Every month, the marketing team at a perfume and cosmetics retailer watched their campaign deadlines approach with growing anxiety. Their manual process of matching products to preferences, avoiding duplicates, and managing Excel files across multiple campaigns was consuming entire weeks of productivity.
The cost? What should take minutes was consuming 100+ hours monthly, with their Make.com automation crashing from memory overload every time they tried to scale.
We at Makeitfuture delivered a solution: Complete campaign automation that reduced processing time by 85%, being able to handle 10x the volume.
The Challenge: When Growth Breaks Your Systems
The problem was simple: the premium perfume campaigns required personalized offer matching, and their current automations couldn't handle the scale.
This meant:
- 50+ campaigns monthly, each with multiple offers
- 10,000+ contacts requiring personalized offer selection
- Memory crashes when processing over 1,000 contacts
- Duplicate emails destroying customer trust
- Marketing team drowning in Excel files instead of strategy
The Solution: Sequential Workflows, Unlimited Scale
When Makeitfuture approached this challenge, we didn't just patch the existing system. We rebuilt it from scratch, focusing on memory efficiency while scaling.
The solution leverages n8n's advanced workflow capabilities integrated directly with Monday.com's campaign management, Supabase for intelligent tracking, and SendGrid for delivery, through five interconnected workflows that process sequentially to prevent memory overload.
Here's how it works:
Stage 1: Campaign Intake and Distribution Automating retail email campaigns at scale with n8n
The system receives campaign data via webhook from Make.com, containing offers, signatures, and contact arrays.We decided that instead of processing everything at once, we split contacts into groups and process them sequentially.
Each group triggers the next workflow only after completion, ensuring memory never exceeds safe limits. The Loop Over Items node manages this, while the Execute Workflow node maintains perfect sequential execution.
Result: 10,000+ contacts processed without a single memory spike.
Stage 2: Memory-Efficient Contact Processing
Using cursor-based pagination, this workflow processes unlimited contacts in batches of 200. When the IF node detects more data, it loops back for the next batch, preventing the memory crashes that plague traditional automation.
Stage 3: Personalized Email Content Selection
Each contact goes through intelligent processing:
- Email Validation: The system verifies email format (contains @, valid domain)
- Offer Matching: Custom code analyzes customer data against offer criteria
- Duplicate Prevention: Checks Supabase to ensure no repeated communications
- Database Recording: Stores all campaign data for tracking and compliance
Our custom code node replaced Make.com's visual workflow that consumed 10x the memory. Same logic, 90% less resource usage.
Stage 4: Batch Email Processing with SendGrid
The system retrieves unprocessed records from Supabase in batches of 100, downloads associated Excel files with offer details, converts them to HTML emails, and updates status to "processing" to prevent double-sending. The Loop processes each batch through the email sender workflow. Status updates in real-time, giving complete visibility into campaign progress.
Stage 5: Automated Email Send and Verification
The final piece transforms data into delivered campaigns:
- Downloads offer files from Make.com
- Generates personalized HTML emails with dynamic content
- Sends via SendGrid
- Updates delivery status in Supabase
- Logs all communications for compliance
Measurable Results: Email Automation Success
Operational Efficiency Gains:
- 85% reduction in campaign processing time
- 90% decrease in memory consumption vs Make.com
- 100% elimination of duplicate emails
- 10x increase in processing capacity
Financial Impact:
- €20,000+ monthly savings in labor costs
- 3-day faster campaign deployment
- Zero downtime during peak seasons
- 50+ campaigns automated monthly
The Technology Stack:
Core Components:
- n8n: Self-hosted workflow automation
- Monday.com: Campaign management and tracking
- Supabase: PostgreSQL database for lightning-fast queries
- SendGrid: Professional email delivery at scale
- Custom Code Nodes: Memory-optimized offer matching logic
The Secret: Sequential Processing Architecture
What separates successful automation from expensive failures is the memory-first design. Our sequential architecture processes workflows one at a time.
Conclusion: Your Competition Won't Wait
Ready to eliminate your operational challenges? The same strategies that transformed this perfume and cosmetics retailer campaigns can revolutionize your business operations.
Contact us at Makeitfuture and discover how intelligent automation can transform your marketing operations.
