead form are fake, mistyped or disposable. Every one of them bounces, and bounces hurt your deliverability, the share of your email that reaches the inbox. Validating addresses when they are collected, before they reach your email tool, is cheaper than cleaning the list later.
How to measure email campaigns
Open rate was the number everyone reported for years, and it has stopped meaning much. Apple Mail Privacy Protection, introduced in 2021, loads email content in the background, so the tracking that counts an open fires for many emails nobody read (AWS Messaging blog). A campaign can show a high open rate and sell nothing.
I'd read these instead, in this order:
- Revenue per recipient. Sales from the email divided by how many people it went to. The worked example below shows why it beats total revenue.
- Click rate. Still a real action, and it tells you whether the offer or the subject line was the problem.
- Unsubscribes and spam complaints. The cost side. A send that sells well and doubles complaints is borrowing from the next one.
- Refunds from email buyers. On an aggressive promotion, check the refund rate a few weeks later before you call it a win.
Say a broadcast to 20,000 people brings $3,000: that's $0.15 each. A send to the 5,000 most engaged people that brings $1,500 earns $0.30 each. The smaller send was the better campaign, and it carried a quarter of the complaint risk. (Illustrative numbers.)
Email campaigns in Q4
Black Friday is when the list earns its keep. Klaviyo's recap of the 2025 weekend found that email and text drove 42% of total revenue across the brands it measured (Klaviyo via Business Wire, Dec 2025). On paid traffic that matters even more, because every other channel gets more expensive that week and the list doesn't. The sequence, the timing and the segmenting for the sale week are in our Black Friday marketing strategy. What I'd do this month is fix the automated emails first, so the buyers the sale brings in get a working post-purchase sequence.
Email marketing campaigns with ElasticFunnels
ElasticFunnels already knows who bought, who took the order bump, who declined the upsell, who refunded and who left a checkout, because your pages and your checkout run on it. Since October 2026 the same data can send the email. You pick a group of customers, say what should happen when someone joins it, and pick the email. Every feature below is on every plan.
Here is that flow in the app, on our demo brand Northwind Supplements (fictional customers and numbers): a thank-you email with the bonus details for everyone who adds the order bump.
1. Start from an audience
An audience is a saved group of customers built from your own orders and page data. Start from a direct-response template (took the order bump, declined the upsell, repeat buyers, fast refunders), build one with rules, or describe it in a sentence to the AI builder. It refreshes on its own, so people enter and leave as they buy, refund or go quiet.
2. Say what happens when people enter
Under When people enter or leave on the audience, Add asks what should happen. Send an email is the new choice. The other three keep a Klaviyo, ActiveCampaign or Mailchimp list in step, send the changes to a signed webhook with the columns you pick, or start an automation you build yourself.
3. Pick the email and who gets it
The Send an email window is one short form. Create and turn on makes a real automation named after the audience and the template, switched on at once.
- Email template: one of your saved templates.
- Send it when: they enter, or they leave (and for which reasons, such as a refund).
- Who gets it: first time only by default, so nobody gets the same thank-you twice when they drop out and come back. Or every time, with a minimum gap in days that you set.
- Holdout: a share of people who never get the email, so you can measure what it actually changed.
- The people already in the audience can get it too, or only the people who enter from now on.
4. Write it in the email builder
Templates are made in the visual email builder: click any text to change it, drop in buttons, images or columns. The rules Gmail and Yahoo ask for are handled when the email is sent.
- Unsubscribe and address. Marketing emails get an unsubscribe link, one-click unsubscribe headers and a footer with your postal address, unless the template already prints them.
- Suppression. Anyone who unsubscribed, bounced, complained or said no to email is skipped, and every unsubscribe lands on one suppression list.
- Receipts stay receipts. A Transactional switch on the step is for access details and receipts: it adds no unsubscribe link.
- Your sender. It goes out through your own SMTP server or your Mailgun, SendGrid, Amazon SES, Postmark, Brevo, Resend or Mailrelay account.
5. Read the result
Back on the audience, every action shows who was in the audience, how many were sent, held out, skipped for consent, failed or still pending. Open the automation to see each run step by step. And because your email links are tagged, the UTM Performance report shows the sales each email brought in.
Email a returning customer while the signal is fresh
Saved audiences are built from orders. Live audiences are built from what someone does on your pages within one visit, such as coming back to the pricing section twice. The On Matched Live Audience trigger follows up by email when that visitor is already one of your customers: it runs at most once per visit, anonymous visitors start nothing, and Who gets it works the same way.
The rest of the email plumbing sits in the same automations builder:
- Funnel triggers. A new purchase, a new customer, a refund, a chargeback, an abandoned cart or a form entry.
- Your email tool, kept up to date. A step adds or updates the contact, list and tags in Klaviyo, Mailchimp, ActiveCampaign, Kit and others, so their flows start on real purchase data.
- Timing and branches. Wait steps space out a sequence, Continue If branches on a yes or no, and a split test step tries two versions of a flow.
- Clean addresses. A Debounce or ZeroBounce step checks the address before it reaches your list.
ElasticFunnels vs ClickFunnels and others for email
All four have built-in email, and all four can start a workflow on a purchase or a tag. The difference is what the email can start from. In ElasticFunnels it can start from who a customer is in your order data: took the bump but not the upsell, bought twice, refunded. None of the other four lists a trigger for someone entering a segment, so that kind of group has to be turned into tags first. The table compares the email automation side, from each vendor's own help and pricing pages (checked 19 Oct 2026).
| ElasticFunnels | ClickFunnels | HighLevel | Kartra | Systeme.io | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Email when someone enters a segment of buyers | Yes, any saved audience, on enter or on leave | No segment trigger in its trigger list | No smart list trigger in its trigger list | No segment trigger in its trigger list | No segment trigger in its trigger list |
| Abandoned checkout and refund | Both are triggers | Abandoned cart built on a page view trigger; no refund trigger listed | Both are triggers | Refund trigger; no abandoned cart trigger listed | Sale canceled trigger; no abandoned cart trigger listed |
| Once per person | First time only by default, or a minimum gap in days | Only one run per contact option | Allow re-entry switch | Not found in its docs | A trigger fires up to 20 times per contact |
| Holdout group to measure lift | Yes, counted on the audience | Split test step between two paths | Split action between paths | Not found in its docs | Not found in its docs |
| Sending and cost | Your SMTP, Amazon SES, Postmark, SendGrid, Mailgun, Brevo, Resend or Mailrelay; every feature on every plan | Built-in sender; Launch plan caps 10K contacts and 50K emails a month (pricing) | LC Email at $0.675 per 1,000 emails, or your own SMTP (help) | KartraMail; Essentials caps 500 contacts, unlimited email from Starter (pricing) | Built in, unlimited emails; Free caps 2,000 contacts (pricing) |
| Newsletters and broadcasts | From Klaviyo, ActiveCampaign or Mailchimp, with lists kept in step by your audiences | Built in | Built in | Built in | Built in |
The last row is the trade-off. If most of your email is a weekly newsletter, the other four put it on the same screen as the funnel, and ElasticFunnels hands it to the email tool you already use. If most of your revenue comes from the emails in the first five rows, which is where paid-traffic money usually sits, I'd want the sends built on order data, because tags only work when somebody remembers to apply them. When a tag is missed, the email simply never fires, and nothing tells you.
- Check your abandoned cart email once a month by abandoning a cart yourself. Automated emails fail silently, and this is the one that costs the most when it does.
- Stop sending sale emails to people who just bought at full price. A buyer who sees the same product at 30% off two days later asks for a refund, and sometimes gets one from the bank.
- Put a holdout on every automated email you care about. Without one, a thank-you that "converts" might only be taking credit for orders that would have come anyway.
- A smaller list that reads beats a bigger one that doesn't. Remove people who haven't clicked in months. The complaint rate drops first, and inbox placement for everyone else follows.
Email rewards plumbing more than prose. I spent nine years as CTO of a direct-response company, building the checkout and the CRM side among other things, and an email that silently stops firing costs more than a weak subject line ever will. Start with the three automated emails, check every month that they still fire, and count every send in dollars. The broadcasts will then have a list worth sending to.
