AI-powered e-commerce email automation platform
A SaaS product that grew out of an expert-driven business and recouped its investment in under six months.
About the Project
Flowmail is a web platform for e-commerce teams that enables non-specialists to launch email campaigns and automations. Users work with scenarios, segmentation, and content within a single product, while results are presented through clear, revenue-focused views. AI is embedded into the workflow as an editorial assistant, suggesting improvements before launch and offering controlled, actionable variants.
About Customer
Mary is the founder of a marketing and advertising agency that spent years growing e-commerce brands through hands-on campaign execution. She understands the cost of small mistakes in segmentation, subject lines, and timing. Flowmail was her idea — to package the agency’s approach into a platform that an in-house store employee can use without specialized support.
Agency logic vs. product system
The challenge was to turn scenarios, rules, segmentation, and performance tracking into a self-sustaining system that operates without constant marketer involvement.
Revenue without manual reconciliation
Campaign and revenue data were fragmented across ESPs, storefronts, and analytics tools. As a result, decisions were based on intuition instead of clear, structured performance views.
Making AI actually useful
AI could not be just a chat. It had to deliver context-aware suggestions tied to a specific campaign, segment, and goal — with controlled application rather than blind generation.
Evolving the content library
Templates, scenarios, documentation, copy, and configurations had to be updated through an editorial workflow. Without it, every small change would require developer involvement and slow the product down.
Proposed Solution
We built a headless architecture where Directus serves as the operational core of the product, and the web application acts as the working interface for the marketing team. Directus manages structures and rules (scenarios, templates, segments, roles, and knowledge base), while a Node.js API layer handles core business logic — campaign execution, validation, and analytics.
Directus as the source of truth
We configured Directus content models for the scenario library, email templates, knowledge base, system settings, and access roles. This allows the agency team to expand the content base independently while maintaining consistent standards across all stores.
Campaign workflow
We implemented the campaign lifecycle in the API: draft → review → ready to launch → sending → completed. Key steps include required fields, segment validation, frequency limits, status tracking, and full change history.
Segmentation
We built segmentation as reusable inclusion and exclusion rules based on user attributes and behavior. Segments can be reused across scenarios, removing dependency on manual lists and reducing pre-launch errors.
Revenue analytics
We implemented event-based data collection and normalization across campaigns and flows. Metrics are exposed in the product as structured views — by period, scenario, segment, and channel — so decisions are made directly inside Flowmail.
AI assistant
We embedded AI into the email editor as an inline assistant. It provides suggestions for subject lines, structure, segment fit, and reasoning behind recommendations, with the ability to apply changes partially. Final control remains with the user.
We translated the agency’s playbook into product logic. Starting from the initial brief, we refined and extended the core workflows, defining the MVP around controlled campaign execution and measurable outcomes without manual reconciliation across tools. We also defined the role of AI as a built-in advisor rather than a standalone feature.
+1 Resource
Results
The product was built to turn the agency’s approach into a repeatable process for e-commerce teams.
60–90 minutes
to prepare a seasonal campaign — down from 4–6 hours of manual setup
15–30 minutes
to update a template across the catalog — down from 1–2 days of designer + developer time
25–40%
editor time saved per campaign with the AI assistant
One dashboard
Sends, opens, clicks, and attributed revenue visible in one dashboard, replacing four-tab spreadsheet reporting
Agency knowledge productized
new merchants onboard in days, not weeks
Get in Touch
Or send us a message and we'll get back to you within 15 minutes during business hours