Get your first 4, basic Email Marketing Automation Flows ready today. I’ll explain each and share ideas you can use on your business.

1. New Subscribers

New Subscribers have been to your website and have subscribed to your newsletter but they have not yet made a purchase. The goal here is to get the subscriber to convert into a first-time customer.

Trigger – Visitor Subscribes to Newsletter

Conditions – No orders have been placed yet

Action – Send an email to confirm subscription and to present an incentive

Wait 1 day – Condition – No orders have been placed yet -> No ->

Reminder for incentive

Wait 1 day – Condition – No orders have been placed yet -> No ->

Move to the Last Chance list where you email this customer with the best possible offer on your next bulk send.

2. New Customers

New customers have just placed their first order on your website. It’s your chance to make the most out of it! The first 30 days are crucial if you are to get a second order. Most of your first-time buyers will not have looked over your site in detail. Most of the time they are coming from paid search so they found the product and checked out right away. With this flow, you will need to bring the new customer back to the site as soon as possible. This will be a discovery process for him and he will need an incentive.

Trigger – Visitor places his first order

System action – Update the First Purchase Date attribute with the date of today (you can use this attribute to send offers every 12 months to celebrate his first order on your site).

Action – Send an email to welcome the client to the website/brand. This can be one or more emails, depending on how deep the brand is. For example, you may want to send a “social discovery” email as a separate one where you detail where you are socially active and you include snips of ratings and interesting content.

Wait 1-2 weeks

Action – Send an email to ask for product reviews

Wait 1-2 weeks

{after 3-4 weeks it’s time to try and get the second order}

Action – Send an email to build anticipation – i.e. Can I tell you a secret? We’re running a massive sale tomorrow for new customers only! etc

Wait for 24h

Action – Send the deal over – it has to be a great deal!

3. Cart Abandoners

These are potential customers. You know what they want, it’s up to you to find the right way to get them to convert.

You will need 3 cart abandon reminders to go out in the beginning and then, based on results and testing you can decide on keeping all 3 or decreasing the number. I always start with:

reminder 1 – 4 hours after abandon – build loss anticipation – stock is limited

reminder 2 – 24 hours after abandon – stock is limited – give an incentive to check out right away

reminder 3 – 48 hours after abandon – stock is limited – last chance to checkout with incentive

4. Browse Abandoners

Yey! The popup worked and you got the email address. Now you can see that the visitor had a look at the website. Are you savvy enough to figure out what he needs in order to get him back on the site?

A browse abandon email by default will have a link back to the last product the visitor had looked at but that is not enough to get a conversion. You will need to add additional products, and those products need to be relevant!

Build several product feeds:

  • most purchased
  • most viewed
  • segment most viewed products based on main category (i.e. outdoors shop? most viewed fishing, most viewed hunting)

By having these feeds you can now build a split in your Browse Abandoned Flow and send relevant products based on what the visitors were looking at.