Email marketing 2026: drip campaigns, segmentation and triggers

Email marketing has been buried since 2015 - in every second post about “new channels”. Meanwhile, I have projects where an email funnel gives 9-11% conversion to a purchase with an average receipt of 25,000 rubles. Not because the email “returned” - it never left. It’s just that those who build drip campaigns with normal segmentation do it unnoticed and without unnecessary noise.

I have been working with email marketing since 2017. During this time, about 30 projects with mailing lists passed through my hands - from an online store with a base of 800 people to EdTech with 240,000 subscribers. The numbers in the article are from practice and correspondence with colleagues from 4 different ESPs. Not benchmarks from American reports, which have little relation to the Russian market.

The main misunderstanding about email marketing is that they think it’s about the frequency of mailings. It’s more correct to think that this is about the moment. The right email at the right time converts 5 times better than the perfect email sent at the wrong time.

1. Why email is not dead: real numbers 2026

Every time someone writes “email is dead,” I look at the numbers of my projects and don’t understand what they are talking about. In the first quarter of 2026, on one of the EdTech projects, the email funnel brought in 4.2 million rubles at a cost of tools of 38,000 rubles/month. It's awkward to calculate ROI.

Where does the myth about the “death of email” come from? People confuse two different products. First - mass promotional mailings “everyone on the base once a week with a discount.” They are really degrading: the open rate is falling, Gmail and Yandex.Mail are more and more aggressively sorting such letters into promos. Second - trigger and drip series by behavior. Their open rate is growing because the algorithms of email clients are able to distinguish what is relevant from spam.

Benchmarks for the Russian market 2026, which I collected from my projects and partner data from three ESPs:

The difference between mass and trigger is on average 15-20 percentage points in open rate. It's not magic, it's just relevance: a person receives an email at the moment when he was already thinking about the product.

2. Drip vs mass mailing: consider using an example

Specific case: EdTech, online courses in design, average bill 18,000 ₽, base 45,000 people. In 2023, the client sent one promotional mailing per week - discounts, announcements, “have time to buy.” Open rate 14%, CTR 2.8%, conversion to purchase 0.4%. During the quarter - 23 sales from email.

We rebuilt to drip campaign with behavioral segmentation. The database was divided into three segments: new leads (0-30 days), warm (they clicked, but did not buy), and dormant (90+ days without activity). Each has its own series. The promotional newsletter was retained, but once every two weeks instead of weekly.

Result after 90 days: open rate increased to 27%, CTR 6.4%, conversion to purchase 2.1%. 94 sales from email with the same database volume. Revenue from the channel increased 4.1 times. The only expenses are 6 weeks of work to rebuild the funnel and switch to a more expensive Sendsay tariff (+12,000 ₽/month).

Mass mailing “the same to everyone” = you sell to one buyer from ten different stages of readiness. Drip - you talk to everyone at their own pace.

3. Segmentation: 5 levels from basic to advanced

Most mailings get stuck at level 1. Some get to 3. I've seen levels 4-5 in less than 10% of projects, but that's where 9%+ conversions live.

Level 1 - by lead source. Those who came from the free webinar landing page receive the “onboarding for beginners” series. Who bought a paid product - the “onboarding for clients” series. This is the minimum without which email marketing does not work at all.

Level 2 - by activity. We divide the base into active (opened in 90 days), dormant (90-180), dead (180+). Active - regular emails. Sleeping - win-back. Dead ones - we delete them or transfer them to a separate reactivation campaign once a quarter.

Level 3 - based on behavior on the site. Here you need ESP integration with the site (pixel or API). I looked at the product page and after 48 hours I received an email with details. I put it in the basket and an hour later I received a letter saying “you forgot something.” It's already lead nurturing in the classical sense.

Level 4 - RFM segmentation. Recency (recency of purchase), Frequency (how often he buys), Monetary (how much he spent). Buyers in the “champion” category (purchased recently, often for a large amount) receive early access to new products. “At risk” (they haven’t bought for a long time, but they spent a lot before) - a personal offer with a deadline.

Level 5 - predictive segmentation. A behavioral history model predicts when a specific user is ready to buy. In the Russian Federation, Mindbox can do this natively. It costs from 50,000 ₽/month, but on large databases it pays off quickly.

4. Trigger series: onboarding, abandoned cart, win-back

Three series that I set up first on every project - they give 80% of the result. The rest is fine tuning.

Onboarding-series. Triggered when registering or downloading a lead magnet. The structure that works for me: letter 1 (day 0) - greeting + the most valuable benefit that the person expected. Letter 2 (day 2) - client case or story. Letter 3 (day 4) - dealing with the main objection of the niche. Letter 4 (day 7) - first offer, soft. Letter 5 (day 10) - offer with a deadline. Letter 6 (day 14) - “last chance”, final deadline. Average for 8 projects: onboarding to purchase conversion is 4.8-8.2%.

Abandoned cart. The most converting trigger in e-com. Letter 1 - 1 hour after the abandoned cart: “you left something.” No pressure, no discount. Just a reminder with a picture of the product. Letter 2 - after 24 hours: we add social proof (reviews of this product) or remove the objection (free return, guarantee). Letter 3 - in 72 hours: a small bonus if it is relevant in the economy. According to my projects at e-com, an abandoned cart recovers 6-11% of abandoned purchases.

Win-back-series. Triggered when a person has not opened a letter for 90 days (or has not purchased for 180 days, for e-com). Three emails 7 days apart: “we’re interested in what you think” (survey), “here’s what’s changed since then” (product news), “personal offer - or say goodbye.” The last letter is honest: “if you don’t open this letter either, we’ll write it down so as not to bother you.” Reactivates 8-15% of the sleeping base. The rest are deleted. This is not a loss, this is a cleansing.

5. Lead scoring in email: how not to call those who are not ready

Typical problem in B2B: marketing passes 200 leads a week to sales, sales calls everyone, conversion is 1.5%, managers are tired and hate leads. The problem is not the number of leads. The problem is that among the 200 there are 30 hot ones and 170 “just downloaded the PDF”.

Lead scoring solves this through points. My standard scheme:

The threshold for transfer to sales is 35 points. When this threshold is reached, the lead automatically drops into the CRM with the tag “hot” and a task to call within 2 hours. Up to 35 points - the email funnel refines itself.

On one B2B project (SaaS for HR, average bill 180,000 ₽/year), after the introduction of scoring, the conversion from lead to deal increased from 1.8% to 6.4%. Managers called 3.5 times fewer people and closed 3.5 times more deals. This is not about managers working better. This is about the fact that they stopped wasting time on people who are not yet ready.

6. Tech stack: ESP, CRM, automation

When they ask me “which ESP to choose”, I always answer with the question: “what about your CRM?” Choosing an ESP without understanding CRM is a waste of time.

The stack I use most often on current projects:

• Unisender — when the budget is limited and quick basic automation is needed. Up to 15,000 contacts are cheap, there is an API, and integration with amoCRM via webhook works. Disadvantage: triggers based on behavior on the site - you need to install additional tools.
• Sendsay - my main recommendation for medium-sized businesses. Normal automation, behavioral segmentation, good deliverability. From 8,000 ₽/month for the 25K+ base.
• Mindbox — when you need a full-fledged CDP with RFM, predictive analytics and deep integration with CRM. E-com from 1,000 orders per day - their level. From 50,000 ₽/month, but it pays off.
• amoCRM / Bitrix24 — on the CRM side there is no fundamental difference if you teach how to correctly tag leads by behavior and assign points. AmoCRM is more convenient for funnels, Bitrix24 is better for large teams with complex processes.

About integration: it is necessary for ESP and CRM to “see” each other in real time. The lead scored 35 points in Sendsay - the task was created in amoCRM in 30 seconds. This is configured via webhook. On most projects I spend 2-4 hours on this - not days. If the contractor says “integration will take 2 weeks,” something is going wrong.

For more information about building a funnel in general, see the article about sales funnel 2026.

7. Metrics and benchmarks: what to consider, what to ignore

The metrics that clients look at and the metrics that I look at are often different.

The client usually asks: “how many letters were sent”, “what is the open rate”, “how much has the base grown”. I look at three numbers: conversion from an email to a sale (or to a target action), revenue per email (revenue per email sent), unsubscribe rate as an indicator of the health of the base.

Open rate is an important metric, but it lies. Since 2022, Apple Mail Privacy Protection has been enabled for some of the audience by default, and Russian mail providers have a similar policy. Openings are counted without actually opening. Therefore, I use open rate for relative comparison (this series vs that series), and not as an absolute truth.

Revenue per email (RPE) is an honest metric. If one mailing received 15 orders for 10,000 people at 5,000 ₽ = 75,000 ₽, RPE = 7.5 ₽/letter. A good guideline for e-com is 5-20 RUB/letter, depending on the niche. Less than 3 ₽ - the funnel does not work.

An unsubscribe rate above 0.5% for a newsletter is an alarming signal. Either the letter is irrelevant for part of the database (solution: segmentation), or the mailings are too frequent (solution: less often). If unsubscribes are above 1%, this is no longer an alarm, it’s a fire.

You can read about building analytics and end-to-end metrics for all channels in the next article - there is also about attribution and what to do when data from different sources does not converge.

8. What to do right now

If you already have a database and mailing list, the first step is not to “buy Mindbox”. The first step is to segment by activity: active, dormant, dead. Launch win-back for sleepers (3 letters, 7 days interval). Remove dead. This takes 1 business day and immediately improves deliverability.

If there is no database, start with onboarding. Lead magnet (PDF, checklist, template) + 5-7 emails on behavior after downloading. The conversion of onboarding into a purchase will be higher than any promotional mailing on a cold base.

If B2B is a sales department, first and foremost is lead scoring. This is not an email project, this is a sales effectiveness project. Email here is simply a channel for transmitting information.

Related materials: benchmarks for open rate email campaigns, cold email chain templates, what is a drip campaign, lead nurturing in detail, email chain generator.

If you want to analyze your specific situation, write to Telegram or through form. Starting consultation - 0 ₽.