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The product is live, the first customers have signed up or bought something, and someone on the weekly call asks why the company is not doing more with email. The list of possible campaigns is long, the team is three people, and nobody owns marketing full time.
Browsing real email marketing campaigns from other brands gives the team a menu: welcome series, abandoned cart reminders, product launches, and win-back emails. With time for one or two this quarter, the order you build them in matters more than the menu, and that order depends on which emails keep working after they are built.
Table of Contents
Build Triggered Emails Before the Newsletter
A newsletter needs fresh work every time it goes out. A triggered email is written once and then sent automatically whenever a customer does something specific: signs up, leaves a cart, makes a first purchase, or goes quiet.
For a team with limited hours, that difference decides the plan. Build the emails that keep working while you are busy with the product, and add scheduled sends once your automations are running.
Abandoned Carts Are the Clearest First Build
For any startup that sells online, this is the campaign with the most obvious audience. The Baymard Institute’s research on cart abandonment rates averages 50 studies and puts the documented rate at just over 70%.
Baymard also asked shoppers why they left, and their reasons should shape the email. The most common one, given by 40% of US shoppers who abandoned an order (leaving aside those who were only browsing), is extra costs such as shipping, tax, and fees that appeared too late.
A reminder email that simply says “you left something behind” ignores that. One that states the delivery cost clearly, or the threshold for free delivery, answers the question that made the shopper leave.
Slow delivery and doubts about payment security also appear high on Baymard’s list, so a line on delivery times and accepted payment methods does more work than a discount code sent by reflex.
The Welcome Series Sets the Terms for Everything After It
A welcome series is the second build, and for startups that do not sell online, it is the first. It tells new subscribers what they will receive and how often, and introduces the product without repeating the landing page. A short series is enough.
If your product has an onboarding step that new users tend to skip, such as connecting an account or completing a profile, use the welcome series to walk them through it.
Your product analytics already show where people drop off between signing up and getting value from the product, and a welcome series that targets that exact step does more for retention than one that simply says hello.
A Newsletter Needs a Reason to Exist
Once the automations run, a regular newsletter becomes worth the effort, but only if each issue is relevant to the people receiving it.
When the Nielsen Norman Group studied marketing emails and newsletters, subscribers described impersonal, irrelevant, or overly promotional messages as spam, even when they signed up for them. Most of them, the researchers found, ignore unwanted emails rather than unsubscribe.
For a startup, that second finding is the expensive one. A list full of people who silently ignore every issue looks healthy on a subscriber count while fewer and fewer people read it.
Segmenting by what people bought or signed up for, and sending each group only what matches, protects the list before the damage shows in the numbers.
Win-Back Campaigns Can Wait
A win-back email targets customers who bought once and then stopped. A young company has few of them, and has not yet seen enough buying cycles to know when a customer counts as lapsed.
Leave this campaign until you have several months of purchase history showing what a normal gap between orders looks like for your product.
By then, the cart reminders and the welcome series will have recorded who bought, when, and how often, which is the data a win-back email is built on.
