Hello! Sarah here, Anso Atelier’s Senior Graphic Designer. I’m here to answer all of your questions about email flows, an essential part of any successful email marketing strategy.
What are flows?
Flows are emails that are automatically sent to a subscriber and/or customer based on the actions they take. I’m sure you have received a welcome email when you signed up for a company newsletter or received an email reminding you of the items you left in your shopping cart. These are flows!
Which flows should I use?
The most common flow, which I highly recommend you have in place, is the welcome flow. This is a series of emails that are sent to subscribers when they sign up for your list. As the emails with the highest open rate, this is an excellent chance to make a good impression, give a sign-up offer, or educate your audience about your company.
Other useful flows to have are abandoned cart, browse abandonment, and win-back. Ever visit an online shop, fill up your cart, and later exit out of the page? An abandoned cart flow allows you to automatically send an email to a customer that has done this, reminding them of the items and enabling you to create a sense of urgency or offer a discount code. Browse abandonment flows are emails sent to customers that were looking at a product on your website but didn’t add it to their cart. This allows you to remind them of the product, educate them on the benefits, and offer a discount code. Win-back emails allow you to, quite literally, “win back” your audience by sending discount codes to those who have not engaged with your content for a certain amount of time in order to get them interested again and encourage them to make a purchase.
How many emails should I have in each flow?
You can have an unlimited number of emails in each flow, but I would recommend doing no more than three emails each. It is important to keep in mind that you do not want to annoy your audience with a constant stream of emails and cause them to unsubscribe. No matter the marketing strategy, balance is key.
When should I trigger a flow to be sent?
This depends on the type of flow. For a welcome flow, I recommend sending the first email in the flow immediately after the customer subscribes to the list, especially if you have a sign-up offer. You don’t want to keep your customer waiting too long for the code, because then they may change their minds about purchasing your product. For the other emails in the welcome flow, I recommend having at least a few days in between in order to not overwhelm your new subscriber.
For the abandoned cart and browse abandonment flows, I recommend sending them several hours after the customer enters the flow in order to not be too pushy with your selling strategy while still reminding the customer about the product on the same day.
In the case of the win-back flow, I recommend sending one email when a subscriber hasn’t been engaged for 90 days and another when they haven’t engaged for 180 days. After a few months of non-engagement, it’s a good time to offer the subscriber a discount code in order to get them interested again and entice them to make a purchase. The number of subscribers in this list will also inform you if you should change your current email strategy to be more engaging.
Conclusion
I hope that you learned how to best implement email marketing flows for your own company/client’s specific needs. Flows are an excellent way to increase sales and brand awareness. Want to learn more about email marketing? Follow us on TikTok @ansoatelier for more how-tos, tips, and tricks!