Emails & Nurture Programs

An overview of emails and nurture programs at GitLab.

Overview

This page focuses on emails and nurture programs, owned and managed by Lifecycle Marketing, Marketing Campaigns, and Marketing Operations. We are focused on progressing leads throughout their funnel and have programs encompassing prospects (aimed at progressing Unknown > Inquiry > MQL > SAO) and product user journeys (free > trial >paid campaigns). We leverage “always on”, logic-based, trigger-based, and persona-driven nurture engines.

Please visit our other pages for more information on email best practices, email processes and requests, and general team information.

Related Handbook: Email Management

Key foundational elements to achieve this:

Email Nurture Programs

Persona Email Nurture

The Persona Nurture (formerly the Intelligent Nurture after relaunch on 2023-11-06) aims at progressing leads from RAW > INQ > MQL > SAO, and leverages segment/region data to provide the right offer to the right person at the right time - based on their region and persona.

We shifted to the persona model in November of 2023 to scale our programs more easily and enable team members to optimize the programs more regularly. The next iteration for FY25 Q4 will be to launch action streams, which are personalized interest based email streams based on the content the lead came in on.

Persona Email Nurture Stream Schedule

The following shows the day of the week and cadence of the different streams in the Persona Nurture:

  • AMER: Thursday, 8:30 AM PT
  • EMEA: Thursday, 1:00 AM PT
  • APAC: Wednesday (Thursday APAC time), 6:30 PM PT
  • LATAM: Thursday, 8:30 AM PT.
  • Localized
    • Spanish: Inactive - leads rerouted to English nurtures
    • French: Thursday, 1:00AM PT
    • German: Inactive
    • Japanese: Wednesday (Thursday JP time), 5:00PM PT
    • Korean: Wednesday (Thursday JP time), 5:00PM PT
    • Portuguese: Inactive - leads rerouted to English nurtures
  • PubSec User/Buyer: Thursday, 7:00AM PT

Persona Nurture Reporting Process

All Nurtures within persona nurture have their link directly to their specific report.

Which are formed as follows:

REGIONAL NURTURES

AMER APAC EMEA LATAM AMER PubSec

LOCALIZED NURTURE:

LOC-FRENCH

LOC-GERMAN

LOC-JAPAN

LOC-KOREA

LOC-PORTUGUESE

LOC-SPANISH

Action streams

In FY26 Q1, we began evolving our person-based nurture strategy by launching our first intent-based nurture program, where we tailor our messaging based on our lead’s interest.

These send weekly at the same time as our Persona nurture.

Example of how this works:

  • Lead comes in on security asset and we send security content.
  • Lead comes in on an industry asset or is segmented into an industry, then they would go into the industry action stream

What happens after they finish the action stream?

  • Go back into the persona nurture
  • Once we have other nurtures, can go into recycled or whatever level makes sense

Flow (New):

  • New person created, add to action stream based on program token
    • If preferred language one that we have a nurture stream for, bypass action stream and put in localized nurture
    • If customer, do not put in action stream, put in regional nurture
    • If they come in from a trial, they will go through trial nurture. If they qualify for an action stream before trial nurture completes, do not move to action stream. After trial, move to regional nurture.
  • After they exhaust content on action stream, move to regional nurture
  • If emailable status changes, pause nurture

Requested Flow (Existing)

  • If existing person has not exhausted content on regional nurture, do not move to action stream
  • If content is exhausted or they aren’t in regional nurture, move to action stream
    • If customer (or segment changes to customer), move/keep in regional nurture
  • If they take a trial, pause Action Stream, move to trial nurture. Restart action stream when trial nurture completes
  • After action stream content is exhausted, move to regional nurture
  • If preferred language changes (from EN or other language we send EN nurture to), move to localized nurture
  • If emailable status changes, pause nurture
  1. FY26 action stream'
  2. Action stream routing
  3. FY25 action streams
  4. Action stream email documentation

User nurtures (GitLab product users)

Trial nurtures

Trial Nurture Variations

Following the launch of Duo Enterprise trials, we have several different trial nurtures running in either Iterable or Marketo. These nurtures send to the Owner role who starts the trial. The goal of these programs is to drive usage for Ultimate + Duo Enterprise and in turn influence conversion:

Self-managed nurtures are sent from Marketo and are typically very similar to GitLab.com nurtures with slight variations (no login links):

There are several localized nurtures that have launched for GitLab.com Trials. These are not up to date with Duo information, as Duo is only available in English currently. These are the localized nurtures:

Free User Onboarding Email Campaigns

Sent through Iterable We recently moved what was formerly known as “In-product emails” from Mailgun to our newer Iterable system. This will allow greater flexibility and iteration.

These are also known as:

  • User onboarding emails
  • Free user nurture
  • User nurture
  • User emails
  • Any sort of combination of the above

We launched these for:

  • Free SaaS users - Beginning of Feb, 2021, moved to Iterable in August 2023
  • Free Self-managed users - Launched mid-late May, 2021, moved to Iterable in August 2023

Iterations: We relaunched these emails in Iterable and turned off Mailgun. Send time is now based on when the user joins GitLab and implemented skipping weekend send dates. In August 2023, we launched a welcome email and simplified some of the content. We will be iterating more on this program going forward.

Who’s part of this project?

  • Allie Klatzkin - email marketing DRI, Iterable analytics, & assist technical setup
  • Paige Cordero (Growth)
  • Gayle Doud (Growth)

So what’s the deal? Basically, we have a series of emails that deploy to net new namespaces. The goal is to get free users to use features of the product. There are 4 tracks - adopt Create, adopt Verify, invite Team, try a Trial. Each track has emails that try to nudge users to take action. If a user takes the action referenced in the email, they will not get the next email in the series and will move to the next series.

From email and reply-to email info@mg.gitlab.com - which is a group inbox. Amy is also a member of this group inbox. HTML files All of the HTML email files are in Iterable.

For a more in-depth look at how these emails work, please review the Figma journey.

Invited users

Please note we are limited in what we can send to this audience.

  • Goal:* Enable users who are invited to get started using GitLab
  • Delivery System: Iterable (SaaS) & Marketo (SM)

Programs:

Last modified February 24, 2025: [MR] Add action streams to the nurture handbook (f2879d94)
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