The Complete Guide to a High-Performing Email Marketing Strategy for Life Science Companies

A researcher downloads your whitepaper.

A clinician visits your booth at a conference.

A distributor browses your product page but leaves without making contact.

Yet in each of these scenarios, meaningful first impressions often fail to convert into qualified leads. Too often, these opportunities are lost due to a lack of structured, ongoing communication. Email marketing is treated as an afterthought, and executed inconsistently without a clear strategy or understanding of the recipient’s journey.

In a sector where sales cycles are long, decisions are evidence-based, and relationships are built on trust, this is a critical missed opportunity. A well-executed email marketing strategy provides a consistent, cost-effective way to educate prospects, nurture leads, and guide them toward meaningful action.

In this guide, we outline the core types of email campaigns and automation flows tailored for science-based organisations, explore how to select the right approach based on your objectives, and highlight best practices to build a high-performing, data-driven strategy that drives long-term impact.

Types of Email Campaigns and Flows for Science Businesses

1. Conversion Flow

Purpose: This flow is designed to guide potential customers or partners toward a high-intent action, such as booking a demo, downloading technical content, or requesting a quote or sample, which are key milestones in a science buyer’s journey.
Content: Emphasise your scientific differentiators such as unique technology, validated data, application notes, or customer use cases. Position your offering as a direct solution to a known challenge or unmet need within their workflow.
CTA: Include strong, context-aware calls to action that align with where the contact is in their decision process. Examples include: “Request a Sample,” “Access Validation Data,” or “Speak to a Specialist.” The goal is to reduce friction and build confidence in taking the next step.

2. Welcome Flow

Purpose: This flow is automatically triggered when a new contact enters your ecosystem, whether through a trade show interaction, website form, or gated content download. It serves as your first opportunity to make a strong, professional impression.
Content: Introduce your company’s mission, scientific expertise, and the value you deliver to your target audience. Clearly communicate what subscribers can expect from future emails, and position your brand as a credible, trusted voice in the field.
CTA: Guide the new contact toward meaningful first actions such as “Explore Our Solutions,” “Read Our Latest Validation Study,” or “Subscribe to Industry Updates.” The objective is to foster engagement from the outset and establish relevance.

3. Upselling or Cross-Selling Flow

Purpose: This flow is aimed at existing customers or high-intent leads, offering complementary tools, consumables, or upgraded services that extend the value of their initial purchase or inquiry.
Content: Present related products or services that logically align with their previous engagement. Emphasise how these additions can streamline workflows, improve performance, or increase efficiency. Strengthen the message with relevant data, technical documentation, or real-world case studies.
CTA: Provide clear, actionable prompts such as “Explore Compatible Kits,” “Upgrade Now,” or “See What’s Next in Your Workflow.” The goal is to position the upsell as a strategic enhancement rather than a push for additional sales.

4. Abandoned Cart Flow

Purpose: For companies selling through e-commerce platforms (e.g., reagents, lab consumables, instruments), this flow is designed to recover potential lost revenue when a customer adds items to their cart but does not complete the purchase.
Content: Remind the customer of the specific items left behind, reinforce the value or benefits of those products, and proactively address common concerns such as delivery timelines, pricing, or technical compatibility.
CTA: Include a clear, direct link to the cart to make returning and completing the purchase seamless. Additionally, consider including a brief survey or feedback link to understand why the purchase was abandoned. This can help improve future conversions and build trust through responsiveness.

5. Re-engagement Flow

Purpose: This flow is designed to reconnect with subscribers or leads who have become inactive over time, whether they’ve stopped opening emails, engaging with content, or completing follow-up actions. It aims to revive interest and prevent list attrition.
Content: Deliver value-driven messaging that rekindles interest such as exclusive offers, new product updates, or recent breakthroughs. You can also include brief surveys to gather feedback and better understand their preferences or reasons for disengagement.
CTA: Encourage recipients to take a light-touch next step, such as “Update Your Preferences,” “See What’s New,” or “Rejoin the Conversation.” The goal is to invite them back into the funnel without overwhelming them, making it easy to re-engage on their terms.

6. Newsletter

Purpose: This flow serves as a regular touchpoint to keep your audience informed, engaged, and connected with your brand. It’s ideal for maintaining visibility with current customers, prospects, and partners over time.
Content: Curate high-value content such as scientific updates, blog articles, product launches, webinar invitations, and customer success stories. Ensure the content reflects your organisation’s thought leadership, technical credibility, and relevance to your audience’s interests.
CTA: Use targeted prompts like “Read the Full Article,” “Access the Data,” or “Register for Our Webinar” to guide recipients toward deeper engagement. The objective is to consistently deliver value while encouraging ongoing interaction with your brand.

Choosing the Right Campaigns and Flows for Your Business

A successful email marketing strategy is not one-size-fits-all. For life science and biotech companies, selecting the right campaigns and flows depends on your commercial goals, your audience’s behaviour, and where your contacts are in the buying or research journey. Below are key considerations to guide your decisions.

Define Your Goals

Start by identifying the primary outcomes you want to achieve. Are you looking to:

Drive demo bookings for a new product?
Increase adoption of a specific assay or kit?
Nurture leads from a recent conference?
Re-engage lapsed researchers or procurement teams?

Your goals will inform the types of email flows you need. For instance, lead generation efforts benefit from conversion and welcome flows, while long-term retention efforts rely more on newsletters and re-engagement campaigns.

Understand Your Audience Segments

Different stakeholders have different expectations. A bench scientist, a clinical researcher, and a purchasing manager will respond to different types of messaging. Use behavioural and demographic insights to group your audience into meaningful segments – by role, institution type, area of research, or level of prior engagement.

This ensures your content is not just delivered, but relevant and valuable to the recipient.

Map Email Flows to Your Commercial Life cycle

Your contacts could be in different stages of their buyer-journeys, from awareness and evaluation to purchase and post-purchase stages. Aligning email content to different stages of the commercial life cycle allows you to customize email workflows for specific purposes. For example:

New leads require onboarding through welcome and educational flows.
Evaluating users benefit from case studies and validation data.
Existing customers respond well to upselling and support-driven content.

By mapping flows to lifecycle stages, you create a structured communication framework that nurtures relationships over time.

Prioritize based on your internal capacity

While automation can save time, every flow still requires content creation, testing, and analytics. Start by building high-impact flows, like abandoned cart or welcome series, before expanding to more complex campaigns. Choose what you can sustain and optimize, rather than attempting to launch everything at once.

Monitor, Measure, and Adapt

Each campaign should be tracked with clear performance metrics: open rates, click-through rates, conversions, and unsubscribes. Use these insights to evaluate what’s working, identify underperforming segments, and continuously refine your strategy.

The most effective email marketing strategies are iterative and data-driven, evolving with your audience and commercial goals.

Best Practices for Email Marketing in Life Sciences

Build a High-Quality Email List

The first step to an effective email marketing strategy is to focus on growing an engaged and permission-based email list. In regulated and trust-sensitive industries like life sciences and biotech, credibility is everything, and that starts with consent.

It is imperative to avoid the temptation to use purchased email databases. While they might seem like a fast way to scale, they come with serious downsides:

Recipients haven’t opted in, which can violate data privacy laws like GDPR, CAN-SPAM, or CASL, exposing your company to legal risk.
These lists are often outdated, contain spam traps, or are poorly targeted resulting in high bounce rates, low engagement, and blacklisting by email service providers.
Unsolicited emails can damage your brand’s reputation in a tightly knit scientific community where trust and professionalism are paramount.

Instead, it is a best practice to build your list through ethical, high-intent channels like:

Whitepaper and case study downloads
Webinar or trade show signups
Gated educational content
Opt-in forms on your website

This ensures that every subscriber wants to hear from you, leading to higher engagement, better deliverability, and a stronger long-term return on your email marketing efforts.

Craft Strong Subject Lines

your subject line is often the only chance to make an impression. It determines whether your email is opened, ignored, or deleted.

Strong subject lines are concise, clearly convey the value of the email, and speak directly to the recipient’s interests or challenges. Phrases like “New Data: CRISPR Workflow Validation” or “3-Minute Guide to Scaling Cell Culture” are effective because they are specific, relevant, and immediately communicate the benefit of opening the email.

Personalise and Contextualise

Use dynamic fields (name, company) and personalise based on segment. Recommend products, content, or events that fit the recipient’s role and interest. Contextual emails show your audience that you understand who they are and what they need, transforming your outreach from a broadcast into a conversation.

Design for Mobile

A significant portion of professionals—especially those in the field or lab—access emails on mobile devices. If your emails aren’t optimised for small screens, you’re likely losing valuable engagement.

Ensure your layout is responsive, with legible fonts, concise copy, and tap-friendly buttons. Keep subject lines and preheaders short, and structure content so the key message appears early. Emails that load slowly or require excessive scrolling are quickly discarded.

A/B Test Regularly

A/B testing allows you to make informed decisions by comparing two variations of a single element, such as a subject line, call-to-action, or layout.

Even small changes, like the wording of a button or the timing of a send, can lead to measurable improvements in open rates or conversions. Over time, consistent testing helps you understand what resonates best with your audience and refine your approach accordingly.

Conclusion

In an industry where credibility, trust, and education are vital, email marketing offers an unparalleled opportunity to connect meaningfully with your audience. For life science and biotech companies, a structured email strategy can increase visibility, build loyalty, and accelerate commercial success.

By aligning your email strategy with business goals, customer needs, and content that resonates with the scientific mindset, you transform email from a routine communication tool into a powerful growth engine.

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