Email Automation
For Business
The receipts, the reminders, the chase-ups, the welcome series, the "we noticed you haven't logged in", the weekly digest, the renewal warning. Right now they're spread across Outlook rules, half-built Mailchimp journeys and a Zap nobody remembers setting up. We replace the lot with one system you can trust.
£38 : £1
DMA UK EMAIL ROI BENCHMARK
2% / 37%
AUTOMATED: SHARE OF SENDS / SHARE OF SALES (OMNISEND, 2025)
£140k
ICO FINE, HELLOFRESH, JAN 2024
Most "email automation" is one person, a folder of templates, and good intentions.
Someone set up an Outlook rule three years ago. Marketing built a welcome series in Mailchimp that ends after email two. A Zap fires off invoice reminders, except when Stripe changes its webhook payload. The sales team copy-paste a follow-up sequence into Gmail by hand.
It mostly works. Until a customer doesn't get their receipt. Until two reminders go to the same person on the same day. Until Gmail and Yahoo's February 2024 bulk-sender rules catch a missing authentication record. Until the ICO writes to ask about your consent records.
Email is one of the few channels customers genuinely want, and one of the few your business owes them. It deserves a system, not a folder of rules.
WHAT YOU HAVE TODAY
- Outlook and Gmail rules nobody documented
- Three ESPs, each sending half a journey
- SPF and DKIM half-set, no DMARC report ever read
- Unsubscribe is a link to a 404
- No idea what bounced, who complained, or why
- Consent stored as "they're on the list"
WHAT WE LEAVE YOU WITH
- One place every email is defined, named and version-controlled
- Transactional and marketing on the right sender, not muddled
- SPF, DKIM and DMARC aligned, reports read weekly
- One-click unsubscribe that works (RFC 8058)
- Bounces, complaints and silent failures alerted
- Consent logged per subscriber, exportable for ICO
Five layers under every email your business sends.
If any one of these is missing or wrong, the others can't save you. It's a stack, not a checklist.
Triggers
What kicks the email off. A sale, a sign-up, a CRM stage change, a timer, a Stripe webhook, an internal alert. Defined once, reused everywhere.
Logic
Branches, waits, quiet hours, frequency caps, suppression. The bit that stops you sending two reminders in an hour or chasing a customer who's already paid.
Content
Templates, merge fields, plain-text fallback, a working unsubscribe, real branding. Reviewed by a human, not "improved" by the ESP's drag-and-drop.
Delivery
SPF, DKIM, DMARC aligned. Dedicated IP or warmed shared pool. Transactional split from marketing. Compliance with Google, Yahoo and Microsoft's May 2025 Outlook.com bulk-sender rules.
Observability
Every send logged, every bounce and complaint surfaced, silent failures paged. The bit you only notice the day a customer says "I never got that".
Five problems in nearly every email audit we do.
We've audited the email setup at recruiters, accountants, e-commerce stores, SaaS startups, training providers and financial advisers. The same five issues keep coming up.
Receipts going to spam
Order confirmations from noreply@yourcompany.com sent through Mailchimp with no DKIM alignment. Since February 2024, Gmail's bulk-sender rules have expected proper authentication. Customers don't get the receipt. Support ticket every time.
Half-built journeys
The onboarding sequence has emails one and two. The win-back has the subject line and nothing else. The renewal warning fires the day after the card expires. The high-intent flows are the ones most likely to be half-finished.
PECR drift
A pre-ticked box on the signup form. A "soft opt-in" list that includes prospects who never bought. Marketing emails sent to personal addresses with no lawful basis recorded. The ICO fined HelloFresh £140,000 in January 2024 after 79 million emails and 1 million texts sent under a bundled consent statement.
Unsubscribe doesn't actually unsubscribe
Three ESPs, three lists, one opt-out that only touches one of them. Or the unsubscribe link goes to a "manage your preferences" page that asks the user to log in. The 2024 Gmail rules require marketing and subscribed messages from bulk senders to support one-click unsubscribe, and Google says unsubscribe requests must be processed within two days.
Nobody watches the dials
Bounce rate, complaint rate, queue depth, time-to-send. We turn up and the dashboards either don't exist or nobody opens them. Google tells senders to keep spam rates below 0.1% and avoid 0.3% or higher. You find out by accident, three months late.
Where we come in.
Audit first. Then a fix-the-foundations sprint. Then the automation you actually wanted, on top of something that won't fall over.
We work with your existing ESPs where they're the right tool, and replace them where they're not. You're not buying a platform; you're buying the engineering judgement to put one together.
BOOK AN EMAIL AUDITAudit
We catalogue every email leaving your business. Which template, which sender, which list, on whose consent. We pull DMARC reports, check SPF and DKIM, score you against the Google, Yahoo and Microsoft bulk-sender rules. You get a one-page report and a prioritised fix list.
Foundations sprint
DNS records aligned. Transactional split from marketing onto separate subdomains. One-click unsubscribe wired up. Consent records back-filled where defensible. Bounce, complaint and queue alerts plumbed into Slack or PagerDuty.
Build the automations
The flows your business actually needs. Onboarding sequence that finishes. Renewal warnings that fire before the card expires. Abandoned-cart series, sales follow-ups, post-purchase, review requests, win-back, internal digests. Tested end-to-end with real fixtures, not "looked good in preview".
Hand back something you can run
A single inventory of every automated email, who it goes to, why, and on whose authority. Dashboards your operations lead actually checks. A written list of which changes a marketer can make in the ESP and which need a developer. Optional retainer if you'd like us watching the dials with you.
The flows that quietly run a business.
Most of these aren't glamorous. They're the ones your customers notice the second they stop arriving.
Transactional
Receipts, order confirmations, shipping updates, password resets, invoices, contracts.
Lifecycle
Welcome series, onboarding nudges, activation reminders, renewal warnings, win-back.
Sales
Cold sequences, meeting confirmations, proposal chase, quote follow-ups, hand-off to a human at the right moment.
E-commerce
Abandoned cart, browse abandonment, post-purchase, replenishment, review requests. Boring until the orders stop coming back.
Support
Auto-acknowledgements that don't lie about response times, ticket updates, CSAT and NPS surveys.
Internal
Weekly digests, KPI roundups, anomaly alerts, "this thing needs a human" pings to the right person.
Compliance
GDPR re-consent, expiring card warnings, document signature chasers, audit-trail exports for the ICO.
AI-assisted
Triage of inbound replies, draft personalisation per recipient, intent detection on responses, optional human review before send. Kept on a short leash and logged.
What happens when you don't take it seriously.
Three things that have actually happened, drawn from public regulator notices and sender guidance.
HelloFresh, £140,000.
The ICO fined HelloFresh £140,000 after the company sent 79 million spam emails and 1 million spam texts over seven months. Consent for email marketing had been bundled with age confirmation.
ZMLUK, £105,000.
The ICO fined ZMLUK Limited £105,000 in January 2026 for 67,772,285 marketing emails sent between January and July 2023 without valid consent. The data came mainly from a third-party website where people weren't given clear and informed choices about marketing.
The 2024 bulk-sender change.
Google and Yahoo began enforcing bulk-sender requirements in February 2024. Gmail requires SPF, DKIM and DMARC for bulk senders, From-domain alignment, one-click unsubscribe for marketing and subscribed messages, and spam rates kept below 0.1%.
Sources: ICO press releases (Jan 2024, Jan 2026); Google Workspace Admin Help and Yahoo Sender Hub guidance; Microsoft Outlook sender policy; IETF RFC 8058; DMA UK Email Benchmarking Report 2025; Omnisend Ecommerce Marketing Report 2025.
The ones we get asked first.
We're already on Mailchimp / HubSpot / Klaviyo. Do you replace it?
Usually no. We use the platform you've already trained your team on, and we put proper engineering around it. We'll only suggest a move if the current tool is the reason things are breaking, and we'll tell you what the migration costs before you commit.
What about transactional? Stripe, Auth0, the app itself.
That's most of where we start. Transactional email is what your customers expect within seconds and what marketing teams shouldn't be touching. We route it through Postmark, Amazon SES or your preferred provider, on a separate subdomain so it doesn't share reputation with the newsletter.
We B2B email cold prospects. Are we breaking the law?
PECR carves out "corporate subscribers": companies, LLPs and Scottish partnerships. You can email them without prior consent. UK GDPR still applies to personal addresses (alex.hawke@company.com is personal data), so you need a lawful basis, a clear unsubscribe and accurate records. We'll tell you, in the audit, where your B2B list is fine and where it isn't.
Why does any of this need a developer? It's just email.
Because the bit that breaks is never the email. It's the trigger that fires twice, the webhook that retries silently, the consent record that didn't save, the merge field that renders {{first_name}} to a customer. The drag-and-drop builder is only the visible bit.
How long until something visible changes?
Audit and foundations move fast. The first real automation, live, in days. Then we release more, weekly.
How much does it cost?
Audit is fixed-fee. Foundations sprint is priced per finding. The build phase is scoped against your flow list, fixed price per phase. You get the number before we touch a record.
Do you do "AI emails"?
Yes, when it earns its keep. Reply triage, intent detection on responses, draft personalisation per recipient, sometimes the body of a sales follow-up where the context is rich enough. We keep a human in the loop on anything that could embarrass you, and we log every prompt and output. We won't auto-send something we wouldn't be happy to put our name to.
Get the email running underneath your business properly.
Send us a list of every automated email you can think of, plus the one you wish was sending and isn't. We come back with a one-page audit and a ranked fix list. Thirty minutes, no slides.