What is a Welcome Series Flow?

A flow in Klaviyo is a series of emails that automatically get sent out to your customers based on certain triggers. The welcome series flow will be sent out when somebody signs up for emails on your website, which will most likely happen via a website popup or contact form. The purpose of this flow is to give customers an intro to your brand and pass along any offers that were mentioned in the website popup.

Learn More: 11 Easy to Set-Up eCommerce Klaviyo Flows You Can’t Live Without

What is a Website Popup?

A website popup is a window that appears on a website’s interface. As the name suggests, it pops up on the screen with the goal of collecting information (typically an email address or phone number) in exchange for some kind of special offer.

For example, for DermWarehouse, our website popup offers 20% off most of the brands that we sell on the site. If customers enter their email address into the popup, we’ll send them a 20% off code via our welcome series flow. We then have a second step within our popup to collect phone numbers for SMS. If customers give us their phone number, we offer them access to VIP sales and promotions. 

A website popup is extremely important because when you’re running paid advertising and spending money to drive traffic to your site, not everyone will convert right away. When you collect email addresses from potential customers, you have a way to remarket to them with your flows and campaigns. This greatly increases the chances that they’ll make a purchase on your site in the future, even if they don’t today. 

Any traffic that you’re driving to your site is extremely valuable, so adding an enticing offer on your website popup is important. Once customers enter their email address in the popup, your welcome series flow will fire off. 

Organization of Your Welcome Series Flow

Below you’ll see an example of what a welcome series flow will look like. You’ll see that the flow consists of a series of emails and/or text messages that will get fired off to your customers based on certain time delays and conditions.

Step 1 of your flow will get sent off immediately after someone supplies their email address. The reason you want to make sure this happens quickly is because if you’re offering a discount, for example, the customer is likely ready to make a purchase right away. The last thing you want is for them to have to wait to receive their discount code via email. This will make for some very unhappy customers! 

Klaviyo recommends sending step 2 of your welcome series flow one day after step 1. Klaviyo makes recommendations on time delays for all of their flows based on data from all of their customers. I tend to stick to their recommendations here. 

You can also see in step 2, that there’s a conditional split that was added. According to Klaviyo, a conditional split is a component in the Visual Flow Builder that is helpful if you want to create a single flow but then curate different content for recipients based on what you already know about them (e.g., gender, location, past purchase history etc.). In layman’s terms, it creates a condition for when someone will continue in your flow. In this case, we only want customers to continue in our flow if they did not place an order after receiving email 1. If they did already place an order, then there’s no reason for us to keep reaching out with our discount code. 

Many businesses have three steps in their welcome series flows, however, for us, this has always been a little overkill. We’ve never generated a lot of revenue from email 3, so we turned this off and stuck with two emails. We don’t want to bombard our customers and feel that if they haven’t ordered after two reminders, they are likely just not interested.

Learn More: How to Set-Up a Successful eCommerce Abandoned Cart Flow

Email Content for Welcome Series Flows

The main messaging you want to get across in your flow is to reiterate the offer from your website popup. If we’re offering 20% off in our popup, we want to make sure our email includes the same offer with a coupon code that customers can use at checkout. 

Don’t overthink your emails here. The main purpose is to get customers to come back and place their order, so you want to make sure that the email you’re sending doesn’t distract them from the main goal. 

We keep our messaging simple, include a big call out with our promo code, and then add links to our top categories on our site and our top brands so people can easily shop. 

I also always make sure to include any restrictions to the sale at the bottom of my email. 

Should You Incorporate SMS Into Your Welcome Series Flow?

You can absolutely incorporate SMS into your welcome series flow. We keep ours strictly to emails and include SMS in some of our other flows, but this is definitely something worth testing out. I’d recommend adding SMS as the 2nd step in your flow. Make sure to use a conditional split after the time delay following step 1. The condition should be that customers are consented to receive SMS. Following the Yes path, you’ll want to add in your SMS message. Following the No path, you can add in your 2nd email. This way, even if a customer is not consented to receive SMS, they will still get a 2nd message. 

Learn More: How to Grow Your Klaviyo SMS List

Utilizing Analytics to Measure Success

I’ve mentioned the large amounts of revenue you would start seeing come in from your Klaviyo flows, so it’s important to dive into the analytics. Klaviyo has great reporting to help you stay on top of performance for all of your flows. 

You can see data such as open rate, click rate, placed order rate and most importantly revenue. 

You can also drill down on more analytics to view information like link activity, which will show you exactly where your customers are clicking within each of your emails. You can see below that most of our customers are clicking on our skin care category, which tells us which products are the most popular. This link activity information gives you great insight into what’s interesting and important to your customers and what to promote in other emails.

Learn More: eCommerce Email Marketing Statistics

In Closing

• The welcome series flow has been a game changer for DermWarehouse and so many of our Media Captain clients. 
• Adding a website popup to your site and making sure to collect email addresses and phone numbers on site is key to making the most out of the traffic that you drive to your site.
• Klaviyo has great reporting and analytics that you can utilize to measure the success of your flows and campaigns. 

Need help setting up your Klaviyo flows? Contact The Media Captain!