Email automation: How to set up automated workflows [data]

Email automation is the practice of sending targeted, triggered emails automatically based on predefined rules, customer behavior, or time-based conditions. If you're still manually scheduling every drip campaign, writing individual follow-ups by hand, or watching leads go cold because no one responded fast enough, email automation is what closes that gap.

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This guide covers how email automation works, how to set up your first workflow step by step, a breakdown of the top platforms, and eight real-world examples you can adapt for your business right now.

Table of Contents

• What is email automation?

• The Benefits of Email Automation

• How to Automate Email Workflows

• Best Email Automation Software

• Email Marketing Automation Examples

• Frequently Asked Questions About Email Automation

• Automate your email marketing campaigns.

What is email automation?

Email automation is software-driven email sending that runs without manual intervention. Instead of crafting and dispatching every message yourself, you build a workflow once — defining who receives what message, when, and under what conditions — and the platform handles the rest.

Common examples include welcome emails sent the moment someone subscribes, abandoned cart reminders triggered when a shopper leaves without buying, lead nurturing sequences that deliver helpful content over days or weeks, and re-engagement campaigns for contacts who've gone quiet. Each of these runs in the background while your team focuses on higher-priority work.

How does email automation work?

Every automated email workflow is built on three components:

Trigger: The event or condition that starts the workflow. Examples include a contact submitting a form, clicking a link, reaching a lifecycle stage, or hitting a date-based condition.

Condition: The logic that determines which path a contact takes. Conditions let you branch a workflow based on what's true about a contact — their industry, past purchases, or whether they opened a previous email.

Action: What the platform does when the trigger fires and the condition is met. This is typically sending an email, applying a delay, updating a contact property, or enrolling the contact in another workflow.

Here's what this looks like in practice using HubSpot Marketing Hub: a contact submits a demo request form (trigger), the workflow checks whether they're in the software industry (condition), and if true, sends them a relevant customer case study, waits three days, then sends a follow-up from their assigned sales rep (action).

If false, they receive a more general nurture sequence. HubSpot's Smart CRM powers all of this by keeping contact data unified across every touchpoint, so your enrollment criteria and personalization tokens always reflect current, accurate information.

The Benefits of Email Automation

Saves Time

The most immediate benefit is reclaiming hours your team would otherwise spend on repetitive tasks. Building a workflow once means your platform handles segmenting, scheduling, and sending automatically, freeing your team to focus on strategy, creative work, and customer conversations.

Improves Timing and Responsiveness

Automated emails respond to customer behavior in real time. When a prospect downloads a guide at 11 PM, they get your follow-up immediately, not the next morning when someone finally checks the queue. Research from Harvard Business Review found that companies responding to leads within an hour are seven times more likely to qualify them compared to those that wait even two hours. Manual processes make that kind of speed impossible at any meaningful scale.

Supports Segmentation and Personalization

Automation platforms connect to your contact data, enabling you to send different messages to different audience segments without building separate campaigns by hand. You can segment by behavior, lifecycle stage, or custom contact properties and deliver personalized content at scale. In HubSpot, Smart CRM ensures your segmentation reflects up-to-date data across your entire contact database.

Nurtures Leads Consistently

Lead nurturing requires the right content, sent at the right time, across a multi-step sequence. Doing this manually means leads fall through the cracks when your team gets busy. Automation keeps every lead on a consistent track regardless of team workload or time zone. For B2B email marketing in particular, nurture workflows often span weeks or months, which makes automation essential rather than optional.

Improves the Customer Experience

When customers receive timely, relevant, personalized messages rather than generic blasts, the relationship improves. Onboarding sequences help new customers get value faster. Re-engagement campaigns make lapsed contacts feel seen. Triggered emails based on behavior signal that you understand how someone is actually using your product.

Produces Measurable Performance Data

Every automated workflow generates data: open rates, click-through rates, goal completions, and conversion paths. That data lets you refine your messaging, timing, and segmentation over time. Unlike one-off campaigns, workflows run continuously, which means you accumulate statistically meaningful data faster and can iterate more confidently.

Pro tip: HubSpot's Smart CRM centralizes contact data across your marketing, sales, and service tools, making your segmentation and enrollment criteria more accurate. Use Breeze Assistant within HubSpot to draft and A/B test email copy inside workflows; it's useful for generating subject line variants and body text, but a human review pass before going live is always worth the time.

How to Automate Email Workflows

1. Choose an email automation platform.

Your choice of platform shapes everything else in this process. Look for a tool with a visual workflow builder, CRM integration, segmentation capabilities, and workflow-level reporting.

HubSpot Marketing Hub is a strong starting point if you want email automation connected directly to your CRM data. We cover the top options in the platform section below, and this roundup of email marketing services is also worth reviewing if you're still narrowing down your options.

2. Define the audience.

Determine exactly who you want to enroll in this workflow. Are you targeting new subscribers, existing customers, leads who've visited your pricing page, or contacts at a specific lifecycle stage? The tighter your audience definition, the more relevant your emails will be.

Pro tip: Your contact data in your CRM should help with this — for instance, in HubSpot, segment your email recipients by lifecycle stage.

3. Set the campaign goal.

Your email marketing is only as good as your strategy — so ensure you know exactly why you're contacting these individuals. Do you want them to buy something? Learn something? Do something?

Once you answer this question, you can figure out the messaging you need to take them from where contacts are currently to where you want them to go.

You also have to plan for what happens when you succeed.

For example, imagine a 10-email series to get prospects to request a consultation. Prospect A converts within the first email. If Prospect A continues to receive emails telling them to do what they've already done, they'll get frustrated.

In HubSpot Workflows, if you define your goal, it will unenroll any contacts who meet the goal.

4. Choose triggers and enrollment criteria.

Enrollment criteria refer to the qualifications that must be met for a contract to be entered into a workflow.

Suppose you're using HubSpot Workflows. You can create personalized, automated email workflows that can get triggered in a number of different ways.

This can look like a contact added to a list, submitting a form on your website, clicking a link in an email, viewing a page on your blog, clicking on one of your ads, or becoming a marketing-qualified lead.

You can also set up email workflows based on any information you have about the contacts in your marketing database.

This information can include page views, email or social media clicks, content downloads, contact properties, or any combination of these and more.

5. Determine which processes you want to automate with Workflows.

If you were manually emailing these contacts, what would you do? Think of your email marketing workflows as blueprints outlining each action your tool will take.

For instance, specify which actions you want the software to take in HubSpot. Examples of automatable actions are:

• Sending an email.
• Scheduling an email (and/or delaying it).
• If/ then email branching.
• Updating and syncing all email and contact data to your CRM.

6. Create the email assets.

Write and design each email in the sequence before publishing the workflow. Keep each email focused on one goal, one CTA, and one clear next step. Personalization tokens (first name, company, last viewed page) add relevance without requiring separate versions of every email.

If you're using HubSpot, start with HubSpot's free email marketing tools to build and store your email assets in the same place you'll manage your workflows. Breeze Assistant can help draft initial versions of your email copy, which you can refine before launch.

7. Test the workflow.

Some things to consider implementing into your workflow publishing process are:

• Looking at your list of enrolled contacts for errors.
• Ensuring the number of enrolled contacts is what you'd expect.
• Considering your workflow chart and use cases.
• Checking your "Send" settings.

In HubSpot, you can test your workflow to ensure the automation you plan to set live works as intended.

8. Launch, monitor, and improve.

Once you're happy with the workflow, set it live.

Mistakes can happen, so monitor for anomalies. Don't be afraid to adjust as needed to resolve issues or improve the performance of your email automation workflow.

Similar to your other marketing strategies, this is also an iterative process.

Additionally, you can continually expand upon your workflows to support other business goals. Use them to automate other actions, such as:

• Setting or clearing a contact property value
• Updating a contact's lifecycle stage
• Adding/removing a contact from a list

Email automation is an iterative process — the first version is rarely the best one.

Best Email Automation Software

Choosing the right platform depends on your team size, tech stack, and how sophisticated your workflows need to be. Here's what to evaluate:

• Workflow builder: Can you build multi-step, branching workflows without developer support?
• Segmentation and personalization: How granular can you get with enrollment criteria and personalization tokens?
• CRM integration: Does contact data sync between your email tool and CRM in real time?
• Ecommerce support: Does it connect to your store and trigger behavior-based emails automatically?
• Reporting: Can you track workflow performance at the sequence and individual email level?
• AI assistance: Does the platform help with drafting, subject line testing, or send-time optimization?
• Free plan or trial: Is there a way to test the platform before committing?
• Pricing and scalability: Will the cost remain reasonable as your contact list grows?

Here are seven platforms worth evaluating, along with a broader comparison of email automation platforms if you want to go deeper.

1. HubSpot Marketing Automation

Best use case: CRM-powered email automation for marketing and sales alignment

Get started with HubSpot's email marketing for free.

HubSpot Marketing Hub connects email automation directly to HubSpot's Smart CRM, giving you a unified view of every contact's history, behavior, and lifecycle stage. Workflows can trigger off any CRM data point and sync actions back to contact records in real time, with no separate integration required. The drag-and-drop email builder, A/B testing, and Breeze Assistant drafting tools are all built into the same platform.

• Key automation capabilities: Visual workflow builder, email tracking, branching logic, delays, goal-based unenrollment, behavior-based triggers, lifecycle stage automation, personalization tokens
• CRM integration: Native (HubSpot Smart CRM)
• Ecommerce support: Yes, via integrations
• Free plan: Yes
• Starting price: Free; paid plans start at $20/month

Pro tip: Our email automation tools are powered by your HubSpot Smart CRM database, so the data used to customize your marketing emails are accurate.

2. Mailchimp

Best use case: Small businesses and ecommerce stores getting started with automation

Mailchimp has a user-friendly interface and solid automation for common use cases: welcome series, abandoned cart reminders, and customer journey automation. It offers extensive ecommerce integrations with Shopify, WooCommerce, and BigCommerce.

• Key automation capabilities: Customer journey builder, send-time optimization, pre-built automation templates, transactional email support
• CRM integration: Basic contact management; integrates with external CRMs
• Ecommerce support: Yes (Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce)
• Free plan: Yes (up to 500 contacts)
• Starting price: Paid plans start at $13/month

3. ActiveCampaign

Best use case: Advanced marketing automation for growing businesses

ActiveCampaign gives you more automation flexibility than most mid-market tools: complex if/then branching, lead scoring, predictive sending, and multi-channel capabilities including SMS. It's a strong fit for businesses running sales automation workflows where deals move through a longer, more complex process.

• Key automation capabilities: Advanced conditional logic, split automation, lead scoring, CRM pipeline integration, site tracking, SMS
• CRM integration: Built-in CRM included
• Ecommerce support: Yes, via integrations
• Free plan: No (14-day trial available)
• Starting price: $29/month

4. Klaviyo

Best use case: E-commerce personalization and revenue tracking

Klaviyo pulls live data from Shopify, BigCommerce, and other stores to power highly targeted automation: product recommendation emails, win-back campaigns, predictive CLV-based segmentation, and revenue attribution at the workflow level.

• Key automation capabilities: Predictive analytics, product recommendations, revenue tracking, advanced segmentation, real-time data sync
• CRM integration: Ecommerce-native; integrates with external CRMs
• Ecommerce support: Yes (Shopify, BigCommerce, WooCommerce, and more)
• Free plan: Yes (up to 250 contacts)
• Starting price: $20/month

5. Moosend

Best use case: Behavior-based automation and list management

Moosend offers conditional logic workflows, real-time analytics, and audience segmentation based on specific customer interactions like products viewed, forms submitted, and links clicked. It's one of the more affordable options with a solid feature set.

• Key automation capabilities: Conditional logic, behavioral segmentation, A/B testing, real-time analytics, custom reporting
• CRM integration: Via integrations
• Ecommerce support: Yes, via integrations
• Free plan: Free trial available
• Starting price: $9/month

6. Mailmodo

Best use case: Interactive AMP email campaigns

Mailmodo lets recipients complete actions directly inside the email (fill out forms, book appointments, respond to surveys) without leaving their inbox. This can meaningfully improve conversion rates for workflows where the next step is a specific in-email action.

• Key automation capabilities: AMP email creation, in-email forms and surveys, behavior-based triggers, no-code editor, detailed analytics
• CRM integration: Via integrations
• Ecommerce support: Yes, via integrations
• Free plan: Yes
• Starting price: $39/month

7. GetResponse

Best use case: Multichannel campaigns (email, SMS, web push)

GetResponse bundles email automation with additional marketing tools (webinar hosting, course creation, and paid newsletters), making it a practical choice if you want to consolidate your marketing stack. It supports 170+ integrations and multichannel automation across email, SMS, and web push.

• Key automation capabilities: Multi-step automation, 170+ integrations, webinar and course support, SMS and web push, pre-built templates
• CRM integration: Via integrations
• Ecommerce support: Yes, via integrations
• Free plan: Yes
• Starting price: $19/month

Email Marketing Automation Examples

Now, let's walk through some examples of automated email workflows you can set up to start getting more out of your contacts database and marketing automation software.

1. Topic Workflows

Main Triggers: Page Views or Content Offer Downloads

Create a workflow for each of the industry-related topics you create content about.

Imagine you're a unicorn breeder whose main content topics include unicorn diets, unicorn gear, and unicorn boarding. Then you could bucket your content marketing offers (e.g. ebooks, webinars, kits, etc.) and blog posts by these topics.

You could also create an email workflow for each topic and then trigger the appropriate workflow when one of your contacts views a page or downloads an offer centered around that topic.

Trigger a content download workflow based on a form submission from a tool conversion tool like HubSpot's Free Marketing & Lead Generation Software.

To trigger an automated workflow in HubSpot, you can use the "Lead Flow Submission” option as the starting condition.

So if a contact downloaded your e-book called 10 Tips for a Balanced Unicorn Diet, your "unicorn diet" workflow would be triggered, sending that contact more helpful content, such as blog posts describing unicorn dietary tips.

2. Blog Subscriber Welcome Workflow

Main Trigger: Subscription to Your Blog

Give your brand new blog subscribers a warm welcome with a blog welcome email. Use this email to:

• Thank contacts for subscribing
• Remind them what they'll get from reading your blog
• Review their subscription settings (and allow them to make adjustments)
• Promote your blog's best-performing articles or other offers

Get tips for creating a successful blog welcome email here, and learn more about optimizing welcome emails here.

3. New Customer Welcome / Training Workflow

Main Trigger: Lifecycle Stage

While we're on the subject of warm welcomes, consider setting up a series of welcome emails when a contact converts into a paying customer, which you can trigger when a contact's lifecycle stage gets updated to "customer."

Not only is this a great way to kick off your new customer relationship on a positive note, but it can also keep your customers engaged after they buy.

And if your product or service requires a little training on your customers' part, use this workflow as an opportunity to introduce helpful training materials on an incremental basis.

4. Engaged Contact / Evangelist Workflow

Main Triggers: Visits, Clicks, or Form Submissions

Create a smart/dynamic list that automatically updates to include contacts that you've really engaged.

To create this list, use trigger criteria such as a high threshold of visits to your website, clicks on your emails or social media posts, or form submissions.

Then create an email workflow to leverage this list to encourage evangelism of your top content on social media.

Because these contacts are highly engaged with you already, they're more likely to share your top content.

You can also consider adding list criteria to pull in contacts with a certain number of Twitter followers to leverage the power of those social media influencers in your database.

5. Lead Nurturing Workflow

Main Trigger: Multiple Beginning-Stage Conversion Events

If a contact has downloaded several of your beginning stage marketing offers like ebooks and webinars, it might be a sign that they're ready for a bit more. Set up workflows that help advance these contacts further through the flywheel.

If the contact is a lead, send them emails containing more content that can upgrade them to a marketing qualified lead (MQL) or an opportunity in your sales process.

This workflow may include content and web pages you've identified from an attribution report analysis as influential in converting leads into customers.

Content like customer success stories/case studies, free trial offers, or product demos could be considered.

6. Internal Sales Rep Notification Workflow

Main Triggers: Late Stage Page Views / Conversion Events

On any given website, there are certain page visits and conversion events that indicate more product interest than others.

First, identify these pages and conversion events using an attribution reporting tool like HubSpot.

You’ll notice that, more often than not, the pages you unearth will be your pricing page, product pages, etc. — the pages that your contacts view when they're truly considering your products or services.

Use workflows here to trigger an internal email notification to your sales rep to inform them of these high-value activities.

Using personalization, give the rep all the information they need about the lead in question, including relevant mid- and late stage content that they can send to the lead in their outreach email.

This allows you to connect sales reps with the best possible leads at the right time.

7. Re-engagement Workflow

Main Trigger: Inactive Contacts

Reawaken inactive contacts with a re-engagement workflow, enrolling contacts once they've met certain list criteria.

For example, you could set conditions such as the length of time since their last form submission, website visit, or email click, triggering the email once it's been a while since a contact last engaged with you.

In your workflow, try sending them an exclusive offer or coupon to get them excited about your company again. For more tips about launching an effective email re-engagement campaign, check out this post.

8. Event Workflow

Main Trigger: Registration or Attendance

Hosting a live, in-person, or virtual event? Use email workflows to automate your communication to event registrants and attendees before, during, and after the event.

For example, create a workflow that delivers important information registrants should know leading up to the event, such as hotel accommodations and agenda information for live events, or webinar log-in information for online events.

When the event ends, set up a workflow that gives attendees online access to session slides and continues to nurture them with additional content or promotion for future events.

9. Abandoned Shopping Cart Workflow

Main Trigger: Shopping Cart Abandonment

If you're an ecommerce business, you'll likely benefit from an abandoned shopping cart workflow.

The concept here is simple: When someone adds an item to their online shopping cart but leaves your site without completing the purchase, you can trigger an email workflow that reminds them of their forgotten purchase.

By offering a special discount code or incentive to buy, you motivate the individual to return to your website to complete the transaction.

10. Upsell Workflow

Main Trigger: Past Purchases

Communication with your customers shouldn't stop after they make a purchase. This is especially true if you sell various products and/or services. Use workflows to help you upsell or cross-sell existing customers.

Create dynamically updating lists of contacts who purchase a certain product — or combination of products — and create workflows aimed at recommending other products/ services or encouraging upsells or add-ons.

11. Customer Happiness Workflow

Main Trigger: High or Low NPS Scores

If you administer regular Net Promoter surveys of your customer base, you can use customers' Net Promoter Scores as a property to trigger workflows.

Simply determine what your ideal customer happiness score is, and use that as the threshold for your dynamic list of happy customers.

Then trigger a workflow for customers with "happy" scores and reward them with exclusive content, offers, or discounts.

Trigger a different workflow for your "unhappy" customers that includes content/offers aimed at helping to improve their happiness.

You can even segment unhappy customers by the specific reasons they're feeling unsatisfied — then send them even more targeted workflows to address their issues.

12. Customer Success/ Engagement Workflow

Main Triggers: Success Metrics or Product Usage

If you keep track of customer success metrics, you have a prime workflow opportunity on your hands.

For example, if you're trying to build up your arsenal of customer case studies, automatically trigger an email that asks customers if they'd be interested in being featured as a success story once certain customer success metrics were met.

Furthermore, suppose you track customers' product adoption or feature usage.

In that case, you could trigger a workflow for users exhibiting low product engagement, providing resources that educate and train them on using the product features they're not taking advantage of.

13. Upcoming Purchase Reminder Workflow

Main Trigger: Purchases Made on a Cycle

Does your contacts database include customers who typically purchase on a cycle? Enter those people into a workflow that gets triggered when they make a purchase.

For instance, you sell eye care products, and a customer purchases a six-month supply of prescription contacts.

Enroll that customer into a workflow that sends them an automated email five months later as a reminder that their six-month supply is about to run out, and it might be time to order a new batch of contacts.

14. Customer Service or Ticket Workflow

Main Trigger: Customer or Prospect Contacts Customer Service via Email or Online Form

Your customers or prospects might have trouble using your free or paid software. When this happens, fielding a bunch of customer service emails and messages can take tons of valuable time from your schedule.

One way to avoid this is to create a workflow that turns customer concerns into tickets that can be categorized, labeled, and assigned to customer service reps on your team.

These tickets can also help you track ongoing problems and when issues with a customer or prospect are resolved.

15. Deal-Based Workflows

Main Trigger: Someone e-signs a Quote or Contract

Sealing the deal is key to successful marketing and sales. Automating small aspects of this process allows your sales reps more time to nurture the client over the phone, during demos, or via other messages.

With a deal-based workflow, you can trigger confirmation emails when a prospect becomes a client or qualified lead by signing a quote or contract.

With systems like HubSpot, you can also set the workflow to change the contact's status to show where they are in the lifecycle.

Frequently Asked Questions About Email Automation

What is email automation?

Email automation is the use of software to send emails automatically based on triggers, timing, or predefined rules, without manually sending each message. A trigger could be a form submission, a purchase, a contact reaching a lifecycle stage, or a date-based condition. Once the trigger fires, the platform sends the corresponding email or sequence automatically.

How does an email automation workflow work?

An email automation workflow has three core components: a trigger that starts the workflow, one or more conditions that determine which path a contact takes, and an action the platform executes (typically sending an email, applying a delay, or updating a contact record). Workflows can be simple (one trigger, one email) or complex, with multi-branch sequences that respond to contact behavior at each step.

What's the difference between email marketing and email automation?

Email marketing is the broader practice of using email to communicate with your audience. It includes one-time campaign sends, newsletters, and automated sequences. Email automation is a specific capability within email marketing: it handles the sending automatically, based on triggers and rules you define. A monthly newsletter you send manually is email marketing; a welcome series that fires the instant someone subscribes is email automation.

Which emails should be automated?

Any email that follows a predictable pattern or responds to a specific action is a strong automation candidate. The most effective ones to start with are welcome emails, lead nurture sequences, abandoned cart reminders, onboarding sequences, and re-engagement campaigns. If you find yourself manually sending the same type of message repeatedly, that's a clear signal to build a workflow instead.

What should I look for in an email automation platform?

Focus on five things: a workflow builder that matches your team's technical ability, native or seamless CRM integration, segmentation capabilities that reflect how you actually think about your audience, reporting at the workflow level (not just the campaign level), and pricing that scales reasonably with your list size. If ecommerce is part of your model, add native store integrations to that list.

Can I automate emails for free?

Yes. HubSpot's free plan includes email automation with basic workflow capabilities and connects directly to the free CRM. Mailchimp's free plan supports up to 500 contacts. Sender's free plan covers up to 2,500 subscribers. Free plans typically limit the number of monthly emails, automation complexity, or contact thresholds, but they're a practical way to test what works before committing to a paid plan.

How do I test an automated email workflow?

Before going live, check four things: enrollment criteria are pulling the right contacts, every branch and delay reflects your intended logic, suppression rules are correctly excluding contacts who shouldn't be in the workflow, and every email renders correctly across desktop and mobile clients. Most platforms, including HubSpot, let you run a test against a sample contact to preview which path they'd follow through the workflow. Always send a test email to yourself before setting anything live.

Automate your email marketing campaigns.

Email marketing automation increases efficiency and gives your team back valuable time that can be spent on customers and other work that requires their attention. You can use HubSpot's AI Campaign Assistant to create assets for your email marketing campaigns.

Additionally, the process helps optimize your email marketing strategy and personalize email content to increase its effectiveness among your target audience and customers.

Identify your ideal email marketing automation tool and begin setting up the workflows your team needs.

Editor's Note: This post was originally published in September 2012 and has been updated for freshness, accuracy, and comprehensiveness.