The Five Automated Emails Every Indian SMB Should Already Be Running (2026): What the Rs.20,000 Nurture Plan Covers

A small business with an email list usually sends campaigns when someone remembers and runs no automation at all, which leaves the cheapest sales channel it owns switched off between sends. Our email marketing and automation page names the automated emails it builds first and the order it builds them in, and sells three plans that maintain 1, 3 or 6 plus of them: Nurture at Rs.20,000 a month, Automate at Rs.40,000 and Lifecycle at Rs.75,000, with the email tool paid in your own account. Our email and CRM cost guide covers what those plans cost against the market. This playbook does a narrower job: it takes the five automated emails one at a time, with the trigger and timing the page publishes, what each one is for and which plan keeps it running. Every figure is from the live page read on 1 November 2026; the yearly totals are our arithmetic. Neither the page nor this guide publishes an open-rate or click-rate benchmark, and the measurement section says why.

What are the five automated emails, and when does each one fire?

The page lists them in build order: a welcome flow, then an abandonment flow for a store or a lead nurture flow for a service or B2B business, then a win-back, and after those three a post-purchase or post-service sequence and a renewal reminder. The table puts each one beside its trigger, the timing the page publishes and the plans that maintain it.

Two readings. First, only the first two emails come with a published count: 3 emails in the welcome series and 3 steps in the abandonment or nurture sequence, 6 emails between them on our arithmetic. The other three are timed to your own data, the date of silence, the delivery date and the replacement cycle, so their schedule is written in the audit, not copied from a template. Second, a business runs either 2a or 2b, not both, which is why the count is five even though the table has six rows.

Which automated email should run first on the Rs.20,000 Nurture plan?

The Nurture card lists 4 campaigns a month with copy and design, 1 automated flow maintained, list hygiene, SPF, DKIM and DMARC deliverability and a monthly report. One flow means one of the five. The page says its build order is the same for most businesses and puts the welcome flow first, so on Nurture the welcome series is the default: it acts on every new contact the day they arrive, and the page expects welcome and abandonment flows to show orders or replies within the first month for exactly that reason.

The exception is our judgment, not a line on the page: a store that already has a working welcome series in its tool and loses a visible share of checkouts may get more from making abandonment its one maintained flow. Either way the plan maintains it, which the page defines as reviewed monthly for drop-off and rewritten when a step stops earning its place. A year on Nurture is Rs.2,40,000 before GST, or Rs.2,83,200 with 18 percent GST, for 48 campaigns and one flow kept working for 12 months, on our arithmetic.

How many of the five does each plan cover, and what does a year cost?

The step from Automate to Lifecycle is Rs.35,000 a month, Rs.4,20,000 a year before GST, and it is not the price of emails four and five. Lifecycle also buys email, WhatsApp and SMS orchestration with shared suppression rules, RFM segmentation, HubSpot Professional or Zoho Marketing Automation administration, sales handoff rules and a weekly dashboard. A business that wants all five emails but not the other channels should say so in the audit rather than buy Lifecycle for two flows. If WhatsApp is already your main retention channel, our WhatsApp versus email retention comparison works through which messages belong on which channel before you decide.

What has to be fixed before any automated email sends?

Automated emails go out every day without anyone pressing send, so a broken sending setup damages them first and quietly. The page spends the first two weeks of every plan on the foundation: SPF, DKIM and DMARC records verified on your sending domain, a dedicated sending subdomain where volume justifies it, bounces and dead contacts removed and a warm-up schedule for a new domain. Mailbox providers now require bulk senders to authenticate, to offer one-click unsubscribe and to keep spam complaint rates well under 0.3 percent, as Google's email sender guidelines set out, and the page says most programmes it audits are missing one of these, usually DMARC.

• Weeks 1 and 2: authentication verified, list cleaned, sending subdomain and warm-up if needed, tool and CRM accounts confirmed in your name.
• Weeks 3 and 4: the plan's flows built and documented with their timing, branches and exit rules, and the first month's campaign calendar approved.
• From then on: bounces removed after every send, and contacts silent for 90 to 180 days moved to a re-engagement flow and then suppressed, which is the win-back email doing its second job.
• The tool bill sits outside every plan and is paid by you: Zoho Campaigns is free up to 2,000 contacts and Mailchimp starts at about Rs.770 to Rs.1,150 a month for small lists, on the page's figures.

How should each automated email be judged without benchmark open rates?

The page publishes no open-rate or click-rate benchmark and neither do we. Averages from a tool vendor are taken across lists, industries and countries that are not yours, and open counts in particular are distorted by mail apps that load images automatically. What the page does publish is what gets reported: open, click, reply, unsubscribe and complaint rates per campaign and per flow, plus attributed orders or pipeline where your CRM or store allows it, monthly on Nurture, fortnightly on Automate and weekly on Lifecycle. That is enough to judge every flow against its own previous month.

One rule from the page runs across all five: complaint rate first. The founder note commits that if complaint rates rise, the report leads with that, not with the open rate, because complaints are what move a domain toward the spam folder for every email you send, campaigns included.

Which plan fits which business?

A business with a small list and no automation today starts on Nurture at Rs.20,000 with the welcome series as its one flow, because that email reaches every new contact. A store selling through its own ecommerce website gets the most from Automate at Rs.40,000, since the abandonment email at 1, 24 and 72 hours only exists on a site that can trigger it. A service or B2B business uses the same plan with lead nurture in place of abandonment, and if its enquiries come from a B2B lead generation programme, the nurture flow is what follows each lead up when the salesperson is busy. Brands that want the review request and renewal emails, or that run WhatsApp marketing alongside email, are on Lifecycle at Rs.75,000. The review request also feeds the review count that our online reputation management page works on. Every price above is on our pricing page, plus 18 percent GST for Indian clients, with the email tool paid by you.