Email and lifecycle marketing: the channel everyone underrates
It is unfashionable, it has no agency glamour attached, and in most businesses it quietly returns more per rupee than anything else in the plan.
Email and lifecycle marketing is underrated because it is unglamorous, yet in most businesses it returns more per rupee than anything else: you own the audience and sends cost almost nothing. Build behaviour-triggered flows before campaigns, keep the list clean rather than large, and measure clicks, conversion per send, revenue per recipient and engaged subscribers, not open rates.
Owned channels have one structural advantage nothing else can match: you are not renting the audience. No auction sets the price, no algorithm change removes your reach, and the cost per message is close to nothing. The reason it stays underused is that it is unglamorous and it requires someone to maintain it.
Build the flows before the campaigns
Automated flows triggered by behaviour outperform broadcast sends by a wide margin, because they arrive when the person is already thinking about you. Build them in this order:
- Welcome. What you do, what to expect, and the single most useful thing you have. This is when attention is highest and most brands send a discount code instead.
- Abandoned cart or abandoned enquiry. The highest-return flow in nearly every business, and frequently the only one anybody builds.
- Post-purchase. Useful rather than promotional: how to get the most from it, what to expect, when to reorder.
- Replenishment or renewal, timed to the actual consumption cycle rather than to a monthly calendar.
- Win-back, with a genuine reason to return rather than an escalating series of discounts that trains people to wait.
List health beats list size
A large list full of people who never open is worse than a small engaged one: it damages deliverability, so your messages stop reaching the people who do want them. Clean it. Remove persistent non-openers, authenticate your sending domain properly, and never buy a list, which is both ineffective and, for personal data in India and most markets, legally hazardous.
What to measure now
Open rates became unreliable once mail clients started pre-fetching images, and using them as a headline metric now measures the mail client. Use click-through rate, conversion rate per send, revenue per recipient, unsubscribe rate as a quality signal, and the trend in engaged subscribers over ninety days. The last one is the health of the asset.
Frequency
Send as often as you have something worth sending, which is a real constraint rather than a platitude. Weekly works if the content earns it. Monthly is fine. The failure is a fixed cadence filled with whatever is available, which trains subscribers to ignore you and then to leave.
WhatsApp, carefully
In India, WhatsApp frequently outperforms email on engagement and is far less forgiving of misuse, because it feels personal. Use it for transactional and genuinely timely messages, honour opt-outs immediately, and keep promotional volume low. A channel people cannot escape is a channel they will block.
Where it connects to everything else
Lifecycle marketing is what makes paid acquisition affordable: if the second purchase is reliable, you can pay more for the first. That relationship is the whole economic argument in D2C growth after the first crore, and it is the reason retention work usually belongs ahead of another increase in ad spend.
Questions we get asked
How often should we send marketing emails?
As often as you have something worth sending. A fixed cadence filled with filler trains people to ignore you, and then to unsubscribe.
Are open rates still useful?
Not as a headline metric, since mail clients pre-fetch images. Use clicks, conversions, revenue per recipient and the trend in engaged subscribers.
Which flow should we build first?
Abandoned cart or abandoned enquiry, then welcome. Those two carry most of the available return in nearly every business.
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