Every week, I talk to multiple brands in a similar situation with their email marketing programs: they’ve set up out-of-the-box automations, those automations are working well, and that frees up time to send one-off campaigns like promotions, product launches, flash sales, etc.

Those brands have more than their send patterns in common; they’re all pretty convinced they’ve struck a good balance between leveraging basic automations and using the resources they save to stay on top of their email marketing calendar.

And just about all of these brands are surprised by what I have to tell them: that balance might look healthy, but it’s putting a serious cap on their long-term growth potential.

Let me explain.

Those brands do often acknowledge a desire to dedicate more time to optimizing and activating flows, but there’s only so much time in the day. It just doesn’t seem worth applying some of their limited bandwidth to automations that are performing so well – sometimes (actually quite often) getting 5-10x the engagement and revenue of their campaigns with boilerplate flows including a welcome series, a cart abandon series, and a post-purchase series.

So, instead of aiming for flow sequences optimized like the image on the right, they’re sticking with the scope and complexity on the left:

In fact, I often see that flows have roughly 1/20th of the total send volume of campaign sends, and this means that brands are simply missing opportunities to keep their most engaged customers in highly personalized flows for longer. Their numbers look good on the surface, but they’re nothing compared to what they could be.

Essentially, if a brand builds a welcome series flow that is five emails long, and every subscriber who enters the flow gets the same linear experience of the same five emails each being sent on the same intervals, there is a massive opportunity to optimize that flow so that it gradually personalizes based on how each customer is engaging. Any actions (clicks, onsite activity) that happens during email 1 should be used to send a more personalized email for email 2, and so on. But it takes work to build these iterative testing decisions, which is often hard to justify when the linear experiences appear to be working well.

My advice: if you’re in this boat, find a resource (it doesn’t have to be an agency, though I’ll say the DMi team has an incredible track record of proving its value in a matter of weeks) and weigh the cost of the resource against the benefits of optimizing journeys and flows. My experienced guess is that it won’t take long for you to prioritize long-term, personalized journey optimization that keeps you out of spam folders and in steady revenue growth patterns.