How to best set up flow' structures for email frequency preferences?

Hi @Dang Le, thanks for bringing this question to the community! Thanks @stephen.trumble for the tag.

I understand your desire to respect people’s email preferences, and it’s something that my agency also makes an effort to do. Being intentional about when you’re sending emails, and to who, is one of the best things you can do for subscriber retention. 

That said, I encourage you to simplify your current system. It may be the case that people are either entering too many flows simultaneously, or you’re sending emails as flows that would be better suited as campaigns, or both scenarios may apply - depending on the email. 

I’d also affirm what @Bobi N. said is important, especially this part:

“For flows we don’t use this because flows are based on action and we don’t want to risk people not getting some important flow email (discount or discount reminder for example) because of the preferences… 

When people do something they should get an appropriate emails… for example, no matter what frequency i chose i should get transactional emails anyway.. so it is similar for flow emails when people actions should be addressed appropriately.”

As you build flows into a system of inter-connected customer journeys, the actions a customer/ profile takes while receiving one flow will impact another. This can impact the decisions you make for time delays in between emails/SMS for each flow, among other things. 

Recommendations

Here are some things you could do to simplify the flow system, and ensure that people are not receiving more than one email or SMS per day (as often as possible - sometimes people will place multiple orders, in which case they need to receive those emails even if > 1 per day)

1. Post-purchase/ Customer Thank You flows - identify where the information/ content delivered in this flow is no longer critical, and it’s okay for people to be removed from the flow queue
   1b. Then at this point, you enable “smart sending” on the following emails, OR you add filters like “has placed order 0 times since starting this flow” or similar, that remove people from the queue of this flow when they are most likely to have entered the queue of another flow, that their attention should now be focused on.
2. Welcome Series/ onboarding flows - be intentional about the timing of this flow, as well as how many days/ weeks it lasts after optin. Set the tone for what you want majority of your subscribers to be comfortable receiving - maybe this is no more than one email per week, or maybe it’s as many as one email every 2 days.
   2b. Engagement results here will give you useful insights about people’s email preferences as well as what they’ve specifically told you with the custom property. BUT - you might consider doing things like excluding anyone who’s currently receiving the WS flow from the recipients of your campaign emails.
3. Customer Winback/ purchase nurturing flows - once someone places an order in this flow, they most likely won’t need to receive further emails in this flow. So remove them from the queue, and let them focus on the post-purchase journey as they enter the next flow queue.

Overall, campaigns are the place where sending based on customer preference is the most impactful, as Bobi shared. You have the most control over when the email is sent, and precisely to who, regardless of what action or absence of action has recently occurred for each recipient. 

What you could also consider is across your various flows, depending on what stage of the customer journey each profile is in, approximately how many emails might someone get per week? That might then help you design your campaign sending strategy more specifically around an email preference. 

In my experience, if your flow emails are grounded in a proactive customer service approach to marketing, people are less likely to feel frustrated about receiving them, even in scenarios where multiple emails are received in the same week. Then you can focus the email frequency preference on campaign emails!

Warmly,

Gabrielle

Klaviyo Champion & Marketing Lead at ebusiness pros