Email flow

An email flow is a sequence of messages that sends itself when somebody does a particular thing. Signing up, buying, leaving a basket, letting ninety days pass without ordering. The trigger is an action rather than a date, which is the whole difference: a flow is set up once and then arrives at the moment it makes sense to that one person, indefinitely, without anybody deciding to send it.

In short

• The trigger is something a person does, never a day on the calendar.
• Built once, then running unattended, which cuts both ways.
• Exit conditions matter more than the copy in most flows.
• Nothing tells you when a flow stops firing, so check it deliberately.

A trigger, not a date

The distinction sounds small in a sentence and changes everything about how the work is done.

A campaign, a newsletter among them, asks somebody to decide what goes out and when. A flow asks somebody to describe a situation once. Every person who later lands in that situation receives it, at their own moment rather than at yours, and the sending continues whether or not anyone at the business is thinking about email marketing that week.

That is why flows tend to be judged unfairly. They are compared to campaigns on the size of the audience each message reaches, and a flow reaching eleven people a week looks trivial next to a send reaching the whole list. The eleven were picked out by their own behaviour at the point of highest intent, which is not a comparison the audience size can express.

The three that do most of the work

Almost every business benefits from the same small set before anything imaginative is attempted.

• Welcome. Triggered by a sign-up. It is the only message you can be sure the person is expecting, because they asked for it seconds earlier.
• Basket recovery. Triggered by an unfinished checkout. The reasons this one earns its place, and the several ways it goes wrong, belong to cart abandonment rather than here.
• Post-purchase. Triggered by an order. Delivery expectations, how to reach a person if something is wrong, and eventually a reason to come back.

A fourth worth building once those are steady is the quiet-customer flow, sent after a set period without an order. It is the only one of the four that touches people who have gone cold, and it is the one most likely to produce unsubscribes. That reads as a loss and is closer to the opposite: an address that will never open anything again is a small weight on your deliverability for as long as you keep sending to it.

Timing is where these go wrong

The delays between messages get copied from examples far more often than they get reasoned about.

The correct delay is the shortest one that still allows the person to have acted on the previous message. That is a different number for a basket left at lunchtime than for a parcel that takes four days to arrive in Cebu, and it has nothing to do with what worked for a business selling something else entirely.

The welcome message is the exception, and it should be immediate. Attention is never higher than in the seconds after somebody types their address, and a welcome that arrives the following Tuesday is introducing itself to a person who has forgotten the introduction.

Words you will hear

• Trigger. The event that puts somebody into the flow.
• Delay. The wait between one message and the next.
• Condition. A test partway through, such as whether the person has bought since the last message.
• Exit condition. The rule that takes somebody out of the flow early because it has succeeded.
• Drip. An older word for the same thing, still used by some platforms.
• Journey. A newer word for the same thing, usually implying several channels beyond email alone.

How a flow fails without telling you

This is the part that separates a flow from a campaign in the way that matters, and almost nobody builds a habit around it.

A campaign that does not go out is noticed within a day, because a person was waiting to press send. A flow that stops firing produces silence, and silence looks identical to a quiet week. Triggers break for ordinary reasons: a form is rebuilt and the new one does not tag anybody, a checkout changes and stops recording the key event the trigger listens for, a platform is updated and a field is renamed.

The email template inside a flow ages in the same silent way. A message written around a product you no longer stock will keep sending, correctly, on schedule, for as long as nobody reads it.

So the habit is to look at each flow on a fixed schedule, monthly is enough, and check two things: that it sent to somebody, and that what it sent still says something true. Neither takes long. Both are skipped almost everywhere, because the flow was built during a week when somebody cared about it and has been running unattended ever since.