When setting up a retention marketing strategy, automated email flows are always a must. But email flows are a universe of their own and depending on the trigger involved, there are many kinds of flows. The one set of automated emails we recommend implementing are the “Abandon Email Flows” the most commonly used one of which is the Abandoned Cart email. As an eCommerce store owner, you probably already have them set up. But if you’re looking to optimize their results, you may want to consider making them more personalized. Why? According to a Google study, 61% of consumers expect brands to tailor experiences based on their preferences, and 90% of leading marketers agree that personalization contributes to business success. So let’s see how you can take your abandonment email flows to the next level.
What are abandonment email flows?
Abandonment flows are triggered when a user abandons an action they were doing on your website. For example: viewed a product but didn’t add it to the cart.
According to SEMrush, this is what a typical eCommerce sales funnel looks like. From all the traffic your website gets, 30% of visitors will browse a category page, 20% will go into a product page, 5% will add a product to their cart and only 1% of your visitors will convert.
This is why implementing email flows is essential in order to re-engage and convert the great percentage of visitors that didn’t make it to the end of the funnel. Based on this, there are three abandonment email flows every eCommerce store should have up and running.
- Browse Abandonment Flow: This one is triggered when a subscriber viewed a product page but didn’t go into the next stage, which would be adding it to their cart.
- Added-to-Cart Abandonment Flow: This email automation is triggered when a subscriber added a product or products to their cart but didn’t start the checkout process.
- Checkout Abandonment Flow: This email automated journey is triggered when a subscriber starts checkout but doesn’t finalize placing the order.
How to personalize abandonment email flows?
As we mentioned, providing value through personalization is essential in today’s marketing world. There are a couple of ways you can enable this personalization on your email automations:
- Giving personalized recommendations using Klaviyo’s data feeds
- Personalizing the content of your flow by creating branches based on customers’ behavior or characteristics
1. Give personalized recommendations using data feeds
When you’re shopping, finding a product that adjusts to your wishes and necessities can be hard. A friendly website interface is key for people to browse all your products easily and find the one for them. However, when that’s not enough, your abandonment email flows can come in and act like your lead’s personal shopping assistant.
Make your subscriber’s experience more smooth by surfacing the right product for them without making them dig for it. 62% of shoppers say receiving recommendations is important when deciding which brand to buy from.
If you use Klaviyo for your email marketing strategy, it’s super easy to recommend products to your subscribers based on the products they have seen and/or purchased. To do this, you just need to
- Log into Klaviyo and open the Content dropdown on the bar menu.
- Click on Products and then on Manage Data Feeds.
- Click on the Add Product Feed option.
- Give your product feed a name and choose from which collection Klaviyo can pick out products to give out recommendations.
- You can include and exclude as many categories as you want.
- Select what information you want Klaviyo to consider when giving out the recommendations, you can choose between Viewed Products, Ordered Products, or both.
What’s great about it is that you can create as many data feeds as you wish, and as personalized as you wish and include them in your browse abandonment emails’ product showcase. It’s super easy to change the data feed you use for every email according to the content of the email or the segment of people that will get it. Just create a template and add a Product Block. Adjust the setting of the block, including the Data Feed you want to use. Choose how many products to showcase, in how many rows and columns and what product information you want to include. We’ll review an example in the next section.
2. Personalize your content through branches
Yes, your flows help you target your customers based on certain actions they took like viewing a product, adding items to their carts, or starting checkout. However, if you’re looking to make your abandonment flows more personalized, branching your flows to target different segments based on the characteristics of those actions or their own personal characteristics, enables you to really tailor the journey for each customer.
Before we get into the details of all the ways you can branch out your flow, let us introduce you to the two different types of branches you can create.
- Conditional splits: These are based on the actions a recipient has taken or their characteristics. For example, splitting customers and non-customers, men and women, etc. Therefore, allowing you to step into the mindset of each different subscriber group and create a personalized sales experience for each based on its unique characteristics.
- Trigger splits: These are based on the specific characteristics of the event that triggered the flow. For example, if the viewed product is part of a specific collection if the price is above or below a specific amount, etc.
Here are some ways you can branch flows in order to create a more personalized experience for your recipients.
Branching by gender
If you have a brand for which gender is relevant (like apparel), then branching people by their gender is a good idea, so you can also recommend relevant products. You can branch either by using a conditional split based on if people browsed or added products from the Women or Men collections to their carts, or if you use Klaviyo, taking advantage of its predictive analytics.
For example, this baby apparel brand created collections based on products that could be more attractive to parents shopping for girls, boys, or both. Then created a Data Feed for each collection. In the cart abandonment flow, they created 4 branches using 3 trigger splits.
If the subscriber started checkout with a product from the girl’s collection in their cart, they would get an email where the product showcase included only products in the Girly Prints collection. They also created trigger splits for people that started checkout with boys and gender-neutral products. As a safety net, they added in the last branch an email with a data feed that included their newest arrivals.
There was no need for too many extra resources, this brand only had to change the data feed selected for the product showcase of each email and tailored the experience for their customers, becoming their own personal shopping assistant.
Here’s an example of the different recommendations customer’s got, based on the products they added to their carts and started checkout with.
Branching by collection
Personalize your abandonment flow by creating emails based on the collection your subscribers viewed, added to their cart, or started checkout with. This can allow you to do many things: branch based on women vs. men collections, sizes collections, colors, etc.
Take this jewelry brand as an example. A percentage of their revenue coming from their “Conscious Collection” products is donated to charity. Knowing this, we set up a browse abandonment flow and made two different branches: one for regular products and one for the products from the Conscious Collection. This way, the recipients feel part of doing the good the brand stands for.
This is a great way of adding value to your product, your brand, and your email marketing content.
Branching by buyers vs. non-buyers
Tailor your content to buyers and non-buyers. Returning customers know your product and they don’t need as much convincing as people that have never ordered before. Push non-buyers to make their first order with more educational content, social proof, and a discount.
Starting the path to creating personalized marketing experiences is the hardest part. Make sure you start on the right foot by leaving it in the hands of an experienced eCommerce marketing agency.
Ps: If you’re looking to personalize your SMS Flows, make them conversational flows. This allows you to collect more insights directly from your subscribers. Check Why your eCommerce Store Needs an SMS Conversational Flow?
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