Email automation: how a dead list of 34,000 contacts started bringing 14% of revenue
Online school, unnamed
About the project
An online school with a list of 34,000 contacts built over three years of webinars and free material. The list sat there. Sends happened by hand, whenever somebody remembered: roughly once a month, one email to everybody.
What it looked like before us
Email revenue was about $1,900 a month, 3% of the total. Open rates were falling, unsubscribes rising, and the view inside the company had settled into “email does not work”.
We did not start with the emails. We started by checking whether the emails arrived at all.
What we did
First, the technical layer. SPF was there, DKIM was not, DMARC was not. Deliverability sat at 71%: close to one email in three reached nobody. We set up all three records and warmed the new sending domain for two weeks.
Second, we removed the dead. Of 34,000 contacts, 11,200 had opened nothing in 12 months. We unsubscribed them. It looks like losing a third of the list. In fact it was the part dragging domain reputation down for the remaining 23,000.
Third, six triggered sequences instead of manual sends.
| Sequence | Trigger | Emails |
|---|---|---|
| Welcome | subscribed | 4 |
| After a free webinar | watched the recording | 3 |
| Abandoned checkout | started paying, did not finish | 3 |
| Never started | bought and did not log in for 7 days | 2 |
| Finished the course | last lesson | 3 |
| Reactivation | 60 days without opens | 2 |
What worked hardest
The “never started” sequence. It is not about selling at all: the person has already paid. But it produced the largest lift in repeat purchases, because people who finish a course buy the next one, and people who never start ask for a refund.
Second strongest was abandoned checkout. It brought $1,800 a month from three emails written once and never touched again.
What went wrong
We launched all six sequences at the same time. Two weeks in we saw that somebody who subscribed and bought immediately received the welcome sequence and the buyer sequence in parallel: two emails a day from one school.
Unsubscribes rose 40% in the first month. We had to introduce priority rules: one active sequence per person, the rest wait.
What we should have done
Launch one a week and write the exclusion rules before launch rather than after. Sequences that do not know about each other behave like several people phoning the same customer on the same day.
What a proper plan does to the economics
Before: $1,900 a month from email, with sending costs around $90. After: $7,400 a month, with costs of $140.
That is $5,450 more every month from a list already paid for three years ago. No new traffic and no new budget. It is money that was sitting in a contacts table and not being collected.
The work took six weeks, four of them on the technical layer and warming. The emails themselves took two weeks to write.