Hi Community!
I’m Phillip. I’m based out of New York and one of my favorite aspects of Klaviyo is definitely their automated flows. In fact, I’m going to share some tips and trips about something our company has discovered recently about one flow in particular: The Welcome Flow.
Utilizing our Welcome Flow to Convert More Customers
A recent challenge our company faced has been taking our welcome flow from good to great! With a large account and quite a lot of history, we observed our Welcome Flow messages had mediocre open rates, click rates, and placed order rates and noticed an opportunity to turn this around.
We’ve found that each flow and each email in the flow are unique and no two should be expected to have the same performance. For example, Welcome Email 1 and Welcome Email 5 will not produce the same return metrics, so it’s best not to have the same goals for each message.
Narrowing in On Specific Metrics for Each Individual Message
With that in mind, we focused on email specific KPIs within each individual flow. Setting benchmarks and goals for each message based on the historical performance of the email itself. Through this process we discovered the performance on a trailing 90-day basis and what would be a realistic goal for each message’s KPI in the next 30-60 days (depending on volume).
We isolated Open, Click, and Placed Order Rates for each email in the Welcome Flow – and used the historical metrics to isolate what we would test to get an idea on the specific metric.
For example: Open Rate → Subject Line, Click Rate → Email Structure/Messaging/Design/CTA, and Placed Order Rate → Destination Page Conversion Rate. By isolating these features and setting specific goals, it made it really easy to track performance or lack thereof of our Welcome Flow messages.
Generally speaking, we targeted an 1.5x increase in Open Rate, 1.5x increase in Click Through Rate, and 1.5x increase in Placed Order Rate. There were nuance differences email to email, but making the goals simple, as explained above, will make it an easy process for my peers in the Community to replicate as well!
The results of the test were incredible to see! This Welcome Flow went from underperforming and not being an efficient avenue of converting new subscribers, to converting 20% more new customers than the previous version built by another agency.
Driving Results with Certainty
The biggest takeaway for us, which really proved our thesis overall, is that if we focus on driving a specific outcome, targeting goals for each KPI, and optimizing the the email for the outcome (and tying performance back to the goal) that we will be able to drive results with a very high degree of certainty.
My Advice to the Community
My biggest piece of advice for the Community at large is to be careful of doing things the easy way or because that is the way they’ve always been done. In essence, just because Welcome Flows have been built one way in the past, doesn’t mean it can’t change. Test things out out to see if you can increase performance, thinking outside the box! After all, the marketing landscape has changed dramatically since Klaviyo built in-house flows in the product years ago. Approaching email from the standpoint of “performance” and not just “email marketing” provides an entirely new way to approach the channel, and can often drive customer acquisition of bigger brands that need more firepower.
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