#113. 3 High Converting Flows To Increase Revenue | Podcast

Vira: 0:41

Hello. Hello and welcome to Email Einstein the podcast by Flowium. I’m your host, Vira Sadlak. I’m an email marketing specialist at an agency called Flowium. We are a bunch of biggest email marketing nerds and because we love what we do and because we are very passionate about email marketing, we want to share our insights with you. Flowium is one of the fastest growing email marketing agencies in the world and we specialize in providing premium full service e commerce email marketing experience to all of our clients. We deliver the right message to the right person at the right moment. That’s what we are all about here at Flowium. And I don’t know about you guys, but here at Flowium we are in a full preparation mode for the holidays. The holidays are coming. Black Friday is coming. It’s like honestly like weeks away from now, which makes me kind of excited, kind of nervous, but good kind of nervous. And if you guys haven’t started preparing yet for the Black Friday Cyber Monday season, well that’s about time we actually put all of our knowledge, all of our email marketing wisdom and this book that our, actually our CEO wrote last year. We put it all in one beautiful book. And in that book we’re sharing all of the Black Friday Cyber Monday and holiday tactics. We share some of the recommendations and some of the best tried and true strategies. Honestly, you’re gonna have the entire calendar there for the entire season of Black Friday Cyber Monday. So yeah, if you wanna check out that book, go to Flowium, do holiday and you will be able to get your very own copy of Flowium Black Friday Cyber Monday email marketing guide. In the meantime, there are also some other fundamentals that you need to take care for for the holidays and of course the automations. This is the bread and butter of email marketing automations, also known as flows. This is where you need to put some of your focus during the season as well. So in this episode we will be talking about three high converting email marketing automations to implement this year. If you still don’t have them in your account, definitely make sure to complete them before the holidays because you don’t want to leave the money on the TABLE. So I’m happy to present to you guys three high converting email automations to implement in 2020 to let’s go.

Alissa: 3:14

We’re going to talk about the first flow, which is the replenishment flow. So as most of you know, there is absolutely nothing like acquiring a new customer and then getting them to buy from your website for the first time. It’s a nice feeling, right? Especially because those acquired customers are very expensive. But if you own or work for a small business, sometimes it may seem like the most important thing to do in order to grow the size of your customer base and also the number of people on your list, which again, like we mentioned, it’s very expensive to do. So here are some numbers around that. So your top 10% of customers are worth six times as much on average as the other 90%. And this is referring to people who are buying from you more frequently. The average e Commerce store earns 41% of their total revenue from only 8% of their customers. Again, we’re talking about those repeat customers. These numbers are crazy.

Vira: 4:09

I know, right?

Alissa: 4:10

Customers who have purchased from your brand twice are nine times as likely to convert as a first time shopper. Wow, that is insanity. And your repeat purchasers are probably spending three times as much as first time customers. So not only are those repeat customers making up pretty much most of your customer base, they are also likely to have a much higher average order value than any of those first time customers. Which makes sense, right? When you’re getting to know a brand, you’re probably only going to buy one thing from them versus a brand that you really know. You’re going to buy like six or seven items all at once, depending on what the items are, of course. So let’s think about it this way, right? If you have a thousand customers buy something from you once, or if you could have a hundred customers buy the same exact product from you for the rest of their lives, which one would you choose?

Vira: 5:00

Yeah, that’s a problem.

Alissa: 5:02

Probably option number two, right? A hundred customers buying something from you for the rest of their lives regularly. That’s way more worth your while than a thousand people buying something from you once. And that’s where this replenishment flow comes into place. So in the simplest terms, for those of you who aren’t familiar with a flow like this, replenishment emails are a replenishment. Replenishment flow are emails that are used to prompt your previous buyer to make a repeat purchase when the items they previously bought are likely running low or almost gone. So this is different from a subscription reminder email, Right. Because replenishment emails don’t inform customers that their card has been or will be charged or that their product is on the way because it’s not an automated process. So if you don’t have a subscription in place, that’s okay. You can put this replenishment flow in place that will effectively act as that subscription. So what the replenishment email specifically does, like, the actual goal of the email is to remind the customer to place a new order or to restock their supply of whatever the item is. So this flow is excellent for brands that have consumable products or other products that you use frequently. Cause obviously you can’t consume makeup, but you use it pretty frequently, right? Prescriptions, makeup, pets, pet supplies, drinks, chocolate fudge, pop tarts, whatever. Yeah, whatever you want.

Vira: 6:21

You name it.

Alissa: 6:22

Oh my gosh, I want a pop Tart now. So funny. So the big question here is, okay, yes, I need a replenishment flow. You know this, right? I need one. But how do you pick the right moment to actually send the email? So with these kinds of flows, with these kinds of emails, your timing is literally everything. If you send the replenishment email way too soon, you could end up encouraging customers to repurchase your product well before they’ll need it, which means that it’s going to interrupt the replenishment process later on down the line. But if you’re too late, you risk losing relevancy. And your customer may have already found an to an alternative. Or you’re now sending an irrelevant email because they already went ahead and made the purchase themselves, which is a good thing for you. But the big focus here is making sure that customers are rebuying from you using this flow. So you can take a guess, right? But using data is really the only real way to ensure that your emails are arriving right on time for your customers. So these emails, the timing of them is going to depend on the lifecycle of your products and the average fulfillment and shipping time for your store. And this is data that you as a brand would have. I can’t give that to you. I’m so sor. So two weeks from when the product would normally run out typically tends to work well, from what we’ve seen. And this is a high level, average kind of general stat that we’re giving you. Please don’t follow this to a T, because it may not work for your brand. But the other thing to remember as well is that if you have a lot of international customers, your delay might need to be even longer.

Vira: 7:47

Especially now. Right. With all of the delays and everything. It’s insane.

Alissa: 7:52

And thank you for bringing that up, Vira, because that’s the other thing is even in our standard flows, like a post purchase flow, that survey email that we usually send at the end of the flow asking people, what did you think of our product? Even those emails have to get delayed because of the shipping issues that are happening worldwide. So making sure that when you’re setting up these flows, okay, yes, usually shipping is three days and then the consumer will get the product on the third day and then everything’s good and then they can replenish two weeks later. However, in the time that we’re in right now with all the shipping stuff going on, all the shipping chaos, you want to make sure that you’re taking into account any potential delays that could be happening, which makes it a lot more difficult. The other thing just to know is there are workarounds to this. There is an app called Aftership. It actually gives you really great information on tracking and shipments and you can actually use different notifications on a customer’s package to trigger different flows. So that could also be very helpful if you don’t know a lot about Aftership. Definitely check it out. We have some clients who use it. This is not an ad, by the way. This is just based on experience. But it integrates really well with Klaviyo, if that’s what you’re using. And again, it will help you trigger these replenishment flows in a way that’s going to be a lot more certain because it even has notification that says package was delivered. And so what you can do is you can trigger your replenishment replenishment flow from when a consumer’s package is delivered and then have it so that it’s delayed by two weeks, three weeks, four weeks, whatever you decide. And then they get that replenishment email sent out. So there are effective workarounds. You just have to do your research and see what works best. So, yeah, yeah, that’s a lot about the replenishment email. But once you have the timing set out, because that’s a big, big aspect of it, to build one, it’s very easy. And then once you actually set up the automation and you set up the content of the emails, you just let it do all the work for you. You don’t have to go out of your way to set up a subscription product for your brand. You have this replenishment flow that’s working really well and doing it for you. And a really quick pro tip on that. Make sure that you set minimum inventory rules so that you can control the threshold for notifying a customer after you restock the item. So this is depending on how you decide to use your replenishment flow. Like am I going to use it to warn people that we’re low of stock or am I just going to use it purely for the sake of reminding people to buy more? If you’re using it around the low stock side of things, you’ll definitely want to hone in on this pro T because you don’t want to tell a hundred customers that a popular item is back in stock if only 10 are available. Right? That’s a really sure fire way for your customer service team to be blasted. All day, every day you’re going to take some customers off. So the other thing that you can do is you can set up an advanced back in stock automation to give your VIP customers so not just your average old customers, but your VIP customers a little extra love and give them some early access to restocked items. So again, lots of info there. You want to try and configure what works best for your brand, but there are definitely a lot of options to you there.

Vira: 10:34

And just like you said Alissa, time is so, so important in those kind of, in those kind of automations. And by the way, if you guys do the subscribe and save, it doesn’t mean that it has to be like either or. You can have both replenishment flow and subscribe and Save. That’s what I’m doing for my like clients. Obviously we will not send the replenishment reminder to those who have the subscribe and Save program. Right. But usually subscribe and Save is like a smaller portion of the list. But there are also those like a bunch of those people who purchase for the first time and we want to like convert them in two time buyers so it doesn’t have to be either or. You can have both and they are both like excellent money makers. So yeah, cool, cool. Love it. So the second flow we wanted to tell you about is called the repeat purchase nurture flow. Now it’s in a way it’s like another way to set up your replenishment/repeat purchase flow. But this time you’re using not your existing data, but you’re harnessing the power of AI. And listen, if you know when you should expect a customer to return for more, good for you. You can time your marketing efforts for when they’ll be most effective and create a super powerful, super cool repeat Purchase, nurture, flow. But if you are like most of the businesses, you don’t have that exact number. And platforms like Klaviyo can actually help you with picking up the expected date of next order feature. So two things to keep in mind when it comes to predictive analytic. And this is how this feature called predictive analytic, and by the way, it’s super, super cool, super powerful.

Alissa: 12:39

Oh my gosh, I love it. It’s so freaking cool.

Vira: 12:41

It can make such a big difference in like the way how your flows perform because you can be super relevant and super timely. Right? So the first thing to understand. So the expected date of next order is based on purchasing patterns of like the average of all of your customers. It’s not personalized, so it’s not always like one accurate. Especially if like one of your customers have or has like unique purchasing behavior. Right? Or for example, like me and my husband, we purchased like the same shampoo, right? But like the bottle of shampoo will last my husband, and I’m not exaggerating, like six to seven months. It’s insane. He doesn’t have a lot here, but he used like teeny tiny bit of the product. When I like to use like a lot. Yeah, I

Alissa: 13:30

fill my hand with shampoo. That’s so funny.

Vira: 13:33

Two hands, Alissa.

Alissa: 13:35

And I’m like, hands, feet, come on.

Vira: 13:38

Yeah, yeah, for sure. I like it. It smells so good. So yeah. So obviously our like repurchasing behavior will be different, right? So the predictive analytic will be based on majority, which is for like most companies, it’s like motion pool companies. It’s me, I’m the majority customer, not my husband, who’s like using a little bit of teeny tiny bit of the product and it lasts him like six months to a year sometimes. But the expected date of next order can actually be personalized as well. But only for the customers who have made like three or more purchases from you at regular intervals. So for this customers, we can actually use the average number of days between their three most recent purchases to predict their next order. So for example, if your customer purchased like, if their purchases were spread within like 68 days, then 58 days. So we predict that their next order will occur within the net in the next 63 days, which is like the average, right? So for the customers who are not your, who you don’t have like a lot of history with, it will be based on like the average, the average of all of your customers. But for those who are your like return customers who you have like three plus Orders you can be like really, really precise with those numbers. And the thing number two, to understand about this cool feature that it doesn’t actually tell us how likely the customer is to place another order. In other words, the expected date of the next order can tell you about customers like previous behavior yet not about their future behavior. Right. So there is like we can say with like a big certainty that if they, if this customer have purchased like three times or more, they probably like our product. So they will probably come back. Yet it cannot obviously guarantee you anything. Right. It doesn’t indicate whether they will actually purchase again from you. So in our repeat purchase nurture flow, we usually use the expected date of next order to more like to prompt your customer to make another purchase. So we maybe like remind them about the perks of the product. Maybe we tell them about like different ways to use the product. Maybe like we, I don’t know, like answer their questions about the product and remind them that hey, you will run out of the product really soon. So as you can see, the repeat purchase nurture series, it’s a really powerful thing, but something that we do like to make this series of emails even more powerful. We usually include a conditional split. So we have like the replenishment predictive analytic flow, but we do the conditional split for first time buyers and those who make the third or fourth purchase. Because as I mentioned already we use sort of like a different logic for those two groups of customers. And if you decide to use this type of flow, if you decide to create this type of flow, we do recommend using dynamic product feed. This is such a cool feature that probably all of email marketing platforms have, right? But you can promote your most popular products, you can set up the dynamic feed to always show the trend or you can even do the personalized recommendations. So yeah, go ahead and use the power of predictive analytic in Klaviyo and other platforms. It’s super, super cool. It’s super powerful. We love it. And your customers will appreciate it as well because it will help you to make your message so, so relevant and so, so timely.

Alissa: 17:06

True. And actually I have that flow live for one of my customers and the power of AI is serious. It is not a power to be to try to control or second with. It’s amazing and it’s so useful for your accounts. So highly, highly, highly recommend it for sure. Okay. And the last flow that you should absolutely be using in 2022 is the back in stock flow which I’m pretty sure we’ve talked about in the past this is easily one of my most favorite back and automations that we do for our clients. So if you’re not going to do any of them, do my favorite, which is the back and stock. Obviously when one of your products unexpectedly sells out, your customers get pretty disappointed and some actually get really aggro, which is always fun to deal with. But unfortunately there’s no guarantee for your customers that they will come back to your website, that your customers will come back to your website right when the product comes back in stock, which leads you to losing customer loyalty, but then also customer revenue, which is really not ideal. So this is where back in stock comes in the back in stock flow anyways. It recovers some of the lost revenue by notifying customers when a high demand and product is brought back to the store and available for purchase. So this is really great for right now in a time when inventory and logistics and all of that stuff is kind of up in the air for a lot of companies. So I know a lot of brands were dealing with inventory issues throughout the holidays, which is disappointing because you have. A lot of traffic, right? A lot of people who want to buy. But you don’t have to lose out on that traffic. You can maximize it with this flow. So in order to make this flow possible, what you want to do is you want to collect the information of interested shoppers and then reach out to them when you restock so that they can come back and complete their purchase. Klaviyo actually has a really great background in stock feature for Shopify that actually lets customers sign up for alerts directly from your website when an item they want is sold out. Which is great because then when the item comes back in stock, it triggers the flow and everything works out really well. The amazing thing is that the open rates and conversions for this flow or a flow like this are unbelievable when the flow triggers. And this is the thing that you have to remember, it’s likely that you’ll put that back in stock flow live and in place. And unless you’re getting back in stock stock items or items back in stock every single day or every single week, it’s unlikely that you’ll see really consistent streams of revenue from that flow. But when an item does come back in stock, you will see a massive boost in revenue, which is actually something that I experienced for one of my clients. So we see tremendous results for a lot of our own clients and for a couple of our clients actually, the back in stock flow is actually generating the highest revenue per recipient out of any of their other flows and is also the the best performing flow overall when it does trigger one of my clients, actually whenever the back the stock flow triggers, it’s like $20,000 in like two days or something, which is just obscene. From a flow. They don’t have a lot of traffic to website. It’s a very niche brand, niche market, niche product. But the fact that a relatively average price point product is generating that much kind of excitement and that much revenue within such a short span of time to a very small customer base, it’s pretty impressive. So back in stock flow, if you don’t do it, you will definitely be missing out. Quick pro tip for you if you’re not doing back or if you’re going to do the back in stock flow. This was actually a really great idea from one of our account managers. Usually the way that we we used to set up this flow is people sign up for back in stock and then when the item comes back in stock, the flow triggers and they get the first email. Now the way that we do it is when someone signs up for back in stock, it actually triggers an email that says, hey, thanks for signing up for back in stock. As soon as your item is back in stock, we’ll let you know. And the reason why we added this other in place like the intro email is because a lot of times you sign up for back in stock, right? But you don’t get a notification. So you’re like, am I gonna get notified? Do they know that I want an item back in stock? What’s going on? What’s next? And that email is a really good notification of what’s next to the customer. And it’s such a great notification that it actually tends to generate quite a bit of revenue. Especially if you put in a like Vira mentioned a product recommendation feed in that email and say, hey, thanks for shining signing up for back in stock. As soon as it’s back, we’ll notify you. In the meantime, check out some of our fav. I know they’re not what you want, but it’s likely that you’ll like these two. If this is the item that you liked originally and you can lead them back to the site and then they can check out some other stuff and then literally check out with your stuff. So back in stock flow, definitely a great flow to have in place, especially for those brands that are kind of dealing with inventory issues right now. So that’s your third and final flow for 2022.

Vira: 21:37

Yeah, that’s definitely one of my favorites. Especially for not Even for brands who sell consumable products. But just like for different brands right now this one is super, super relev. Because I’m like my clients are out of stock. Like most of my clients are out of stock on their bestsellers right now. And it never happened before as much. But right now with like all this like delivery and shipment delays and everything, this flow does generate a lot of money. In fact, for one of my clients it’s the number one flow overall. Not just like revenue per recipient but like in general. This is their number one flow that brings them probably like I don’t like 50% of all of their klaviyo revenue revenue. Isn’t it insane?

Alissa: 22:20

Holy moly. 50%. That’s next level. Yeah, that is next level.

Vira: 22:24

And like the, the open rates are insane too. They’re like 50 something percent. Just because these people, they do expect to hear from you, right? They are waiting. They like, they said specifically that. Hey, I want to hear from your brand. I want to receive this notification. Please send me the notification when it’s back in stock. And like a lot of big brands are using using it to like H and M or like Ikea or like all this big brands. But I remember like few days ago I subscribed like to Ikea’s notifications, right? And I received the back in stock notification. But when I went to the website it was already like sold out. And I like literally went to the website maybe like 30 minutes after I received that email. It was like so frustrating. That’s why it’s like really important to pre plan your to like have this like minimum inventory rules, right to control the threshold hold of like all of your products and everything. Well, thank you so much for listening to this episode. I hope you learned something new. Just a heads up, over the next few weeks we will be actively preparing for Q4 and we will be actively preparing for the holidays. We’re going to share some tips and tricks, some tried and true strategies that we’ve tested and loved and the strategies that worked. But if you want to get all of that like information in one place, we actually prepared this really cool Black Friday, Cyber Monday and holiday email marketing guide for you guys. So go to flowium.com holiday and check it out. It will help you to get ready for the season. And we are sharing some of the best strategies that we tried over the years. Definitely a strong recommendation from us. And of course come back next Tuesday because next Tuesday we will be talking about all of the exciting ideas for your October October campaign calendar. Thank you so much for listening. Thank you so much for being with us. We hope to see you here next week. Bye.