By strategically implementing email flows, brands can engage customers at different stages of their journey, drive conversions, and build lasting relationships.
Keep reading to learn just how important email flows are and get a detailed look at eight sequences that every ecommerce brand should consider adopting for their email strategy.
What Are Ecommerce Email Flows?
Ecommerce email flows are sequences of emails triggered by specific customer actions, behaviors, or conditions. Using marketing automation, these flows are designed to guide customers through their shopping journey, from initial engagement to post-purchase communications.
With a prearranged journey that caters to your audience based on real-time triggers, specific behaviors, and timelines, your recipients receive a more personalized experience with each new email they engage with. This gives them an active role in orchestrating their customer journey and defining their personal experience with your brand.
The scenarios these flows create can serve a wide variety of purposes: introducing a subscriber to your brand with a welcome email, waiting a desired amount of time before following up on an abandoned cart, enticing a lapsed shopper to shop your sale with a special discount, and so much more.
Are Email Flows Effective To Use for Ecommerce?
Email marketing is one of the most lucrative and influential channels you can use for your marketing strategy, but your email campaigns are only as good as the shopping journeys they build for your audience.
Modern customers expect their journeys to be personalized with emails that cater to their unique needs. They expect each email they receive to be informed by their interactions with the last campaign, which is why automated email flows are so important.
Email flows turn your individual emails into connected experiences without the need to painstakingly construct new messages that accommodate each customer’s individual preferences. With a preset series of automated emails ready to be sent to your audience whenever they meet certain criteria, you can build efficient and effective campaigns.
This can lead to great results, including:
More Customer Engagement
Triggering campaigns based on specific user actions or predefined schedules can turn your campaigns into a conversation with your subscribers, with each new step in the email flow appealing to their unique preferences.
Increased Sales and Conversions
Automated email flows can play a major role in driving sales and increasing conversions. On average, automated flows generate 30 times more revenue per recipient compared to standard email campaigns.
Building Customer Retention
Building long-term relationships with your subscribers is essential for email marketers, and email flows are great tools to build sustainable customer connections. The more focused your flows are on your customer’s needs, the more useful they can be at fostering loyalty and repeat business.
Reducing Cart Abandonment
Cart abandonment is a huge challenge in ecommerce — nearly 70% of online shopping carts are abandoned.
Thankfully, abandoned cart emails can go a long way toward getting those dropped sales back, and by building flows around these messages, you can further boost their effectiveness.
8 Examples of Email Flows for Ecommerce
The benefits of thoughtfully planned email sequences is undeniable, but how exactly do you build a good email flow? What kind of triggers should you put in place, and what does an optimized timeline look like?
The answers to these questions will differ depending on your unique business, but there are certain types of email flows that every business can benefit from.
Let’s dive into eight examples of ecommerce email flows, some conditions and triggers you should consider when building them, and how each flow could play out over time for your customers.
1. Welcome Email Flow
Automated welcome campaigns are great ways to greet new subscribers, introduce them to your brand, and set expectations for future communications.
Bloomreach’s welcome flow Plug & Play use case is a perfect example of a six-day welcome flow. It incorporates all the must-have triggers and conditions that make up a successful welcome campaign, including:
- Subscription to email list: Welcome email flows should be triggered when a customer subscribes to receive email communications from your brand.
- Consent verification: Make sure your flow has consent verification built into the process. Confirming that the email address is valid and that the customer has given consent to receive emails is an essential step.
- No previous welcome flow: To avoid repetitiveness, your sequence should have a step to ensure that the customer has not received a welcome flow campaign before.
Our welcome flow follows a proven email cadence:
- Email 1: An initial welcome email.
- Email 2: An email sent three days later highlighting unique selling points and educating your customer about what makes your brand special and why they should support your business.
- Email 3: A follow-up email sent three days later showing top-selling products or providing a discount code. If your recipient has made a purchase, you can showcase your popular and highly rated products. If they still haven’t purchased yet, you can offer a special discount to inspire that first purchase.
2. Product Recommendation Flow
Product recommendation emails are great tools for inspiring customer engagement. These emails rely on recommendation engines to serve products that your recipients are likely to enjoy, and they can be incorporated into automated flows using event-based triggers such as:
- Product views: Recommendation flows can be triggered when a customer views a product on your website, sending them similar products to view.
- Purchase completion: An email can be triggered after a customer completes a purchase, sending complementary products for customers to consider.
- Monthly sends: Product recommendations can easily be incorporated into recurring newsletter flows.
The more personalized your product recommendations are, the more engagement your campaigns will receive. But even a simple, straightforward recommendation email flow can produce game-changing results.
Bloomreach Engagement’s automated newsletter for new items of interest use case is a great example of a simple and effective product recommendation flow. This use case can be set up in no time, creating a monthly email newsletter showcasing your brand’s most commonly viewed items in the last 30 days.
With a routine cadence and most sought-after products on display, this automated email flow is well worth the effort to capture your audience’s attention and bring them back to your brand.
3. Abandoned Cart Flow
Streamlining and automating your abandoned cart recovery campaigns is in every business’s best interest. Here are a few trigger conditions to keep in mind when building your abandoned cart sequence:
- Cart updates: An email flow can be triggered when a customer adds items to their cart but does not complete the purchase.
- Checkout page visits: A flow can also be triggered when a customer navigates to the checkout page but does not finalize the purchase.
- Time of cart abandonment: It’s best not to send an abandoned cart email directly after a customer clicks away. Incorporating a waiting period is ideal, and you can even use AI to determine the perfect send time.
Using these conditions, your abandoned flow cadence might look like this:
- Email 1: A personalized abandoned cart email sent a few hours after a shopper leaves your site without completing a purchase.
- Email 2: A reminder email sent two days later emphasizing the items in the cart, possibly including a discount or special offer to incentivize a purchase.
- Email 3: A final email sent four days later about the abandoned cart, highlighting the urgency of item availability and encouraging customers to complete their purchase.
4. Post-Purchase Email Flow
Retaining customers is just as important as acquiring new ones, which is why post-purchase emails are so lucrative for businesses. They can deepen the customer relationship and turn one-time purchasers into longtime brand advocates.
Building a post-purchase email flow can take your customer relationship in a wide variety of different directions, but here are a couple of essential conditions to keep in mind when building your own sequence:
- Purchase completion: A post-purchase email flow should be triggered after a customer completes a purchase.
- Previous email open rates: As your post-purchase flow progresses, your recipient’s engagement should inform their email cadence and content.
With this in mind, here’s a template you can use to build a post-purchase flow:
- Email 1: An order confirmation and thank-you email sent directly after a purchase.
- Email 2: A follow-up email sent two days later if the recipient opened the thank-you email. This email features product recommendations that complement their purchase.
- Email 3: If the recipient opens the follow-up email, an email is sent highlighting loyalty programs four days later to entice further purchases.
5. Reengagement Email Flow
Like post-purchase emails, reengagement flows can take on many different customer journeys. But no matter what you want your ideal shopping journey to look like, win-back emails can help you get straying customers back on track.
Reengagement emails incorporate many of the triggers outlined in examples above, but there’s one major condition that every winback flow should utilize:
- Inactivity period: Reengagement flows are usually triggered after a set period of time where a customer has not interacted with your brand. Constructing email flows based on inactivity over the span of 30, 60, or 90 days can help shape the right approach to win back their business.
Considering this, here’s a blueprint you can use to start shaping your reengagement email flow:
- Email 1: An email reminding recipients of your brand and highlighting any new products, services, and updates.
- Email 2: A follow-up email sent one week later showcasing product recommendations based on categories that the recipient previously bought or viewed.
- Email 3: If no action is taken, a follow-up email is sent one week later with a special offer or discount to incentivize the customer to make a purchase.
6. Seasonal Promotion Email Flow
Big-name sales like Black Friday can be make-or-break events for businesses, which is why your email marketing strategy needs to be well-defined and focused on driving meaningful engagement.
To create an effective seasonal promotional email flow, you should consider incorporating any of the conditions covered so far, along with one specific trigger for this particular type of sequence:
- Seasonal events: This type of email flow is triggered by specific seasonal events, such as Black Friday, Christmas, spring, summer, or a flash sale. This can be tracked by setting a date-based trigger aligned with the seasonal promotion.
Here’s a draft of a event-based promotional email flow you can work with:
- Email 1: An announcement email highlighting the promotion a week in advance, underscoring the key offers and creating excitement around the event.
- Email 2: A reminder email to shop the seasonal sale happening now, emphasizing limited-time offers and special deals.
- Email 3: A last-chance message telling the recipient that the promotion is about to end, possibly including a countdown timer to communicate a sense of urgency.
7. Feedback Request Email Flow
Customer feedback emails can provide valuable insights into your customer relationships and become beneficial touchpoints in a broader email flow, such as post-purchase sequences and reengagement campaigns.
Here are a few triggers that can help inform your feedback email sequence:
- Purchase completion: An email can be triggered after a customer completes a purchase.
- Customer service interactions. A flow can be triggered following contact with a customer service representative.
Feel free to work with this sequence as an initial design for your feedback request email flow:
- Email 1: A thank-you email sent directly after a customer makes a purchase.
- Email 2: A post-purchase feedback request email sent one week later that includes a link to a survey or feedback form.
- Email 3: A follow-up email sent one week later to recipients who have not yet provided feedback, emphasizing the importance of their input.
Product Review Request Email Flow
Similar to a customer feedback email flow, a straightforward and effective sequence of emails can be built to inspire your customers to write a product review.
With the triggers and conditions discussed above, we can outline a review-focused flow that is as basic as it is productive:
- Email 1: A thank-you email sent directly after a customer makes a purchase.
- Email 2: A request to write a review for the purchased item sent one week later.
- Email 3: A follow-up email sent one week later to recipients who have not yet written a review, emphasizing the importance of their input.
Build and Implement Effective Email Flows With Bloomreach Engagement
Email flows like these can help businesses effectively engage with customers when and where it counts. You just need the right marketing automation platform to put your plans into action.
Bloomreach Engagement is the all-in-one marketing tool that can automate, optimize, and scale your entire email marketing strategy. Our solution brings together customer data, omnichannel automation, AI, and advanced analytics in a single platform, giving you everything you need to design personalized email marketing campaigns that will drive more revenue. What’s more, we make it easy for you to start anywhere and scale as your business grows.
Ready to see what Bloomreach can do for you? Schedule a demo to learn more.
