Email automation: 8 scenarios that work for you

Email automation sends the right message at the moment the recipient is waiting for it: right after they sign up, a few minutes after they click an offer or on their birthday. You set it up once and then it works for you. In this article you will find out how automation works, why it earns more than regular campaigns, how to set it up in six steps, and eight ready-made scenarios you can switch on today.

In a nutshell

1. Every automation can be written down in one sentence: "When the recipient clicks the link to the price list, send them an email offering a consultation 30 minutes later."
2. Automated emails are a small share of the messages sent, but they bring in a disproportionately large share of orders. In Omnisend data for 2025 they made up 2% of emails sent and 30% of email revenue.
3. The best place to start is a welcome email, because every new contact receives it at the moment of their greatest interest.
4. Resending to those who did not open or did not click raised the click-through rate by 22% and 83% in Quanda's own campaigns.
5. Tags are the glue that holds automations together: a click, a form or a survey answer assigns a tag, and the tag triggers further communication.
6. Once a quarter, check the numbers, the texts and how many emails a contact receives from all automations in total.

In short: what it is, what you need, how much work it takes and what can go wrong

• What it is: a rule that sends an email or adds a tag by itself when a contact meets a condition. For example, they fill in a form or do not open a campaign.
• What you need: a prepared and activated transactional email, well thought out tags and a verified sending domain.
• How much work it takes: a simple automation takes five minutes, a welcome series an afternoon.
• What can go wrong: an impersonal tone, several automations colliding at once and texts that stop being accurate after a year.

What has changed since the article was published: The article came out in August 2021 as a description of the new automations in Quanda. In October 2026 we rewrote it as a guide. We added an explanation of how automations count time, an overview of every place in Quanda where you will find them, eight scenarios with their settings, data on the performance of automated emails and a checklist to go through before launch.

What email automation is

Email automation is a rule that sends an email or performs another action on its own as soon as a contact meets a condition you set in advance. You describe once what should happen and under what circumstances. Quanda then does it the same way every time, for each contact separately, day and night, without you having to remember anything.

You may also come across the terms automated email, automatic email or autoresponder. Email automations are a core part of marketing automation.

Every automation in Quanda has three parts. Whether you set it up in a campaign, a form or a survey, the screen looks almost the same.

Once you remember this trio, you can set up any automation. It helps to write it down in one sentence: "When the recipient clicks the link to the price list, send them an email offering a consultation 30 minutes later."

A transactional email in Quanda is a prepared email that waits for an automation to send it to a specific person. You create it just like a regular campaign, except that you do not choose recipients and, instead of sending it, you activate it. Whenever an automation needs to send an email, this is the one it reaches for. The details are in the guide Transactional e-mails.

How an automation differs from a regular campaign

Automation does not replace campaigns, it complements them. News and seasonal promotions still belong in regular campaigns according to your communication plan. Automation is for everything you would otherwise write over and over again to every new person.

Why email automation pays off

Automated emails are only a small part of what companies send, yet they earn disproportionately more than regular campaigns. The reason is simple: they arrive at the moment the recipient is waiting for them and follow on from what they have just done. Data from two large email platforms for 2025 show this clearly.

Out of every 100 emails Omnisend customers send, two are automated and they bring in almost a third of revenue. At Klaviyo the ratio is similar: 5.3% of messages sent and nearly 41% of email revenue, rounded to 41% in the chart.

The individual metrics paint the same picture. They come from a different Omnisend report, Email Marketing Benchmarks, with a different sample than the chart: more than 27,000 brands, over 20 billion emails from regular campaigns and 470 million automated emails in 2025.

Source: Omnisend, Email Marketing Benchmarks, data from more than 27,000 brands for 2025.

Two numbers in the table deserve attention. The open rate is almost identical for both types, because it is distorted by automatic opens in Apple Mail. The real difference only shows in clicks and orders. And automated emails have a higher unsubscribe rate. Anyone who receives a message that does not fit them unsubscribes faster. That is why it matters that an automation reacts to the recipient's actual behaviour.

Mailchimp states that automations brought users with a connected online shop up to eight times more orders than bulk emails (data from January 2023 to January 2025, Mailchimp page on automations). The words "up to" matter here: these are the best results, not the average.

For companies outside e-commerce: Most of the data come from online shops, where abandoned cart and welcome emails lead the way. According to Omnisend, together they brought in 76% of all orders from automations. Companies that do not sell online can rely on GetResponse data, which cover all types of senders: emails triggered by a recipient's action had a click-through rate of 5.02% there, newsletters 3.84%. And our own numbers: in two Quanda campaigns, resending raised the click-through rate by 22%, and a reminder to those who did not click raised it by 83%.

Where you will find automations in Quanda

Automation is not one feature in one place. You will find it everywhere you come into contact with a customer.

Source: Quanda pricing, as of October 2026.

Tip: A tag is the glue that connects individual automations. A form, a click in an email or a survey answer assigns a tag to the contact, and the tag puts them into a series, into birthday wishes or into the next campaign. How to name and use tags is described in the guide Tags.

How an automation counts time

This is where most mistakes happen. Quanda counts the waiting time depending on whether the event actually took place.

So for opens and clicks, each recipient gets the follow-up email at their own moment. For not opening and not clicking, it goes out to everyone at once. You can attach any number of conditions to a single event, and they are evaluated one after another according to the time you set.

Warning: Since 2021, an email open has been a less reliable signal. Apple Mail and some other apps download emails automatically, so emails that a person never saw are counted as opened too. Automations built on clicks are more accurate. More is explained in the article Email open rate: is 20 % a lot or a little?

How to set up email automation in 6 steps

The process is the same everywhere, only the place where you create the automation differs. Verify your sending domain beforehand. A verified sending domain is the domain after the @ in your address for which you have set up DNS records that tell mail servers you are authorised to send email from it. Automated emails go out continuously and without your supervision, and without a verified domain sending is restricted. The process is described in the guide How to set up DNS records for sending.

1. Write the automation down in one sentence: when a contact does this, after this much time that will happen.
2. In the Transactional e-mails section, create the email the automation should send. You do not choose the recipients, the automation decides them.
3. On the last page of the transactional email, activate it in the Campaign activation section.
4. In the campaign, form or survey, open Automation and click Add new condition.
5. Name the condition, choose the event, set the time in minutes, hours or days and pick the action, for example send an email or add a tag.
6. Save the condition, send yourself the transactional email as a test and, once it is live, track how many people opened the automatic email and clicked.

Mind the purpose of processing: In the transactional email settings, choose the purpose of personal data processing so that it covers all the contacts the email is meant for. A contact with a different purpose of processing will not receive the email, even if they meet the condition.

Try your first automation in Quanda

8 email automation scenarios

The following scenarios are ordered from the simplest to the most demanding. For each one you will find when it is useful, how to set it up and what to watch out for. You do not have to switch them all on. Start with the first two and add more once you see results.

1. A welcome email right after someone subscribes

Someone has just filled in the form on your website. The screen is still in front of them, they are thinking about you and they are expecting an email. You will never have more of their attention than right now.

The data confirm it. GetResponse evaluated 4.4 billion emails sent in 2023, and welcome emails came out as the most successful type of message of all.

People click a welcome email four times more often than a newsletter. Klaviyo also reports that almost 48% of revenue from automated emails comes from new customers, compared with just 16% for regular campaigns. The welcome is the moment when a prospect becomes a customer.

• Event: the form was filled in.
• Time: immediately, a few minutes at most.
• Action: add a tag based on the contact's source and send a welcome email.

A welcome email should include a thank you, the e-book or discount code you promised, a short introduction and what the recipient can expect from your emails. If you have double opt-in switched on, meaning that a sign-up is confirmed by clicking a link in a verification email, these are two different messages. Keep the confirmation email as simple as possible, with a single link, and leave everything else to the welcome email. How to set this up is described in the guide Automation in a form.

2. A welcome series that guides a new contact

One welcome email is not enough to show a new contact everything that matters. An email series is a sequence of emails that Quanda sends step by step to every contact who receives a chosen tag. There is one interval between parts for the whole series, for example 7 days. Every new contact receives the first part on the nearest sending date, no matter when they signed up. The welcome email from scenario 1 has meanwhile gone out right after signing up, and the series follows on from it.

• Event: the contact receives a tag, for example from the form in scenario 1.
• Time: one interval for the whole series, for example 7 days.
• Action: the series sends the next part.

The sales offer only comes after emails the recipient has benefited from. The process is described in the guide How to create and set up an e-mail series.

3. A second chance for those who did not open the email

The quickest win of them all. Anyone who did not open a campaign gets it again a few days later, ideally with a different subject line. You do not prepare anything new, you just save the original campaign as a template and load it into a transactional email.

• Event: did not open the email.
• Time: after 3 days.
• Action: send a transactional email with the same content.

In one of our campaigns, 109 more people opened the resent email and 16 of them clicked. The campaign's overall click-through rate rose from 5.1% to 6.2%, an increase of 22%. You will find the whole example with numbers and steps in the article Second wave email: how to lift click-through rate by up to 83%.

Tip: Change the subject line. Anyone who missed the first version may have missed it precisely because of the subject line. How to write a better one is described in the article How to write an email subject line people actually open.

4. A reminder for those who did not click

You invited people to a webinar, an event or to fill in a survey. Some of them read the invitation but did not click the button. Send all of them a short reminder a few days later with a single prominent link.

• Event: did not click a particular link, for example the Register button.
• Time: after 2 to 4 days, always with enough time left before the event.
• Action: send a shorter reminder.

The reminder goes both to those who never opened the invitation and to those who read it but did not click. Write it so that it makes sense to both groups. In another of our campaigns, the reminder added another 324 clicks and the overall click-through rate rose from 15.7% to 28.7%, an increase of 83%.

Warning: Scenarios 3 and 4 overlap within the same campaign, because anyone who did not open the email did not click either. For a single campaign, choose only one of them.

5. A follow-up offer after a click

A click on a specific link is the strongest signal of interest an email can give. Anyone who clicked a link to a specific product or service is thinking about it right now. A follow-up email with an extended offer, answers to frequent questions or an invitation to a consultation arrives while the interest is still fresh.

• Event: clicked a particular link.
• Time: after 30 minutes to 2 hours.
• Action: send a follow-up email and add an "interested in …" tag.

The interest tag is valuable for the future too. The next time you send news about this product, you choose as recipients only those who showed interest in it. A contact with such a tag is also a signal for your salesperson that they are worth a call.

6. Birthday and name day wishes

Birthday wishes are one of the few messages people are genuinely happy to receive. They do not sell anything, they simply bring a smile. Quanda has two separate campaign types for this, Birthday wishes and Name day wishes. Name days are a Central European tradition: each day of the calendar belongs to one or more first names, and people with that name celebrate it much like a second, smaller birthday. You start the campaigns once and then every day they check your contacts on their own and send wishes to everyone whose date falls on that day.

• Event: today's date matches the contact's date of birth or name day.
• Time: every day at the hour you choose.
• Action: send the wishes, perhaps with a small gift.

You do not have to find out name day dates yourself. Contact automation fills them in on its own based on the first name, for new contacts as soon as they are created. The process is described in the guide How to create and set up a birthday and name day e-mail campaign.

7. A satisfaction survey after a purchase and a reaction to the answer

After a completed order, a delivery or a resolved request, ask how you did. The automation then reacts to the answers straight away: it thanks satisfied customers and asks them for a reference, and it tags dissatisfied ones and notifies a colleague to get in touch with them before they write a review.

• Event: the survey was completed, or a specific answer was chosen.
• Time: immediately.
• Action: send a thank you email, add a tag based on the answer and, for a low rating, notify a colleague.

Quanda assigns a tag based on an answer only to a contact it knows, meaning a recipient who came to the survey from an email campaign. Anyone who fills in the survey through a public link stays anonymous. You will find a ready-made survey, including the steps, in the library: Customer satisfaction survey.

8. Emails triggered by data from a CRM or ERP

The most valuable moments for an email often do not happen in an email at all, but in your company systems. A customer picked up a car, paid an invoice, finished a course or had a complaint resolved. Quanda HUB is an integration platform that connects Quanda to your CRM, ERP or DMS and triggers email scenarios from the documents and events in them.

Emails like these cannot be planned in a campaign calendar, because every customer is at a different stage. Automation sends them to each person on the right day. How the connection works is shown on the Quanda HUB page.

How to tell that an automation is working

Track automated emails the same way as campaigns, just at a different rhythm. Do not wait for results the next day. Take a look after a month and then once a quarter.

An automated email should have a higher click-through rate than your regular campaigns, because it arrives at the moment of interest. If it does not, the problem most likely lies in the timing, or in the email not responding to what the recipient has just done. The meaning of the individual numbers in Quanda is described in the guide What the terms in statistics mean.

Tip: Set up an automation for undelivered emails too. Tag the contacts whose email could not be delivered, and every so often correct them or remove them from your database. A clean database is the foundation of good deliverability.

6 mistakes that stop automations from working

1. A transactional email that is not activated. The automation will offer it, but until you activate it, there is nothing to rely on.
2. A different purpose of processing. Contacts with a different purpose of personal data processing than the transactional email will not receive it.
3. Colliding automations. A welcome email, a series, a survey and a regular campaign in the same week. A useful rule is that only one automation talks to a contact on any given day.
4. A noreply sender. Nobody replies to an automatic email they cannot reply to. Send it on behalf of a real person and read the replies.
5. Robotic language. "Your request has been registered" makes nobody happy. Say what has just happened, what comes next and who the recipient can turn to.
6. Set and forget. Prices, offers and colleagues change. An email written two years ago may be welcoming new customers to a company that now looks quite different.

Checklist before launching an automation

• I can describe the automation in one sentence: event, time and action.
• The transactional email is activated and has the correct purpose of processing.
• The sender is a real person and somebody reads the replies.
• The email addresses the recipient by name and follows on from what they have just done.
• I know what other emails the contact will receive in the same week.
• I have sent myself the whole sequence as test emails and read it in the order the customer will receive it.
• I have a quarterly review of the numbers and texts in my calendar.

Final word

Automations are not a substitute for communication, they are its backbone. Regular campaigns still carry your news and ideas, while automations take care of everything that repeats. Start with a welcome email and a second chance for unopened campaigns. You can set up both in a single morning and see results within a month.

The free online course Automation in Quanda from A to Z takes you step by step through every place where Quanda can work for you. If you would like to design automations for your company together with us, arrange a free consultation or write to us at support@onquanda.com.

Fingers crossed!