5% of the emails.41% of the money.

Revenue as each platform credits it to its own emails.

Where the money really comes from.

Ask a CRM team what they're working on and you'll hear about the next campaign: the sale, the launch, the Friday newsletter. Ask where email's money comes from and the answer is somewhere else.

Omnisend looked at 27 billion emails sent by more than 150,000 brands in 2025. Automated emails were 2% of them, and brought in 30% of email revenue.¹ Klaviyo's benchmarks, from more than 183,000 brands, tell the same story: flows are 5.3% of sends and nearly 41% of email revenue.²

UK marketers are catching on. In the DMA's 2026 tracker, automated emails made up 34% of what marketers send, up nine points since 2021. The share who say triggered emails make their email more effective rose from 16% in 2021 to 26%.³

Why flows win: the customer's timing, not yours.

A campaign goes out when the calendar says so. A flow goes out when the customer does something: signs up, fills a basket, buys, goes quiet, clicks cancel. It lands when they're already thinking about you.

That timing shows in the numbers. Flows get more than three times the click rate of campaigns, and a placed-order rate 13 times higher. Nearly half of flow revenue comes from new buyers, against 16% for campaigns.²

UK shoppers stand out, too. Of the nine countries Omnisend compared for email, UK email clicks turned into purchases most often: 16.54% of the time in 2025.¹

Built once, then left.

Here's the odd thing. The emails that make the most money get the least attention. Flows are often built when a new platform goes in, then left to run while the team gets on with the campaign calendar.

So the welcome email your newest customer got this morning may be years old. Same words, same image, same offer, for every single person, whatever they bought and whoever they are.

That's the opportunity hiding in plain sight.

Where a personal hero pays its way.

Flows already know something about each customer: what they left in their basket, when they last bought, what they're about to cancel. A personalised, animated hero puts that right at the top of the email, instead of one image for everyone.

Nature's Menu put each customer's name, their dog's name and a dog of the same breed into its welcome, abandoned basket and cancellation emails. The abandoned basket converted 18% better, and cancellations fell by about 30%. Its reactivation email offered 20% off instead of 40%, and still brought more customers back.

Movement catches the eye. A detail that's theirs gives them a reason to act. The science is in our read on cognitive overload.

Cancelling gets easier in 2027. Make staying worth it.

For subscription brands, one flow is about to matter more. The UK has around 155 million active subscriptions, worth about £26 billion a year, and an estimated 9.7 million of them are unwanted.⁷

New rules under the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act are expected from January 2027. Cancelling will have to be straightforward, with no steps that aren't reasonably necessary, and there will be a new 14-day cooling-off period when a trial rolls into a paid subscription, or a contract of a year or more renews.^{8, 9}

Save offers are still allowed, but they mustn't frustrate the process or drag it out.⁷ So the cancellation email can't be a hurdle. It has to be a reason: their dog, their progress, the thing they'd miss.