7 Klaviyo Flows That Maximize Shopify Sales

Welcome to Ecommerce Cultivated, a podcast for modern luxury brands who are ready to grow and scale their eCommerce business. I’m your host, Karen, a retail expert for over ten years, turned strategist, Shopify, and Klaviyo Expert. Join me as I discuss how to craft a sought-after and timeless business that includes discussions around strategy, branding, design, marketing, and more.

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Managing the relationship you have with your potential customers, as well as your existing customers, is a great way to increase your eCommerce business sales and to further build brand awareness, and also to educate your audience about your products and offers.

In today’s episode, I want to go over Klaviyo Flows that you can use to help you increase your product sales.

What Is Klaviyo?

But first, I want to talk to you about Klaviyo and what it is. In case you aren’t familiar with the system, Klaviyo is an advanced email and marketing automation company that helps businesses manage communication with their audience. It allows you to take ownership of owning your email list and how you build it and manage communication with your audience.

It also allows you to send out marketing emails and SMS messaging, so text messaging if you decide to add on that feature.

A great benefit about Klaviyo is that it allows you to analyze and assess attributed revenue with your marketing so you can look at how your emails are performing and what contributions they are adding to the overall revenue of your business. Plus, there are a ton of additional features that make this a great tool. Another benefit of Klaviyo is that it also integrates with other platforms, not just Shopify.

But in the context of what I’ll be discussing today, I’m going to be talking about its integration with Shopify, specifically for those who use Shopify as their primary platform for their online store.

Besides platform integrations, Klaviyo also has a ton of integrations with common apps that Shopify store merchants use, making it an ideal tool to keep track of the important information in one place, so you don’t have to worry about how you’re going to connect your app to your email marketing platform.

What Are Klaviyo Flows?

Now that we’ve gotten a bit of information out about what Klaviyo is, I also want to clarify what are Klaviyo Flows. If you’re familiar with other email marketing software, you may have heard of terms such as email sequences and workflows. Each platform kind of has its own terminology.

But in Klaviyo. This is often referred to as Klaviyo Flows. Which is a great way for you to send marketing communication to your audience via automation. Let’s say you’re busy, and if you have some tools that you can utilize on the back end that’s nurturing and informing your audience. It’s going to save you a lot of time and also help you to make sales in your business without you being there 24/7. I really like to recommend that business owners can use to help them automate.

As I said earlier, Klaviyo does offer additional ways for you to communicate with your audience such as SMS messaging. So if that is a feature that you want to add on, you can totally do that and it’s great because you can have everything in one place. But in this episode I’m going to be talking about Klaviyo flows in the context of email marketing only.

So the first one that I’m going to recommend is the welcome series Flow.

Welcome Series Flow

I think this is an essential one that you should have in place. A welcome series is welcoming those who sign up to your email list into your business. And so this is also a great way for you to deliver an incentive that you may be offering. For example, if you’re offering a discount, you can send them the discount code via email. And also this is a great way for you to increase your brand awareness.

After they receive the first email that offers them the incentive, later you can start to send them more emails regarding your brand. That way they become more familiar with your company and understand what you’re all about. Then you can also educate them further about the product selections that you offer. That way you give them the opportunity to actually go through the buyer’s journey from being possibly unaware of who you are as a business to being interested, to actually becoming a customer.

This is definitely essential and Klaviyo actually starts you off with this flow as an option when you first sign up for your account.

A note about welcome series is that I’ve noticed with clients in their accounts is when a customer goes on their website, they sign up to the email list, and sometimes they don’t automatically just check out right away. Sometimes they do, but I do notice that they will go to their email, open that email, get the code, and then continue shopping. A welcome series is a great way to help you not lose sales, especially if the person who’s visiting your website is busy and they cannot purchase at that moment.

If you can get them onto your email list, offer them an incentive. Then give your potential customer time to later come back to finish the purchase. I do have some additional flows that I’m going to be talking about here that will also help facilitate that.

Browse Abandonment Flow

So sometimes you have people that will come to your website, maybe they’re not familiar with your brand and so they’re just looking around and they are checking out certain products and they’re reading descriptions, checking out the reviews, looking at the photos and videos and just kind of getting an idea of the product itself.

And so for whatever reason, maybe they click off of the site and they leave because they had other things to attend to or they just weren’t ready at that moment. This flow right here that I am going to recommend is called the browse abandonment flow. And so this is where people are the browsers, the ones just looking and haven’t made it to the checkout page. This flow will actually send them a nudge email that says hey, you forgot XYZ,  and the email reminds them of what they were looking at.

The benefit of this is that if that person was interested and got distracted, this email can help reengage their interests and actually help them to make it to the checkout page to buy. So this is a great one to have and it also will help aid in moving that person from interested to actually becoming a paying customer.

Abandoned Cart Flow

One of the challenges that eCommerce store owners face is abandoned carts. People who come to the site, check out products, add them to the cart and then they get to the checkout page and for whatever reason, they don’t finish the sale. It could be that they are distracted, they got pulled away because there was something else that needed to have their focus for the moment or they were surprised by the shipping, whatever it is.

Abandoned carts account for a lot of lost potential sales. And so for eCommerce brands, on average, abandoned cart rates are about 70%, which is fairly high. This flow that I’m going to recommend that you have in place is called the abandoned cart flow. And as you probably can guess, it is going to help you potentially recoup some of those abandoned carts. So what this does is it will send an email out to those who have added items to their cart and for whatever reason didn’t check out.

It reminds them that they left these items in the cart and then will email them taking them back to the checkout page if they click a certain button. If you’ve shopped online long enough, you probably have had this experience yourself where you’ve received that sort of email and honestly, it is effective.

It helps you to re-engage that person about the items they were interested in and then helps them to buy.

If somebody is really distracted or they became busy and they couldn’t check out for that moment, maybe they couldn’t get to their card quick enough or something happened with their child and they needed to attend to that.

If you can send them a reminder email that says hey, you forgot this, this will allow you to reduce that abandoned cart rate and acquire a new customer. So definitely have this one in place as well.

Post-purchase Flow

Once someone has purchased from you, what are some ways that you can actually show your gratitude?

I think this is a fun one to have and is definitely, a great way to elevate your experience for your online store and your overall customer experience and that is to have a post-purchase flow. A post-purchase flow is a flow that you can send out to those who have bought products from you and it’s a great way for you to say thank you and recognize them for becoming a customer.

It adds a more personalized touch to the experience and it recognizes them in a special way. Now you can send this to those that purchase one time and it is also a great way to recognize those who come back and do repeat purchases.

If you have somebody that has purchased from you like maybe more than three times, you can send them a special post-purchase email and offer them a special incentive to show that you are grateful for their business and their repeat business.

Product Review Flow

Let’s talk about when you visit an online store website, what are some things you look for to help you feel confident about the business and also build trust before you actually purchase?

You’re probably going to look at the photography, you’re going to look at any type of videos, and you’re going to read through the product descriptions. You’re going to look and try to assess if this is a quality website and also if the products are of quality.

Another thing that you’re going to look at probably unconsciously is product reviews. So in Klaviyo, they do have a flow that you can send out, which is a product review flow that will allow you to request feedback from those who have purchased products from you. This is a great way to build social proof that will help other customers who are potentially interested in purchasing from you to feel more confident about buying from your business.

Instead of you trying to figure out when this purchase and last purchase from you and when you should be sending out the request for a review, you can set up this automation on the back end of Klaviyo to handle all of that for you.

That way it’s automated and you can gather feedback from your audience about their experience, the products and so much more.

Even though this isn’t something that is probably going to be like an abandoned cart flow, social proof is really important in helping to establish that trust. And so if you can add more social proof to your product, it’s actually going to increase your sales. So I definitely recommend this.

If you aren’t showing a lot of reviews on your website, it’s still a great way to get feedback about how your audience and how your customers feel about your business and the products that you sell. So definitely have this one set up.

How many times have you gone to the website, you’ve discovered a product or products that you’re interested in and you go to add it to your cart and you find out that it’s out of stock and you’re like oh no, especially if it’s something you really want it. And some brands, really miss the mark on this where they don’t have a way for you to be notified when the item is back in stock. I highly recommend having this, especially if you have popular products that tend to sell out quickly before you can replenish them.

The back-in-stock flow gives you a way for you to send an automated email to let people know that this item or items are back in stock and that they can purchase them.

This is also a great way for you to have a quick money cash injection into your business because once you get the items back in stock, most likely people are going to rush to the website after they open the email to buy the item because they don’t want to miss out.

This creates FOMO and people tend to buy right away once the item is back in stock and they’re notified. So definitely have this set up so that you aren’t missing out on potential sales.

Winback Flow

So a lot of the flows that I’ve been talking about have been great for those that are kind of early in the buying journey or getting familiar with their business. But what about those already purchased from you?

And maybe they haven’t been back to your business in a while because they’ve forgotten or you haven’t been sending out regular marketing emails or marketing to them and so you want to reengage them, get them back into your business. One way to do this is through a winback flow. A winback flow is a series of emails that get sent out to customers who have previously purchased from your brand but haven’t done so in a while.

Maybe it’s been like three months since they last purchased or six months since they last purchased.

What Klaviyo will do is it will assess their buying habits and determine when was the last time they purchased. And if you have the winback flow set up, it will start to send them a special communication to re-engage them back into your business.

Now, this is a great one to have because it reminds them of your business and it also will give them a great way to check out any new products that you release or to repurchase some items that they previously bought and loved. And so this is a great way to also feel more confident about getting sales into your business because they previously purchased from you, so you know that they trust you.

This is a great way to add more revenue to your business and extend that relationship.

You always want to not forget about your existing customers, those who always purchase with you, and just make sure that you are taking care of them.

So this is a great way to stay connected, to keep them informed, and also just to say thank you for being a long-term customer.

All right, so that was a lot of information, but just a quick recap the flows that I went over that are really going to help you push the revenue sales for your eCommerce business from Klaviyo are:

• Welcome series flow
• Browse abandonment flow
• Abandoned cart flow
• Post-purchase flow
• Product review flow
• Back in stock flow
• Winback flow.

There are obviously more flows that you can implement based on the needs of your eCommerce business.

But overall, Klaviyo lets you get really detailed about how you want to manage the relationships you have with your existing and potential customers.

Each flow has benefits in that it allows you to review analytics so that you can see how much revenue is being generated from those flows. This allows you to make smarter business decisions and it also helps you to adjust where you need to. If a flow isn’t generating a certain amount of revenue or isn’t performing in the way that you want it to, you can make adjustments based on the analytics that are being provided inside of Klaviyo.

Like I said earlier, Klaviyo is really an advanced tool, so it allows you to see all this helpful data so that you can make great decisions about your business and also help you to see how effective your email marketing is when it comes to your business.

I know that I probably went over a lot of information about flows and maybe you have questions. If you do, feel free to reach out to me and I’ll be happy to answer them for you. If you want to have a further discussion about how we can work together to help you set up flows in your business and you want to make sure that Klaviyo is a good fit for you, definitely reach out. I’ll leave information in the show notes about how you can get in contact, so definitely check that out.

It’s been a pleasure having you listen, be sure to follow and stay connected by joining our eCommerce community. Linked in the show notes.