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5 must-have Email Marketing flows for e-commerce by Linda Bleijenberg

Did you notice how expensive online acquisition has become lately? 
At Code we certainly have. How is an online brand supposed to attract customers and make a profit in this changed acquisition landscape?
There is a tried and true answer to that question, and it is: customer retention.
Keeping your existing customers with you is the way to go, now more than ever. And the best way to do that is via email marketing. At Code, we see what emails can do for our clients’ online stores on a daily basis, and it is beautiful. In this blog we share our most successful email flows with you.

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Why focus on Email Marketing?

Because automated email marketing continues to be the best-converting type of marketing - as we can see every day at Code. Everybody uses email on a daily basis: so if you want to reach people, you simply can’t beat email. It is fast, it is accessible, and it feels much more personal to your audience than an online ad or a post on your socials.

What is more, email marketing is owned marketing: instead of being dependent on a tech moloch’s fickle algorithms (and even more fickle terms of service), with email marketing you are in control. This makes email marketing constant, predictable, and more often than not a lot cheaper than other marketing channels. It also gives you a lot of flexibility in terms of visuals and layout, which allows you to present a consistent brand image.

But what campaigns and flows work best for your brand? Easy: the five mentioned in this blog. For every brand that we help set up their email marketing, these are the five flows we start with.

1. Welcome series

A welcome series is a couple of emails you can send to anyone who subscribed to your newsletter, with the goal of turning them into customers. Welcome emails typically have a much higher open-rate than other marketing emails, so be sure to make good use of it!

What is remarkable about welcome mails is how actively interested the subscriber is at this initial stage. Make sure you capitalize on this by properly introducing your brand and getting to know the new subscriber’s preferences. This will show in your results: showing well-timed, relevant information pays off in the long run.

At Code we usually go for a series of four or five emails, as in the welcome flow we designed for O'Neill. The average result for a welcome series in which we offer a gift is a 50-70% open rate and a 15-20% placed-order-rate, but O'Neill realized a whopping 72% open rate and a 24,5% placed-order-rate for mail 1.

2. Abandoned checkout recovery

With this email you reach out to customers who were in the process of actually placing an order, but for some reason failed to complete it. Mind you: an Abandoned checkout recovery is not the same as an Abandoned cart recovery! A visitor abandoning the actual checkout process has a different level of interest than someone who put some products in their cart and never even made it to the checkout. With people leaving at the checkout, there is a much higher chance that they really wanted to buy the product, but some- thing put them off - and you might want to figure out what that was.

On average abandoned checkout emails help our clients to recover around 15% of what would have otherwise been lost revenue.

3. Abandoned cart recovery

As we said in the previous section: shoppers abandoning their cart aren’t as committed to the products in that cart as the people who started the checkout process. Hence: don’t spam them. A single invitation to check out these products is enough, we think. Anything more is too pushy. Depending on the type of products in your average cart, you can recover 5% of abandoned carts through this email.

4. Birthday

If new subscribers gave you their date of birth in reaction to your welcome series, you should of course do something festive with it! That’s where this email flow comes in. Your first instinct is probably to send them an email on their actual birthday - but that might not be the best idea. If you sell coffee, wine or party dresses, for instance, the customer will need your product in advance, so they can use it on the day itself. Hence, consider sending the email a week before to give them time to receive your gift.

On average we achieve a 8-15% placed-order rate with this one, depending on if you offer customers a discount or not.

5. Back in stock reminder

When a product is sold out and you expect new stock coming in soon, it is a good idea to offer people a back-in-stock reminder when they can order again. On average, these reminders have a 10-15% placed order rate.

Customers can subscribe to a reminder by clicking a button on the product page. When they enter their email address in the pop-up screen, make sure there is an opt-in for your newsletter too by adding a checkbox. Also check if this flow overlaps with other email flows the subscriber might be in already, such as the welcome series.

An added benefit of this flow is that you can predict demand for a product, which helps you to determine how much to buy.

Email Marketing with Klaviyo and Code

Now you know which email flows are a must-have for your e-commerce business. It's time to choose Klaviyo or Mailchimp and set them up! 

As your Klaviyo partner, we can realize 20 to 50% revenue through email marketing.

We would love to have a sparring session about your email marketing. We can tell you all about cost, the kind of results that are feasible for your business, and how we propose to execute any specific requests you have.

Rather do it yourself? Download our e-book for some guidance and inspiration.

Book a Klaviyo demo

Linda Bleijenberg
Written by

Linda Bleijenberg

Code easily writes 100 lines of code every day, but a blog is a different story! So we leave that to Linda Bleijenberg, our copywriter. She lives around the corner in Delft and wants to be an IT wizard when she grows up. Until then, she interviews our experts and shares our most interesting insights about Shopify and E-Commerce on our blog.

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