Are you still doubting the importance of email marketing for your store?? If yes, you have just lost 38% of monthly revenue.

Don’t rely on promos or nurturing campaigns alone. For persistent sales, even when store revenue drops, use flows (a.k.a. automations).

You must have read a million times about segmentation’s importance for email marketing. ?But segmentation doesn’t end with sending campaigns to engaged people. Automated email sequences, or “flows,” are as important as campaigns. According to Klaviyo, they get an average 1528% better conversion over promos.?

We classify flows by either the trigger that initiates them or the segment they target:

✔️ action-triggered flows cover the most engaged segments and help drive sales. Example: starting, but failing to complete a checkout should trigger a Cart Abandoned flow. 

✔️ unengaged segment-triggered flows help renew engagement and clean the list. Example: a segment of people who never opened or clicked a promotional email should trigger a Re-Engagement flow.

✔️ buyer segment-triggered flows show appreciation and improve repeated buyers rate. Example: a segment of people who bought once but have been inactive for 30 days could trigger a Win-Back flow.

✔️ recently engaged segment-triggered flows bring better promotional results if using conditional based follow-ups . Example: buyers of a particular product who have been active in the last 10 days may be good candidates for a VIP flow.

Timing Really Is Everything

Why do flows make such a difference? Because flows combine customized offers with precise timing. Few other channels can do this.⏰ Prospects become qualified based on their willingness and ability ?to buy a given product or service. Since this is often event-based, precise timing is a crucial factor in the sales qualification process. Cash flow, a needed repair, customer education, etc. are often one-time events that catalyze a sale.

Drip marketing, cold calling, content marketing and dozens of other forms of inbound and outbound prospecting all struggle to identify the right time to pitch the prospect. Ultimately, timing for these methodologies is a guess, educated or otherwise, that each tries to offset with frequency. We just hope that increased sales is directly proportional to increased sales pitches.?

But true marketing automation, such as through Zapier zaps, bot engagement or email flows, relies on triggers that usually only happen at the right time. Marketers prepare in advance pitches  to dispatch as soon as the trigger fires.

The triggers listed above, such as initiating a checkout process, are all excellent clues?—sometimes even sure bets—on where the prospect is within the sales funnel. These indicators enable the marketing message to arrive once, not frequently, at the right time. This precise timing makes it much more effective.

In this way, email flows allow you to automate a part of your sales process. Social posts and other marketing methods are rarely timed with such precision. Close examples include search marketing, where a prospect initiates a search query at the time they are looking to buy.? Or retargeting which displays relevant cart abandon advertisements shortly after the prospect initiates the purchase. ?

It is no coincidence that search marketing and retargeting, like email automation, have some of the highest conversion rates of any marketing channels.

By leveraging timing in marketing message delivery as only automation allows, you supplement your push marketing with a “second sales team” of triggers and flows that work for you 24/7. They constantly monitor for signals?from your prospects that they are ready, or nearly ready, to buy.

For more real-world examples of how the addition of marketing flows has increased sales in dozens of verticals, just comment below.?

Anna Hrychukh and Thomas McClintock, Hustler Marketing