How to set up email marketing/automations on the cheap.

I'm setting up our welcome email onboarding for Xtreeks and thought I'd share the email automation for our other app as an example (shown below). It's over a year long and still has a decent open rate. I prune every couple of months to remove non-openers.

The email series is for merchants using our Shopify app. It gives 60-second summaries of marketing research (summarized by AI) and links back to the study.

I've tailored the prompt over the last year and it works pretty well, especially since I wrote the first dozen or so myself to give it examples. I still get emails from readers about how useful the content is.

What I use: Email marketing is usually overpriced, but if you can do without the fancy features and send from your AWS account it's pretty cheap. We use the Connect plan on Email Octopus, which is only $23/month for 5K subscribers.

I just use a basic plain text template, automations, and send out a few one-off campaigns every now and then. It's the cheapest option I've found without doing more setup/maintenance myself.

For Xtreeks I plan to start with emails about basic habit formation that helped me, then maybe some motivational stuff after that about doing hard things. We'll see what resonates.