Team Madcraft
Eva is Email Marketing Lead at Madcraft, overseeing the strategy and delivery of email marketing for Irish and US clients, with a focus on customer retention, engagement, conversion, and measurable revenue growth through effective lifecycle and CRM strategies.
Most established Irish businesses have an email list and a monthly newsletter. Very few have an email programme that contributes to pipeline.
The gap between the two is not effort, It is structure. A newsletter sends the same message to everyone on the same day regardless of where they are in a buying decision. In a considered B2B sale that runs over months and involves several people, that is close to the least useful thing email can do.
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We build lifecycle journeys, segmentation and reporting that connect email to pipeline and retention, alongside the website and the rest of the marketing programme.
Because the programme was built around a send schedule rather than a buying decision. The newsletter goes out because it is the first Tuesday of the month, not because anything happened.
Three things follow from that.
The list stops being a list of prospects and becomes a list of everyone who ever downloaded anything. Engagement falls, because most recipients have no current reason to care about this month’s topic. And because engagement falls, sender reputation slips, which quietly reduces how many of the emails that do matter reach an inbox.
None of that is a content problem. You can write a better newsletter and still have the same programme.
It should do three distinct jobs, and most programmes only attempt one.
Those three jobs need different content, different timing and different measurement. Trying to serve them from one monthly send is why email underperforms in B2B. Our email marketing and retention work separates them from the start.
The stages that matter are the ones where a person’s situation changes, because that is when a message is worth sending.
For most established B2B businesses, five are enough to begin with:
Most brands have welcome and post-purchase emails. Far fewer structure them deliberately. Looking at twelve months of live data from an Irish brand’s Klaviyo account, two flows stand out, not because they’re complicated, but because the timing and segmentation are intentional.
The flow sends its first email one minute after signup, while intent is at its peak.
That email offers 15% off, a figure that was A/B tested against 10% before becoming the default. Two follow-ups follow over the next three days: one focused on product discovery, the other reinforcing the discount through styling.
But the data shows where the flow really earns its money.
Performance over 12 months:
Email 1 accounts for roughly 90% of the flow’s €342,000 in attributed annual revenue. Emails 2 and 3 still capture people who didn’t buy initially, but they’re clearly secondary.
The lesson isn’t simply “offer a discount.” It’s that the send delay is doing more work than the content. A near-instant first touch, landing when someone has just raised their hand, converts at over 13%. Nothing else comes close.
This flow takes the opposite approach. The first message waits five days, closer to when the customer has actually received and worn the item, rather than simply paid for it.
It also branches by purchase history:
Performance over 12 months:
The flow generated roughly €75,300 in attributed revenue over the year. Conversion rates are naturally lower than the welcome series because the buying moment is cooler, but segmentation keeps the experience relevant. A first-time buyer and a fifth-time buyer get different emails for a reason.
Neither flow is complicated. What they share is deliberate timing and audience segmentation: a one-minute delay instead of same-day, five days instead of instant, a tested discount instead of a guessed one, and purchase-count branches instead of one generic message.
The content matters. But it’s the structure around the content that shows up in the numbers.
What sales genuinely finds useful versus what marketing assumes they want want
In the world of Irish e-commerce, there is often a silent divide between how email performance is measured and how actual revenue is generated. As email tacticians managing Klaviyo, our interest with open and click rates is completely justified, these metrics guarantee deliverability, prove inbox placement, and confirm that our content is successfully transferring initial intent to the shopper.
For the sales side of an online brand, however, a top-line open rate is meaningless if it doesn’t move the needle on net revenue, Average Order Value (AOV), or Customer Lifetime Value (LTV).
Yet, these two perspectives cannot exist in isolation. Without high open and click rates to fuel the site, store traffic dries up, Klaviyo deliverability drops, and bottom-line revenue suffers. Marketing and sales must co-exist as a unified engine: marketing uses core email metrics to maximise reach and increase buyer interest, creating the precise high-intent traffic that the e-commerce strategy needs to convert into actual, revenue driving orders.
Segment by behaviour and stage first, then by role, then by sector. B2B lists are small, so cutting them by industry alone usually produces segments too thin to justify separate content.
Behaviour is the most useful and most neglected input. Someone who has read three service pages this month is in a different position from someone who opened a newsletter in March. Role matters next: a Finance Director and a Marketing Manager on the same buying committee need different reassurance about the same purchase.
A practical starting point is a grid of three engagement tiers against three lifecycle stages. That gives nine segments, which is far more targeting than most established businesses currently apply and few enough to maintain. Our existing guide on how to segment an email list effectively covers the mechanics in more detail.
The welcome sequence, then post-enquiry follow-up, then reactivation. In that order, because that is the order of attention and effort.
Triggered emails consistently outperform scheduled ones because they arrive when something has just happened. Brevo’s 2026 benchmark data puts automated email open rates at 30.63% against 20.73% for standard campaigns, and shows European lists engaging above the global average, which is generally attributed to consent-based list building under GDPR.
One caution on benchmarks. Most widely quoted email statistics, including the well-known figures on revenue per recipient, come from datasets weighted heavily towards ecommerce. They are useful for direction and misleading as targets for a business with a six-month sales cycle and a €50,000 project value. Set your own baseline, then improve against it.
Email should be able to react to what someone does on the website and to what the CRM already knows about them. Without those two connections it is a broadcast tool with better design.
Three connections are worth building early:
This is also where email stops being a channel and becomes part of the wider system. It works best alongside the website and the rest of the marketing programme rather than beside them, which is the argument we make in what to do when a website gets traffic but no enquiries and the reason a digital growth strategy should cover email rather than treat it as a separate exercise.
Deliverability sits underneath all of it. Authentication requirements at the major mailbox providers have tightened, and a programme with a weak sender reputation will underperform no matter how good the segmentation is. Our guide to email deliverability covers the technical setup.
Measure what email caused, not what it triggered in a tracking pixel. Apple Mail Privacy Protection pre-loads images, which inflates open rates and makes them unreliable as a performance measure or as an engagement segment.
A more honest set for B2B:
The point of measurement here is not a nicer dashboard. It is being able to answer, in front of a board, what email contributed. That is a very different conversation from reporting a 24% open rate.
Yes, particularly for nurture and retention, where the sales cycle is long and buyers are not ready when they first make contact. Madcraft builds B2B email marketing as a lifecycle programme rather than a monthly newsletter.
A set of email journeys triggered by where someone is in the buying or client relationship, rather than by a fixed send schedule. Madcraft builds these around the stages that matter in a longer B2B sale, from first enquiry through to retention.
A campaign is sent to a segment at a chosen time. A flow is triggered by something a person did, so it arrives when it is relevant. Madcraft usually builds the core flows before increasing campaign volume.
Open rates are inflated by privacy features that pre-load images, so a high number can mean very little. Madcraft reports on replies, clicks against delivered volume and influenced pipeline instead.
By syncing contact records and lifecycle stage both ways, so email can react to sales activity and sales can see what a contact has read. Madcraft scopes this as part of the reporting and tracking setup.
Welcome and follow-up sequences can show engagement within weeks, while nurture and retention effects follow the length of your sales cycle. Madcraft sets the measurement window against your actual cycle rather than a standard reporting month.
