As marketers, we’re constantly on the lookout for avenues and channels that will have the best ROI for our clients. After all, your success is our success - we want you to get the best bang for your buck. That’s why we’re firm believers in the power of email marketing, which Klaviyo states generates a whopping 63x ROI for its customers, and we’ve seen the incredible results for our clients. If you’re a business owner on Shopify, email marketing is the move, and email flows specifically are your ticket to win it.
What Are Email Flows?
Email flows are automated, event-triggered email sequences that are sent to customers whenever they take a specific action on a website. These triggers can be just about anything, but some primary triggers include abandoning their cart, making a purchase, and signing up for email marketing.
For example, if a customer abandons their cart and you have an Abandoned Cart flow set up (and optimized), they’ll receive a series of emails reminding them about the contents of their cart and encouraging them to complete their purchase, possibly with a discount code included. See how that might be incredibly handy?
What Makes Email Flows So Effective?
Now that we know what email flows are and how they generally work, why are they so useful? Spoiler alert: It’s all about conversions.
Relevance
Relevance is crucial for all marketing. You can’t possibly advertise to every single person on earth, and why would you want to? It goes without saying that spending ad dollars on people who aren’t interested in your product and may never be isn’t effective.
But the same is true from the customer’s perspective: Audiences want to see advertising that is relevant and personalized to them. From a study discussed in Forbes, “90% of consumers say that messages from companies that are not personally relevant to them are ‘annoying.’ Of those irritating messages, 53% say advertising for an irrelevant product tops their list of messaging annoyances.”
Email flows take relevance to a new level.
Since they’re tailored to specific actions a customer takes, they're hyper-relevant to each and every customer who receives them. Adding customizations to display the products customers browsed on your site gives email flows even more customization and relevance than campaigns. Put another way, email flows respond directly and meaningfully to the needs and desires every potential customer.
Email flows only address what the customer has communicated they’re interested in. No “throw it and see what sticks”, no wondering why replicating your best-performing ad or post isn’t working, and no guesswork, period.
They’re a direct, two-way line of communication to your customers and potential customers. And when relevance has only gotten more, well, relevant over recent years, it makes a real difference in engagement.
Timing
It’s not just what you say. It’s how you say it… and when. Perfect timing means high engagement, and having email flows locked and loaded to send during optimal moments in your customer’s lifecycle makes a huge difference in conversion rates.
Unlike batch email campaigns and social posts, flows hit at exactly the right moment in the customer journey. You can engage customers through email at any point after you’ve gained their email. So, whether your prospect is in the acquisition, conversion, retention, or loyalty phase, you can benefit from having an email flow ready to send. Remember, hyper-relevant content leads to higher engagement.
Automation
Since email flows are automated, they help you generate passive income by gaining conversions whenever a customer takes an action on your site. This translates to compounding returns for your marketing spend.
There’s no such thing “set it and forget it” in marketing, but email flows are just about as close as you can get. The vast bulk of work involved with flows comes during the setup phase, where you’ll be strategizing, writing, designing, and building each individual email.
You will want to continuously optimize your flows after you've gained open rate, click rate, and purchase data, but time spent on optimization is generally far less than the initial build-out.
Low Cost, High Ownership
At its worst, Google Ads can feel like a bottomless pit devouring all your ad spend while you get nothing in return (hey, we know the feeling). After all, you’re just renting digital real estate from Google - and it’s a pay-to-win game. Email marketing on the other hand, rewards your efforts with something tangibly real, valuable, and powerful: your customers’ emails.
With email marketing, you own your list, and you own the channel. You can modify your content at any time and A/B test as much as you want. It’s also far more straightforward to directly gauge what’s performing best and driving conversions. Compared to PPC and social, this gives you a far stronger ROI.
Cost is another area where email flows significantly win out over other marketing channels. With Klaviyo, the only time your spend increases is when your email list grows. Not a bad problem to have, considering more emails on your list = more opportunities for conversions.
What’s Holding You Back?
So, why don’t more small businesses set up automated email flows? If email marketing is truly great, why don’t more brands sing its praises from the rooftops?
Most of our clients tried Google Ads, Meta Ads, or even email campaigns on their own before partnering with us, but very few of them gave email flows a shot. Here are the top factors we see holding business owners back from email flows:
It’s difficult. While email programs are generally pretty user-friendly, getting into the weeds of email flows can be daunting, especially if you don’t have experience with email marketing.
It’s time-consuming. Learning how to set up email flows effectively is a big resource sink that many business owners might not be willing to expend. As a business owner, you’re focused on your product, your customers, and your business operations. You don’t have time to A) learn how to set up email flows, B) design, write, and build them out at scale, or C) A/B test and optimize them to get the best return.
It might not have an immediate ROI. Compared to Google and Meta Ads, which showcase your products and brand to brand new potential customers, email marketing, which is directed to people who are already familiar with your brand, might not seem like the best way to allocate resources at first glance.
You don’t have an email list. If you're not cultivating your email list, you're not alone. Growing a dedicated list of email openers and brand advocates requires holistic cultivation across multiple channels. Not to mention lead magnet creation, pop-up form implementation, and creating winning offers that push conversions.
Did any of that ring a bell? The truth is that every major brand has a thriving email list, comprehensive flows, and regular, engaging campaigns. Email marketing helps brands succeed and scale, because when it works well, it’s a total game changer.
Get Help From Experts
As a Klaviyo Partner, our team has set up and optimized email flows for dozens of our clients. On average, our clients achieve full ROI from email flows within three months, with flows accounting for 50% of their total email marketing revenue during that time.
Learn how we developed personalized flows for Oysters & Caviar’s customers, and find out how our expert flows earned Klondike Kettle Corn $5.24 per Welcome Flow recipient.
Contact us here to get started - we’d love to learn more about your brand. Wishing you good work and good results, from the friendly team at Good Commerce :)