Digital Marketing
Email Automation & CRM
Automation is a multiplier. Applied to a broken process it multiplies the breakage and posts it to more people.
Email automation and CRM setup makes follow-up happen without anybody remembering to do it: welcome sequences, abandoned baskets, nurture and re-engagement, running on contact data that stays accurate. The Nexclick builds the CRM foundation first, because automation on bad data sends the wrong email faster.
Is this you?
What usually prompts the call
- Enquiries get one reply and then nothing until somebody happens to remember.
- Your CRM is a spreadsheet, or a CRM nobody updates, which amounts to the same thing.
- Abandoned baskets and abandoned quotes are not followed up at all.
- A lead who goes quiet for two months is effectively lost for good.
What we do
The actual deliverables
Things that appear on an invoice, not adjectives.
- Get the CRM foundation right first
- Fields, stages, ownership and what must be true for a record to move between them. Automation built on inconsistent data produces confidently wrong emails at scale, which is worse than none.
- Map only the sequences worth building
- Welcome, enquiry follow-up, abandoned basket, post-purchase, re-engagement and win-back. Two or three of them reliably carry almost all of the return.
- Write them properly
- Automated does not mean generic. A three-email follow-up written around the objection that actually loses you deals outperforms a twelve-email nurture written for nobody in particular.
- Trigger on behaviour, not only on elapsed time
- Sent because of something the person did rather than because four days passed. Time-only sequences cheerfully email people about things they have already bought.
- Exit and suppression rules
- The part that gets skipped and the part that generates complaints. Anyone who replies, buys or unsubscribes must drop out of every running sequence immediately, not at the next step.
- Connect everything that creates a contact
- Forms, checkout, phone calls and the ad platforms, so nothing arrives in the business without an owner and a source attached to it.
- Hand back to a human at the right moment
- A notification to a named person when somebody shows real intent. The single most valuable automation in most businesses is the one telling a salesperson to pick up the phone now.
- Document every automation
- What triggers it, what stops it, and who to ask about it. Undocumented automations are the ones still emailing customers three years after the person who built them left.
Checklist
The sequences worth building, in order of return
Built in roughly this order for most businesses. The first three routinely produce more than everything below them combined, and a good number of companies should simply stop after them.
- 01Enquiry follow-up — three emails answering the objection that actually loses you deals.
- 02Abandoned basket or abandoned quote — the highest-return automation in ecommerce, by a distance.
- 03Sales handover alert — a named person told the moment somebody shows real intent.
- 04Welcome sequence — what you do, what to expect, and how often you intend to email.
- 05Post-purchase — delivery, setup help, and a review request timed after value is felt rather than after dispatch.
- 06Re-engagement — one honest attempt before removing somebody from the list entirely.
- 07Win-back for lapsed customers — priced as an offer rather than sent as a reminder.
- 08Renewal or reorder prompts where your product has a genuinely predictable cycle.
- 09Internal alerts when records go stale in a stage nobody is watching.
- 10Anything beyond this list, only once everything above it is working.
How it works
Step by step, with timeframes
Timeframes are typical rather than guaranteed, and they assume we get account access and approvals when we ask.
- 01Week 1–2
CRM audit and data clean
Fields, duplicates, stages and what the data can actually support. Reliably the least popular fortnight of the engagement and the one everything else depends on.
- 02Week 2–3
Sequence mapping
Which sequences, what triggers each, what stops it, and what a human being does at the end of it.
- 03Week 3–5
Build and test
Built, then tested with real records through every path including the exit rules, before a single live contact is allowed to enter one.
- 04Week 5–6
Launch and monitor
Live in stages rather than all at once, with the first fortnight of each sequence watched closely for anything the tests did not surface.
What you get
Reporting and ownership
- A CRM with defined fields, stages and ownership rules, documented in writing.
- Sequences with exit and suppression rules tested before anything went live.
- An alert to a named person when a contact shows genuine buying intent.
- A written map of every automation: trigger, content, exit conditions and owner.
- Everything inside your own accounts, with our access removable at any time.
Tools and platforms
- HubSpot, ActiveCampaign, Klaviyo or Pipedrive
- Form and checkout integrations
- n8n, Make or Zapier where no native connection exists
- GA4 and offline conversion import
- CRM reporting
Timeline
How long this actually takes
Five to six weeks, of which the first two are CRM work rather than email. That order matters and is frequently resisted, because the CRM fortnight has nothing to show for it. Two honest constraints. Automation multiplies whatever process you already have — if your follow-up is poor, automating it produces poor follow-up faster and to more people. And there is a ceiling: a twelve-email nurture sequence is usually a sign nobody wanted to have the sales conversation. Three good emails and a phone call outperform twelve automated ones in almost every business we have built this for.
Pricing model
Fixed-price project
Fixed price for CRM setup and the initial sequences. Ongoing optimisation sits inside a wider retainer, and plenty of clients maintain it themselves afterwards — the documentation is written to allow exactly that.
Questions
Email Automation & CRM questions
Which CRM should we use?
For most UK small and mid-sized businesses, Pipedrive or HubSpot’s free tier is enough for years. The expensive question is not which one but whether your team will update it. A cheap CRM that gets used beats an expensive one that becomes a second address book.
How many emails should a nurture sequence contain?
Fewer than you have been sold. Three to five, each with a reason to exist, then a human being. Long sequences correlate with businesses avoiding the sales conversation, and their later emails are typically opened by almost nobody while still counting against your sender reputation.
Why does the CRM work come before the automation?
Because every automation reads the data. Inconsistent stages, duplicate records and half-filled fields mean sequences fire at the wrong people with confident wording. Two dull weeks of data work prevents the failure mode where automation makes your business look careless at scale.
What are suppression rules and why do they matter?
They stop somebody receiving a sequence they should no longer be in — because they replied, bought, complained or entered a different sequence. Missing them is how a customer gets an email urging them to buy the thing they bought yesterday, and it is the most common complaint trigger.
Will automation replace our sales follow-up?
No, and it should not. It handles the mechanical part — the reminder, the resource, the nudge — so a person is free for the conversation that closes. Businesses automating the whole follow-up usually see response rates fall, because the recipient can tell.
How does this differ from marketing automation?
This is email sequences plus the CRM underneath them, appropriate to most businesses. Marketing automation is the wider platform — lead scoring, multi-channel workflows, routing across a sales team — which is genuinely useful above a certain volume and overpriced below it.
What happens if we want to change platform later?
The documented map is written to be platform-agnostic — triggers, content and exit rules described in plain terms rather than as screenshots. Migration is still real work, but you will not be reverse-engineering your own automations from the interface of a tool you are leaving.
Last reviewed 28 July 2026.
Tell us what you are trying to fix
A 20-minute call, no pitch deck. The Nexclick will tell you what we would do, roughly what it costs, and whether we are the right people for it.