Turn one-time customers into regulars

Most projects begin with a list nobody has looked at in years. Picture a bakery that has collected email addresses at the till since the day it opened and never written to anyone. Before a single message goes out, that list is cleaned. Addresses that keep bouncing are removed, inactive people are put in their own group and given one friendly chance to stay, and new sign-ups confirm their address by clicking a link in their first email⁵.

Then comes the plumbing that decides whether an email lands in the inbox or in spam. Google asks every sender to prove its emails are genuine with records called SPF or DKIM, and to keep spam complaints below 0.3%⁶. Anyone sending more than 5,000 messages a day to Gmail must also set up DMARC and offer one-click unsubscribe⁶. A new branded sending domain is warmed up slowly, and Klaviyo suggests about 30 days of steady sending with good results before switching to it⁴.

Only then do the automatic messages get built. Klaviyo recommends four to start with, a welcome series for new subscribers, an abandoned cart reminder, a thank you after purchase and a winback for people who bought once and drifted away⁷. Think of a customer who fills a cart on her phone late at night and falls asleep before paying. The next morning a short, friendly email reminds her what she left behind, and nobody had to remember to send it.

Behind it all sits the CRM, where each contact carries a stage such as subscriber, lead or customer, so you can see where everyone stands⁸. In Indonesia, where nine in ten people use WhatsApp every month, follow-up often moves there too⁹. WhatsApp asks for opt-in before the first message, respect for every opt-out and a quick path to a real person whenever a chat is automated¹⁰. No platform publishes a standard schedule for this work, so the timeline below shows how such projects usually run.