Industry Playbooks

Every industry has its own rhythm, its own customer expectations, and its own definition of what great email looks like. A strategy that drives revenue for DTC ecommerce would feel completely wrong for a nonprofit. A cadence that works for SaaS onboarding would overwhelm a university’s student communications.

These playbooks give you the specific flows, benchmarks, and tactics for 19 industries. They’re not templates to copy blindly. They’re starting points informed by data and adapted by practitioners who’ve tested what works in each vertical.

Use the playbook for your industry as a diagnostic tool. Compare your current programme against it. Identify the gaps. Prioritise the highest-impact changes first.

1. Ecommerce DTC

The DTC email programme lives and dies by three flows: welcome series, abandoned cart, and post-purchase. Get these right and you’ve built the engine that drives 25-40% of your total revenue. Everything else is optimisation on top of that foundation.

Start with abandoned cart recovery. Over 70% of online carts are abandoned, and the best recovery programmes bring back 17.12% of those. Your abandoned cart flow should fire within 1 hour of abandonment (not 24 hours, not 4 hours, 1 hour). The first email is a simple reminder with the product image and a link back. The second, sent 24 hours later, introduces social proof or addresses common objections. The third, at 48-72 hours, can include a small incentive if your margins allow it. Top-performing programmes hit $3+ revenue per recipient on this flow.

Your welcome series is where first impressions become first purchases. The best DTC brands see 8% conversion rates from their welcome flow. Send 4-6 emails over 7-10 days: brand story, best-sellers, social proof, then a time-limited offer for first purchase. Don’t lead with discounts. Lead with story and value, then offer the incentive to those who haven’t converted.

Post-purchase is where most brands leave money on the table. This flow should confirm the order, set delivery expectations, provide usage tips, request reviews (at the right moment, typically 7-14 days after delivery), and suggest complementary products. Replenishment emails are particularly powerful for consumable products. If your average customer re-orders every 30 days, send a reminder on day 25 with a one-click reorder link.

Chase Dimond and Reinis Krumins both emphasise engagement-based sending: send more to people who engage, less to people who don’t. This protects deliverability and improves RPR across the board. In practice, this means your most engaged segment (opened or clicked in the last 30 days) might receive 3-4 campaigns per week, while your less engaged segment (90-180 days since last engagement) gets one per week at most.

RFM segmentation (recency, frequency, monetary value) helps you identify your VIPs, your at-risk customers, and your lapsed buyers. Treat each group differently. VIPs get early access and exclusive offers. At-risk customers get re-engagement. Lapsed buyers get win-back campaigns or are suppressed entirely.

One tactical tip: year-in-review emails modelled on Spotify Wrapped generate massive engagement. Show customers their purchase history, their favourite categories, how many orders they placed, their total savings. Personalised data creates emotional connection and shareable moments. Brands that run year-in-review campaigns see 2-3x higher engagement than their average promotional email.

2. SaaS B2B

B2B SaaS email is about activation, not opens. Nobody cares if someone opened your onboarding email. What matters is whether they completed the setup wizard, invited their team, or used the core feature for the first time.

Val Geisler pioneered the approach of behaviour-based onboarding over time-based sequences. Instead of sending email 2 on day 3 regardless of what the user has done, trigger emails based on what they have and haven’t accomplished. Someone who’s completed setup but hasn’t invited teammates gets the team collaboration email. Someone who signed up but never logged in gets a different sequence entirely. This requires event tracking between your product and your ESP, but the payoff in activation rates is substantial.

Stick to one CTA per email. B2B buyers are busy. They’re scanning your email between meetings. Give them one thing to do and make it obvious.

Feature adoption emails are underused. After onboarding, most SaaS companies go quiet until it’s renewal time. That’s a mistake. Monthly or bi-weekly emails highlighting features the user hasn’t tried, showing use cases from similar companies, or sharing tips for getting more value from the product reduce churn and increase expansion revenue. the companies that keep educating users after onboarding retain them longer.

Segment by company size, industry, and product interest. A 10-person startup uses your product differently than a 500-person enterprise. Your emails should reflect that. Enterprise users need content about security, compliance, and team management. Startup users need content about speed, simplicity, and getting results with limited resources.

Target benchmarks: >20% open rate, >12% CTOR for B2B campaigns. If you’re hitting those numbers, your targeting and content are both working.

Look at how Linear, Notion, and Figma handle email. Their changelog emails are concise, visual, and focused on value rather than feature lists. Feature education is delivered in context, tied to what the user is actually doing. Community building happens through curated content and user spotlights. These companies treat email as a product channel, not just a marketing one. Their product updates feel like gifts, not interruptions.

3. SaaS B2C

B2C SaaS lives on retention. Acquisition gets the attention, but retention drives the economics. A 5% increase in retention produces a 25-95% increase in profit. That’s not a typo. Small retention improvements compound dramatically because you’re not just keeping one month’s revenue, you’re keeping every subsequent month.

81% of customers who have a positive experience make repeat purchases. Your email programme’s job is to create and reinforce those positive experiences between product sessions.

Duolingo’s streak model is the gold standard for retention email in B2C SaaS. The daily streak reminder creates a habit loop: cue (email notification), routine (complete a lesson), reward (maintain your streak). Their emails are simple, occasionally funny, and always focused on one action. The emotional manipulation of their owl mascot (‘Your streak is about to break!’) is remarkably effective at driving daily engagement.

Gamification in emails works when it’s tied to genuine value. Progress bars showing feature adoption (‘You’ve completed 3 of 5 setup steps’), milestone celebrations (‘You’ve logged in 30 days in a row’), and achievement badges all drive engagement. But gamification without underlying value is just decoration. The badge has to mean something.

Your re-engagement trigger should fire earlier than you think. If a B2C SaaS user hasn’t logged in for 7 days, they’re at risk. Don’t wait until day 30 to send a win-back. Send a value reminder at day 7, a ‘we miss you’ at day 14, and a final ‘here’s what you’re missing’ at day 21. Each email should show them what they’re losing, not just ask them to come back.

Tactical tip: usage-based emails perform 3-4x better than calendar-based emails. ‘You processed 47 invoices last month, here’s how to automate that’ beats ‘Check out our new automation feature’ every time. Personalised data makes the value proposition concrete and immediate.

4. Newsletter and Creator

The newsletter business model has matured rapidly. What started as a hobby for writers has become a legitimate media business with proven economics.

The numbers support this. Email marketing ROI sits at 122% compared to 28% for social media. You own your audience. Algorithm changes don’t destroy your reach overnight. No platform can deplatform your email list.

But let’s be honest about the economics. You need 500-1,000 readers minimum before any monetisation makes sense. The real inflection point is 10,000 subscribers, where meaningful ad revenue becomes available ($200-500 per placement at standard rates). Below that, focus on growth and content quality, not revenue. trying to monetise a 2,000-subscriber newsletter is premature optimisation.

Here’s what I call the ‘minimum viable newsletter’ benchmark: 25,000 subscribers, 40% open rate, 3 sponsors per issue, $35 CPM. That produces $150,000-200,000 per year. Not life-changing wealth, but a serious business that can support a creator full-time. The maths: 25,000 subscribers x 40% open rate = 10,000 opens per issue. At $35 CPM x 3 sponsors = $1,050 per issue. Send weekly, that’s $54,600 per year from sponsorships alone. Add paid subscriptions, affiliate revenue, and digital products, and you reach the $150-200K range.

The revenue stack for newsletter businesses typically layers up like this: sponsorships first (lowest friction, no product creation required), then paid subscriptions (Substack, beehiiv, Ghost), then affiliate revenue, then digital products (courses, templates, guides), then events and community. Morning Brew built this stack to over $50 million in annual revenue. Most solo operators won’t reach that, but the model scales because each layer compounds on the audience you’ve already built.

Dan Oshinsky has written that there is no single playbook every newsletter needs to follow, but there are rules you need to follow to create the best version of your newsletter. Matt McGarry and Tyler Denk both emphasise that the first 100 subscribers are the hardest. After that, momentum builds. Referral programmes accelerate growth significantly, with beehiiv’s built-in referral system helping newsletters grow 30-40% faster than those without one. SparkLoop enables cross-promotion and paid subscriber acquisition at $1-3 per subscriber, making it one of the most cost-effective growth channels available.

Daily newsletters build stronger habits but burn out creators faster. Weekly newsletters are more sustainable but grow more slowly. Choose based on your content capacity and audience expectations. A daily newsletter you can’t maintain is worse than a weekly one you never miss.

$20-40 CPM ad rates are achievable for newsletters with engaged, niche audiences. General interest newsletters sit at the lower end. Highly targeted B2B newsletters (marketing executives, SaaS founders, finance professionals) command premium rates because advertisers can reach specific buyers they struggle to find elsewhere.

Tactical tip: the single best growth lever for newsletters is consistency. Pick a day and time. Never miss it. Your audience will build the habit of reading you only if you build the habit of showing up. The newsletters that grow fastest are the ones that never skip a send.

5. Agency

Agencies face a unique challenge: they’re managing programmes for clients, not themselves. The playbook is different when you’re accountable to someone else’s KPIs.

Scott Cohen emphasises tracking metrics per client vertical. A 25% open rate might be exceptional in one industry and mediocre in another. Build a benchmarking database across your client portfolio so you can show each client where they stand relative to their industry peers.

Build retention plans that address 100% of renewals. Quarterly strategy reviews with performance data, optimisation recommendations, and a forward-looking roadmap. The agencies that lose clients are the ones that set up the programme and then run it on autopilot.

In Australia, two agencies exemplify the specialist approach. Shaun Ernst’s Email Experts is a Klaviyo Platinum Master Partner and served on Klaviyo’s Global Partner Advisory Council, consulting directly with Klaviyo’s senior executive team to inform their product roadmap. Their client roster includes JB Hi-Fi, General Pants, Decjuba, and Swisse. Ernst’s philosophy centres on setting up the core components to “collect subscribers and set up the technology to better understand, segment, and reach your customers,” combining email with Facebook, SMS, and pop-up forms for comprehensive audience engagement. Brenden Rawson’s Andzen became the first Klaviyo Elite Master Partner in APAC (fifth globally) and won Klaviyo Agency Partner of the Year APAC 2025. Rawson and co-founder Jason Anderson brought deep technical DNA from their time at Sign-Up.to, a UK email platform, which gives them an infrastructure-level understanding most agencies lack. Andzen repositioned from an “email marketing agency” to a “customer journey agency,” recognising that retention is really about the data and the customer experience. Their approach: bring in as many data points, preferences, and personalisation signals as possible, then tailor nurture and post-purchase series to match. Both agencies demonstrate that deep platform specialisation beats being a generalist.

Tactical tip: build a testing calendar for each client. One subject line test, one send time test, one content test per month minimum. Document results in a shared knowledge base so the entire team learns from every test across every client. The cumulative insight from testing across multiple verticals is one of the most valuable things an agency can offer.

6. Nonprofit

Nonprofit email is about turning one-time donors into recurring supporters and turning supporters into advocates. The economics work in your favour: recurring donors give more over time than one-time donors, and email is the most cost-effective channel to nurture that relationship.

46% of donors cite exclusive content or insider access as a top incentive for continued engagement. This matters for your email strategy. Don’t just send donation asks. Send impact reports, behind-the-scenes updates, beneficiary stories, and early access to events. The ratio should be roughly 3:1, three value emails for every ask.

Mission-driven storytelling separates great nonprofit email from the generic ‘please give’ requests that fill inboxes during every giving season. Patagonia’s model is instructive here: they lead with the mission, make the supporter the hero of the story, and position the donation as an action that creates measurable impact. ‘Your $50 provided clean water to a family of four for a month’ is infinitely more powerful than ‘Please consider donating $50.’ Specificity creates connection. Vague asks get vague responses.

Monitor churn carefully, and separate cancelled donations from payment failures. A cancelled donation is a relationship problem. A payment failure is a technical problem. Both reduce your recurring revenue, but they need completely different responses. Payment failure emails should be immediate, clear, and make it easy to update payment information. Cancellation emails should acknowledge the decision respectfully and offer alternatives (reduced amount, less frequent giving, volunteer opportunities instead).

Segmentation for nonprofits should include donor level (first-time, recurring, major gift), engagement level (active volunteer, event attendee, email-only supporter), and cause interest (if your organisation covers multiple programmes). A major donor who volunteers monthly needs very different communication than a first-time $25 donor who’s never attended an event.

Tactical tip: end-of-year giving campaigns should start in November, not December. Send 3-4 emails through November building the case, then 2-3 in early December with the ask, then a final push in the last week. Most nonprofits compress their entire campaign into the last two weeks of December and lose to inbox competition from every other charity doing the same thing.

7-9. Healthcare, Financial Services, Real Estate

These industries share common patterns covered throughout this guide: segment aggressively, automate your core flows, and match your email frequency to your customer’s natural buying cycle. A few industry-specific notes worth highlighting.

Healthcare: HIPAA compliance is non-negotiable. Keep marketing emails completely separate from clinical communications (different sending domains, different systems). Automated appointment reminders reduce no-shows by 30-40%. Keep content at an 8th-grade reading level.

Financial services: Build compliance review into your production timeline, not as an afterthought. Create pre-approved content modules for disclaimers and risk warnings. Transactional emails are your best cross-sell opportunity. Segment educational content by life stage, not demographics.

Real estate: Leads contacted within 5 minutes are 21x more likely to convert than those contacted after 30 minutes. Speed wins deals. Segment drip sequences by journey stage (browsers, active searchers, under contract, past clients). The most effective emails feel personal. Use the agent’s name and photo, reference specific properties the prospect has viewed.

10. Travel and Hospitality

Loyalty members in travel and hospitality generate 18% more revenue per stay than non-members, and 60% of travellers prefer booking directly with hotels when they receive perks for doing so. Email is the primary channel for building and maintaining those loyalty relationships.

The ROI for travel email is exceptional, ranging from $40 to $200+ per dollar spent depending on the segment and campaign type. Abandoned booking recovery alone can recapture 10-20% of lost bookings, making it one of the highest-value automations in the industry.

Your email programme should map to the traveller’s journey: inspiration (destination guides, deal alerts), planning (itinerary suggestions, comparison tools), booking (abandoned booking recovery, upsells), pre-trip (packing lists, local tips, upgrade offers), in-stay (welcome, daily activity suggestions, dining recommendations), and post-trip (review requests, loyalty point updates, re-booking incentives).

Airbnb’s host notification emails are worth studying as a marketplace model. Their emails to hosts are revenue-focused: ‘You could earn $X per night in your area,’ competitive data about pricing and availability in the local market, and Superhost gamification that ties engagement to tangible benefits (better search ranking, exclusive rewards). This two-sided approach keeps both supply and demand engaged.

Seasonal timing matters enormously. Booking intent peaks in January for summer travel and September for winter holidays. Your promotional calendar should lead these peaks by 4-8 weeks to capture demand during the research phase.

Tactical tip: pre-arrival emails sent 3-5 days before check-in have the highest conversion rate for upsells (room upgrades, spa packages, dining reservations). The guest is excited about their trip and more willing to spend. This single email can add $20-50 in ancillary revenue per booking.

11-12. Education and Professional Services

Education: The biggest problem is coordination, not content. Some universities send 400+ emails per year and 54% of recipients don’t always read them. Consolidate departmental sends into a single institutional digest. Segment by student stage (prospective, admitted, enrolled, alumni). Text-only emails from individual admissions counsellors outperform branded HTML for prospective students. The personal touch matters more than the design when you’re asking someone to make a six-figure education decision.

Professional services: Long sales cycles (6-18 months) require sustained nurture. Ian Brodie (author of Email Persuasion and Unsnooze Your Inbox) advocates frequent, short emails that blend genuine insight with direct offers — not the “teach, don’t pitch” approach many assume. His model: email at least weekly (he sent 2-3 times per week), keep emails concise, mix useful ideas and stories with clear calls to action, and never retreat to a monthly newsletter — that’s a fast route to being forgotten. After every major regulatory change, send a timely analysis within 48 hours. Speed of response signals expertise. These event-triggered emails consistently generate the highest engagement for professional services firms.

13. Retail

Retail email revolves around two things: loyalty programmes and personalised promotions. Get both right and email becomes your highest-ROI channel.

Birthday emails generate 25% more opens and 40% more clicks than standard promotional emails. They’re the easiest win in retail email. Send a birthday offer 3-5 days before the birthday, a reminder on the day, and a ‘last chance’ if unused after a week. Even a simple 10-15% discount on their birthday creates goodwill that outlasts the promotion.

Over 80% of loyalty campaigns use email as the primary communication channel. Points balance updates, redemption reminders, and expiration warnings keep members engaged with the programme. The critical insight: expired points create negative sentiment that damages the customer relationship. Warn members at 30 days, 14 days, and 3 days before expiration. Every point that expires is a small failure in your communication programme.

The Starbucks Rewards model is worth studying. Their email programme succeeds because of four elements: simple mechanics (spend money, earn stars, get rewards), progress visualisation (you’re X stars away from your next reward), personalised offers based on purchase history, and seasonal FOMO (limited-time offerings that drive urgency). The psychological power of showing someone they’re ‘2 stars away from a free drink’ is remarkable.

RFM segmentation is essential for retail. Your top 10% of customers likely generate 40-60% of your revenue. Treat them differently. Early access to sales, exclusive products, and VIP events for your highest-value customers drive retention and increase lifetime value.

Tactical tip: post-purchase review request emails sent 10-14 days after delivery (giving the customer time to use the product) generate 3-5x more reviews than requests sent immediately after purchase. Reviews drive future revenue through social proof, making this one of the highest-ROI automated emails you can send.

14. Events

Event email is a compressed timeline with high stakes. You have a fixed deadline (the event date) and every email must move the recipient closer to registration, attendance, and post-event engagement.

Start engagement at registration, not a week before the event. The moment someone registers, they should enter a confirmation and preparation sequence: what to expect, how to prepare, schedule highlights, speaker introductions, networking opportunities, and logistical details. This sequence reduces no-show rates by 20-30% and increases attendee satisfaction.

Follow up within one week post-event. This is when engagement is highest and receptivity peaks. Send a thank-you email within 24 hours (with key takeaways and photos), followed by session recordings or slides within 3-5 days, and a feedback survey within 7 days. Don’t wait two weeks. The emotional afterglow of a great event fades fast.

Personalise by sessions attended. If your event has multiple tracks, tailor your follow-up based on which sessions each attendee chose. Someone who attended three marketing sessions should receive different follow-up content and offers than someone who attended three product sessions.

The pre-event promotional sequence for potential attendees should run 6-8 weeks before the event: early-bird pricing, speaker announcements, agenda reveals, and social proof (registration numbers, notable attendees). Increase frequency in the final two weeks as urgency builds naturally.

For recurring events, your post-event sequence becomes the top of your funnel for the next event. Start nurturing for next year’s event within 30 days of this year’s event ending. The attendees who had a great experience are your easiest converts for next year.

Tactical tip: a ‘bring a colleague’ email sent to registered attendees 2-3 weeks before the event, offering a discount for additional registrations, typically generates 5-15% more registrations. People attend professional events in pairs and groups when given an easy mechanism to invite others.

15-17. B2B Manufacturing, Restaurant/Food, Fitness

B2B Manufacturing: Reorder triggers are the highest-ROI automation. If a customer typically reorders every 90 days, send a reminder on day 80 with current pricing and a one-click reorder link. This single automation can increase reorder rates by 15-25%. Quarterly business review emails summarising purchase history and savings strengthen relationships and surface upsell opportunities.

Restaurant and food: Loyalty patrons order 3x more than non-loyalty customers. Connect email with loyalty programme data so every email reflects their points balance and progress toward the next reward. ‘You’re 15 points from a free entree’ beats ‘Check out our new menu items.’ Match email frequency to dining occasion (coffee shop: 2-3x/week, fine dining: 2-4x/month). A ‘we haven’t seen you in a while’ email triggered after twice the customer’s average visit interval is the single most effective re-engagement tactic.

Fitness and wellness: The subscription model means every retained member is another month of revenue. New members who attend their first class within 7 days are 50%+ more likely to remain after 6 months. Focus your welcome sequence entirely on getting that first visit. Milestone celebrations (‘You completed your 100th class’) drive engagement and social sharing. Seasonal challenge emails (30-day fitness challenge) outperform standard promotional sends by 2-3x in click-through rate.

18. Media and Publishing

56% of email subscribers unsubscribe because the content isn’t relevant to them. For media companies, where content is literally the product, this statistic should shape every decision about segmentation and personalisation. Irrelevant content is the fastest path to list decline.

Build your owned database. Media companies that rely entirely on platform distribution (social media, Apple News, Google Discover) are building on rented land. Email is owned audience. Every subscriber is someone you can reach regardless of algorithm changes, platform policy shifts, or social media bans.

Monetise through advertising positioned above the fold. In newsletter emails, the first ad placement generates 60-70% of total ad engagement. Native ad formats (content that matches the editorial style) outperform display-style banner ads by 2-3x in click-through rate. But label sponsored content clearly. Trust is your business model, and deceptive advertising erodes it faster than any short-term revenue gain.

The 1-3-1 newsletter structure works well for media email: 1 main story (your best piece of content), 3 shorter items (curated links, quick takes, data points), and 1 call-to-action (subscribe to premium, share with a friend, reply with feedback). This structure gives readers value density without overwhelming them and creates a consistent reading experience they can depend on.

Privacy-first monetisation is becoming essential. As third-party cookies disappear and tracking restrictions increase, first-party data from email engagement becomes more valuable for ad targeting. Build subscriber profiles based on what they click and read, then offer advertisers targeting based on interest categories rather than individual tracking.

Segmentation by content interest is more important than demographic segmentation for media companies. Someone who reads every article about climate policy but ignores business news should receive different content than someone with the opposite pattern. Track topic engagement and adjust content mix accordingly. Most ESPs can track click behaviour by category if you tag your links properly.

Tactical tip: a ‘this week’s most-read articles’ email sent on Saturday or Sunday morning performs exceptionally well. It catches weekend readers with socially validated content, drives traffic during typically low-activity periods, and gives you a natural framework for a weekly digest without creating additional editorial overhead.

19. Marketplace and Platform

Marketplace email is uniquely complex because you’re serving two audiences simultaneously: buyers and sellers. Each side needs its own email strategy, but the two strategies must work together.

Transactional emails need to be near-instant. Every minute of delay increases the chance a user completes the transaction elsewhere. Buyer/seller matching emails are the core growth mechanism. Alert buyers when new listings match their criteria. Alert sellers when demand spikes. The Airbnb model is instructive: host emails focus on revenue opportunity and competitive positioning, guest emails focus on inspiration and value. Completely different tone, content, and cadence for each side.

Track cohort retention for both sides. If seller retention drops, supply decreases and buyer experience degrades. If buyer retention drops, sellers lose revenue. This creates a death spiral that’s very difficult to reverse.

For sellers, the ‘weekly performance summary’ (views, inquiries, conversion rate, revenue compared to previous weeks) is consistently the most opened email type. Sellers are obsessed with their numbers. Include one actionable suggestion per email (‘Listings with 8+ photos get 40% more bookings’) to drive incremental improvements across the seller base.