The Three Sequences That Drive Revenue

On the path to $1M ARR, three email sequences drive the majority of email-attributed revenue: trial conversion, dunning, and expansion. Everything else is secondary until these three are working.

Trial conversion emails get more free users to become paying customers. Dunning emails recover failed payments that would otherwise become silent churn. Expansion emails convert growing usage into higher-tier subscriptions. If you only have time to build three sequences, build these three and optimize them relentlessly.

Trial Conversion Is Your Growth Lever

Between zero and $1M ARR, improving your trial-to-paid conversion rate is the single highest-leverage activity. If you have 500 trial signups per month and convert 5%, that is 25 new customers. Improving to 7% is 35 new customers from the same traffic. That is 40% more revenue with zero additional acquisition cost.

Email is the primary lever for trial conversion. The right onboarding sequence gets users to their activation moment faster. The right conversion email arrives at the moment of maximum engagement. The right urgency email at trial end creates action. Invest heavily in optimizing this sequence.

Dunning Is Free Revenue

Failed payments are the most overlooked revenue leak in SaaS. At $1M ARR, involuntary churn from failed payments can cost $50K-100K per year. A three-email dunning sequence recovers 30-50% of those failures. This is revenue you already earned being returned to you by an automated email.

Set up your dunning sequence today if you have not already. Send an email at payment failure, at day 3, and at day 7. Include a direct link to update payment info. Make the tone friendly, not threatening. This sequence literally pays for your email tool many times over.