Generate 40% Of Total Business Sales From These Email Marketing Automations

Klaviyo and Shopify are the match made in eCommerce marketing heaven. Klaviyo understands what’s important to online retailers. Revenue, Conversions, and Speed.

From the moment you log in to your Klaviyo account, you know if your email marketing is working or not.

In this blog, I want to cover the five most important automations for any eCommerce store. Everything we cover in this blog can be implemented using Klaviyo and Shopify. On average, these automations generate 20% – 40% of all business sales.

Let’s dive in.

The Five Most Important Automations For Your eCommerce Business

Welcome
Lead Nurturing
Sales Automation
Cart Abandonment
Review & Testimonial Request

These automations are the bloodline of any business, especially eCommerce. Why? They follow the customer’s tendencies while keeping them on track to engage with your business and convert into a paying customer. Let’s take a closer look at how these work.

Welcome Automation

Probably the most used automation within email marketing. At the time of subscribing, we are automatically expected to receive an email from the said company.

Make your welcome emails count and focus on welcoming your new subscribers. Too many companies try to include their whole life story in one email. For this reason alone I separated the Welcome Automation from the Lead Nurturing. It puts you in the state of mind of ONLY welcoming right now. You will have time to nurture your potential customers later on.

Klaviyo Tip: Did you offer a coupon or discount? You can integrate with most coupon services including the one provided by Shopify.

Lead Nurturing Automation

This automation is a sneaky one. If done right, it should be in your top 3 revenue-generating automations. Why? With this automation, your goal is to earn your subscriber’s trust by educating them on your product or service.

As an example for Yadav, a diamond and fine jewelry store, we focused on educating their subscribers on how to buy diamonds. We taught them how to spot imperfections, how diamonds are priced, and how to get the best deal on your next diamond purchase.

The advice and education we give can be used shopping at any diamond or jewelry store. Even our own!

This kind of information gives your subscribers the confidence and knowledge they need to make the right decisions on their purchase. Once they have that, they will buy from whom they feel most comfortable with… this is typically the brand that taught them these great tips of advice.

Sales Automation

What’s funny about these automations is that they don’t normally perform as well as most want. Why? Because people don’t like to be sold!

So why even make it? Think of it as a safety net. It’s the last line of defense for people on the fence. By this point, the majority of your new subscribers have already purchased something, (From your Welcome or Lead Nurturing Flows) so by this point, they already bought.

For sales automations I like to create three different ones:

Seasonal: Create a specific seasonal catalog within your store and showcase these products in an automated email that is sent to people who have NOT yet purchased. Obviously, update your cataloge seasonally to keep your automation fresh.

Tip: To target “hot” leads, try to segment your automation to only send to people who have come back to your website more than once in addition to not purchasing.

Follow-up: Subscribers who have already purchased, send them related products or addons.

Let’s dive into this one a bit more. The goal of this automation is to help increase your customer value, meaning the amount your customer spends. You can offer addons like advance features if you sell software, or possibly socks to someone who bought shoes, but sometimes it’s not a direct, “Would you like fries with that?” type of situation.

For example, when helping Wild Water Fly Fishing, an online fly fishing store, with their email marketing. We decided to create an educational follow-up series for those who purchased a fly rod with us. These emails had high engagement as they taught them how to use the equipment, along with tips on how to fly fish. This automation helped increase repeat customers by double digits.

Don’t have anything to give away? Don’t have time to make a whole bunch of content? Simply offer them a 5% – 10% discount on their next purchase.

Tip: Set automated reminder emails to trigger every 2 – 3 months if your subscriber hasn’t used their discount yet.

30 Day Rolling Loyals: The first thing you need to do is create a segment focused on engagement in the last 30 days.

In the last 30 days, who has:

Visited Your Website?
Opened or Clicked an Email?

Make sure to exclude new signups from 30 days ago.

Every 30 days, these are the people you’ll keep sending to. Your segment will change daily based on subscriber engagement over 30 days. You want to exclude new signups as this automation is intended to find your loyal following.

So what do you send them? Here are some ideas:

New Products
Browsed Products
Popular Products
Blogs

Whatever you send, make sure it adds value to your subscriber. Enough value that they want to click to your website to learn more.

Remember emails don’t sell. The job of an email is to inform and/or take you somewhere else, where the purchase is actually made, typically: your website.

The hidden power of this last automation is that it only focuses on subscribers who are already reaching out to you by engaging with a marketing piece or your website. This will help increase your email delivery rates and conversion rates.

Tip: When adding products the subscriber has browsed, don’t place them front and center. Surround them with static products. Nobody likes to feel watched.

Cart Abandonment

Sends emails to subscribers who added products to their cart but didn’t complete the purchase. This automation is one of the money makers. Here are some tips when setting up:

Klaviyo makes it super easy to integrate with your store to create a seamless experience for your customers by automatically pulling the products they left in their cart into the abandonment emails.

Their email template is mainly done, it’s up to you to add your company flair and voice.

Make sure to use your voice, not a system or company voice. If you owned a surf shop, you may say something like “Kawabunga! Surfs Up, You Left Your Stuff Here” as a subject line instead of your typical “We saved your order”. I exaggerated but you get the point. People buy from people not from companies, share your personality.

Use proper images in your store so they get pulled in properly into your emails. If possible, use images with clear backgrounds.

Abandon Cart emails are great to include reviews. And guess what? Klaviyo offers something called feeds. Feeds allow you to create a section in your email that is automatically updated by a feed, (A blog is an example of a feed or your reviews). So you can create review feeds based on specific products or your company overall and include them towards the bottom of these emails.

Below is an example of what this looks like towards the bottom of an email. (You can place this feed anywhere on the email).

Imagine getting an email with a product you left in your cart. You were on the fence and then you open this email and see the product you want with actual up-to-date reviews telling you how awesome it is. It should be illegal.

Reviews & Testimonial Requests

Listening to feedback and reviews will help your company grow in the right direction while testimonials help attract more subscribers and customers.

Sending emails after a purchase to request feedback and a public testimonial can be challenging sometimes, and let’s be honest, who has time to stop what they are doing and write of a review?

Only when we are angry, right?

Happy customers want to leave great reviews but they don’t want their day inturrupted.

Requesting Feedback

To start off, the second part of this automation, you don’t need to have it activated all year around. It’s great if you can but, you don’t want it to compete with your review emails. I suggest turning this automation on 1 – 4 times at random over the year. You can also strategize this automation and activate when a change is made throughout your company. Eg. If you recently changed supplies for something, make sure to get feedback for the next orders.

You don’t need to complicate your feedback emails. Sometimes you can send a simple email with a thumbs up and a thumbs down. Make it easy for your subscribers to give you feedback. Just a simple click can teach you a lot.

For those who click on thumbs up, send them a followup email requesting a more in depth feedback form to be completed. Again, I used the words “in-depth” but let’s not complicated it. Ask no more than 5 questions and set them up for success. Ask specific, yes or no questions they can expand on. The best question you can ask is this:

Would you recommend us to a friend? And Why?

You get right to the meat of it when you ask a question that puts their social status on the line.

Now for those who clicked on the Thumbs down in the earlier email, we want to figure out what went wrong and resolve the issue right away.

Klaviyo allows you to send an email notification to an internal staff member to contact the customer to make it right.

Requesting a Review or Testimonial

Reviews influence thousands of buyers daily. When asking customers for reviews, ask questions you think people would want to know. Eg, if you sold blankets, you want to make sure everyone talks about how soft or warm they are.

I don’t recommend asking everyone. I’d recommend asking customers who have had a great experience (grab data from feedback automation. All the Thumbs Up Subscribers).

Some people call this cheating but to be honest, the angry customer will find his/her way to leave a public review. We don’t need to encourage it.

And that’s it! These automations alone will generate 20% – 40% of all of your business revenue. They take about 30 days to properly set up and will highlight future automations to build. How? These automations force you to take the steps your customers experience so it’s easy to spot improvements.