If automated email marketing is not part of your sales funnel, you are seriously missing a trick.
From the moment a potential customer becomes aware of your brand, you can provide tailored and personalised emails, known as email flows, to coach them down the sales funnel. The nurture sequence follows the customer along their buying journey, encouraging them to make an initial purchase and then on to becoming a loyal brand advocate.
Klaviyo is an online marketing platform that supports thousands of companies around the world in creating automated email flows. As well as providing the tools to create and manage email marketing on a mass scale, Klaviyo allows you to segment your audiences, view data and insights and understand the next steps to move your email marketing forward.
How do the email flows work?
The email flows are made up of several prewritten emails that can be personalised for each recipient. They are sent out when certain criteria are met. So, for example, you can trigger an email to be sent when a customer:
- signs up to receive your company newsletter
- abandons a cart
- makes a purchase
- spends a certain amount.
You can decide which triggers will work for you and your customer base. When you team up with Klaviyo to run your email marketing campaign, its automated system sends out the right emails, at the right times, to the right people. This means that once you have put in the work upfront to create your flows and set them live, they run constantly.
This automation is crucial in allowing you to scale your business. Scalable systems enable consistent growth while you concentrate on delivering excellent service at the front end.
To plan your email flows, Klaviyo suggests you split your audience into three segments: pre-purchase, mid-purchase and post-purchase. Your customers will have different objectives and concerns depending on where they are in the buying journey. For example, someone who has just discovered your brand might sign up to your newsletter to find out more. From here, you aim to increase the ‘know, like, trust’ factor by educating them about your brand and incentivising them to make a purchase. For a customer who has filled their cart but not completed their purchase, a reminder email with a discount code might be more appropriate.
Post-purchase, Klaviyo points out that keeping customers informed about the shipping status of their purchase makes all the difference between an adequate buying experience and an excellent one. It suggests thanking your customer for their order, informing them of when the product has left the warehouse, accurate updates and suggestions of ways to use their new product. After delivery, you can reach out again to ask for a product review, offering a discount on an additional purchase as an added incentive to buy again.
Reviewing and Refining
Once you have your email flows set up and they are doing their job, Klaviyo gives you behind the scenes access to pinpoint exactly which areas are seeing positive results and where you might need to make changes. The email process should be viewed as part of a wider funnel, so it’s best to analyse performance at the different stages mentioned above (pre-sale, mid-sale and post-sale). If you observe that one section of your funnel produces a spike in Unsubscribes, you can focus your attention there. Similarly, if an area produces impressive results, reflect on why that might be and try to replicate the effort in other parts of the flow. Sometimes a slight change in tone or use of certain phrasing can make a big difference.
Split testing, A/B testing and filters are also available to help you drill down into what’s working and what isn’t. The ability to refine at every level means that you can optimise all aspects of your campaign to achieve maximum results.
Klaviyo is compatible with Shopify, making it easy to integrate the system into your wider strategy. Klaviyo collects relevant data about your customers as they use your Shopify site and places them into the appropriate segments for targeted emails. When synced with your Shopify site, Klaviyo takes every detail of every order, including historical data, without limitation and allows you to easily create sign-up forms, personalised coupons, product recommendations and back-in-stock alerts. Klaviyo can even make predictions for your customers including churn risk, lifetime value and average time between orders.
The Klaviyo team has helped over 30,000 ecommerce sites scale and grow with their comprehensive automated email systems and they can do the same for your business.
If you’d like Venture Forge to help you manage your Klaviyo email marketing campaign with your Shopify site, contact us at [email protected] or through our website.