The emails that sell while you're on the beach

August is a strange month for drinks brands. Half your customers are on holiday, your team wants a break too, and the temptation is to let marketing idle until September. Resist it. August is the ideal month to build the machinery that sells without you, because the work you do now pays out for the rest of the year.

Last month I made the case that email is your highest-return channel. This month, the how. It comes down to two words that sound technical but really just mean “stop treating everyone the same”: segmentation and automation.

A flat list is a leaky bucket. Segments and flows are the patch.

Segmentation is simply grouping people by what they've actually done: bought rosé but never red, opened every email but never purchased, spent £200 last year but nothing since. Once you can see those groups, you can speak to each one properly. The natural-wine buyer doesn't want your bulk-case offer, and the lapsed big-spender needs a different nudge than a brand-new subscriber.

Automation is what makes that scalable. You set the rules once (when someone abandons a basket, send this; when someone hasn't bought in 90 days, send that) and the system does the rest, around the clock, while you're firmly out of office. It's exactly the kind of build I set up for clients in Klaviyo and Mailchimp, and it's the closest thing to passive revenue a small drinks brand can get.

Setting up your first automation? Reply to any issue of The Pour with the platform you're on and I'll point you to the one flow worth building first, or book a 20-minute chat in my diary.