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Welcome Series Setup and Best Practices

  • 21 September 2020
  • 30 replies
  • 7624 views

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What Is a Welcome Series Flow and Why Use One?

A welcome series is a sequence of emails sent directly after someone signs up to hear from your brand. This is a critical moment in the customer lifecycle because it's your opportunity to introduce new, interested prospects to your business and product offering. With a welcome series, you should strike while the iron is hot and capitalize on this display of interest.

A welcome series is crucial email automation, and Klaviyo provides a pre-built welcome series out-of-the-box. You will find a standard welcome series listed in the Flows tab of your account. If you want a more advanced welcome flow, you can browse different ideas in our Flow Library.

How Does a Welcome Series Flow Work?

Unlike many other recommended flows, a welcome series is a list-triggered flow. Whichever list you choose should be the list that new subscribers are added to when they sign up. There are four key ways that new contacts can be added to a list to trigger a welcome series:

  • By signing up through a signup form

  • By signing up through a subscribe page

  • By being manually added to a list

  • Via the API

How Many Emails Should I Include?

Based on research from thousands of Klaviyo ecommerce customers, we have found that sending three emails in your welcome flow leads to optimal performance.

What About Timing?

We recommend the following structure for your Standard Welcome Series Flow:

  1. Email #1, send immediatelyIntroduce new subscribers to your brand and collect their email preferences. To send subscribers an email immediately after they opt in, add an email directly after your flow's trigger with no time delay before it.

  2. Email #2, after two daystwo days after they sign up, encourage your subscribers to like or follow you on social media.

  3. Email #3, after four daysFour days after someone signs up, showcase your best-selling products.

How Should I Try to Improve My Welcome Series Flow?

The Browse Ideas tab is a great place to look for new ideas and inspiration when leveling up your welcome series and includes many of the best practices we recommend.

Additionally, we offer additional Best Practices that provide examples/recommendations for targeting different audiences for your welcome flow(s).


30 replies

Userlevel 7
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Hi @Sunil,

Thank you for your reply.

  1. On your first point, the only pre-requisite to quality for the flow would be to join that list that triggers the flow. If any given user is in fact already subscribed to another list with your current pop-up settings to not show to existing profiles, then a user who joined another list via a Klaviyo form-fill wouldn’t be able to enter the customer vs. non-customer flow. Also keep in mind there is a distinction between a “customer” (a user who has placed an order) and a “subscriber” (a user who has explicitly filled out a sign-up form or consented to your brand in another way). It’s possible for a user to sign-up and become a subscriber without purchasing anything (being a customer) and vice versa. For example, if a user previously placed an order, and then became a subscriber after the fact, after entering the flow, they would go down the “Yes” path of the split for “Placed Order at least once over all time”.
  2. We have a plethora of articles and material on segmentation, I strongly recommend exploring our help center with particular attention to our section on lists and segments for examples and strategy. I also recommend searching the community for segment-related strategy and questions.
  3. Yes that definition of a win-back flow is correct. A win-back flow is a series of emails sent to customers who previously engaged with your brand, but have not interacted with you for a certain period of time. I recommend checking out our article on that with more information here. A potential purchaser segment includes anyone who engaged with your brand in the past month but has yet to make a purchase. It is one of our default segments. It includes users who have been “active on site” or clicked an email or viewed a product and not placed an order in the last 30 days. It won’t necessarily include users who abandoned a cart since that is a separate metric “Checkout Started”. In terms of targeting users, you should be setting up discrete flows for each of those scenarios i.e. a “Browse Abandonment” flow triggered off of Viewed Product and a “Abandoned Cart” flow triggered off of Started Checkout. For more information on these topics, I recommend checking out the full-length articles on these flows in our help center. These can be found here and here
  4. There is no single correct answer here, I recommend looking through this article on the welcome series for some tips and also check out the additional articles section at the bottom of that article for further links to blog articles on the topic. I also recommend searching the community and the help center for welcome series and campaign-sending strategy we have a lot amazing material here to assist.
  5. Yes, you can click into the “Add Columns to Email” at the bottom of the template and then select “One” and drag and drop that and the text block will span the entire email

 

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Hello, this was great and very helpful. 

I have one question how do I make my flow active? It does not seem as easy as flicking a switch like the abandoned cart or customer thank you.

It is likely so easy but can not work it out and I want the email sign up mailer live. 

Thank you community 

Userlevel 7
Badge +61

Hi @David DNACBD,

Thanks for sharing this with us.

I recommend checking out our article How to Enable a Flow to Start Sending which speaks to turning flow emails live. It is no different than turning an abandoned cart or thank you flow live.

If you notice all flow emails are live but no users are entering the flow, I recommend reviewing reasons why a user may not be entering a flow here and here.

I hope that is helpful!

 

 

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I want to send the email when people sign up in my website.

Even user didn’t sign up by klaviyo, can we make the welcome email?

 

I can’t see any possibility for that.

 

  • I want to send the email when people sign up in my website.
  • I want to stop sending email from shopify side.

Please let me know these two things.

Thank you.

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Hello! I would like to ask the question of welcome flows and tried the post and still can't send emails1. Turn off double receiving email confirmation2. Turn off Smart Send3. Welcome series opened in real time4. After I entered a few emails in my shopify footer/pop-up window, I still can't receive the welcome series emails, but I checked the newletters list and confirmed that these emails entered the newletters list, and then I clicked into welcome flows to see When the first email arrives, any data is 0, but the second email sees data at the waiting position. Can you help me?

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