Selling out your products is the holy grail for any e-commerce store and one of those rare “good problems to have”. But being out-of-stock on your bestsellers can also mean loss of revenue, and sometimes even losing customers. However, keeping on top of updating inventory and communicating that to your audience in real-time can be challenging. Imagine having to manually check which previously sold-out product is now back in stock and then churning out a manual campaign to announce that? Not the smartest way to go about it.

And that’s where back-in-stock email flows come in. These flows automatically trigger an email when a sold-out product is back in stock and ready to be sold! However, setting them up can require a bit of expertise so in this post I’ll take you through how exactly to set up Back-in-stock flows on Klaviyo for your Shopify (or any other e-commerce platform) store.

Back in Stock flows appear different from other triggered flows as these require an external but unique back-in-stock component delay to start triggering. When creating them, it is important to set the message correctly in order to show the right product data. Currently, Klaviyo supports back-in-stock flows for accounts with Shopify, BigCommerce, and custom inventory catalog integrations. In this article, you’ll learn how this flow works, its components, and how to build them. 

Key Components

• Event Alert / Trigger: When a customer subscribes to an out-of-stock or sold-out product on your site, you’ll see an event tracked as Subscribed to Back in Stock in Klaviyo. Automatically this will mark them to enter the Back in Stock flow, then wait at a back in stock delay until their item of interest is restocked.

• Website Button: Once the trigger is set up in your flow, the next step is to add the snippet to the files of your store. Automatically, a button will appear when items get sold out as “Notify me when available”. If customers click this a form will pop up and go to the Back in Stock. See below to install the snippet: 

• Install the Back in Stock Snippet for Shopify
• Install the Back in Stock Snippet for BigCommerce

• Waiting at the Delay: After the flow is triggered, you can see the contact in the status Waiting, this list of recipients is expecting the back in stock delay. You can review this activity in the configuration sidebar of the delay component.

** To view recipient activity around your stock alert email, click on the email itself. Here, in the sidebar, you will see a summary of the activity over the last 30 days. Click View all Analytics to explore activity over a longer, or custom, timeframe.

The product is Back in Stock, what happens next? 

Depending on your settings configuration, contacts in Waiting will move into Moved to Next Step step to receive an alert message informing them their item is available again. There Are two notifications rules working closely on how many and how frequent these notifications should be sent: 

• Notify Customers: This rule will determine how many customers are notified when each item is restocked, depending on the demand of the product. A good tip here is to prioritize the VIP segment for notifications. These can be configured in your Account’s email settings.
• Notifications Timeframe: This rule determines the wait between batches of emails in case you choose to specify a number for this per item restocked.

Example: “ If a single item is restocked and “customers to notify” is set to 5, Klaviyo will message the 5 oldest subscribers. Then, wait for this amount of time before emailing the next 5. Emails will continue to be sent in batches until the existing inventory drops below your account’s minimum inventory threshold.“

Step by Step of Building a Back in Stock Flow 

• Use Pre-Built Templates / Create Your Own Back in Stock Email: You can find pre-built Back in Stock templates in Klaviyo’s Flow Library by searching the keyword name of what you’re looking for. However, if you want to create your flow from scratch these are the steps to follow: 

Take into account the specific set of dynamic variables needed to create your Subscribed to Back in the Stock event. You can see here the table of variables provided by Klaviyo and supported for Shopify and BigCommerce. This is what a template will look like using the dynamic variables, the first image in the template builder in comparison to the second image with real event data. 

Back in Stock Reports

To revise the analytics and activity of your flow, a report option can be found by clicking the Back in Stock Delay component, then the View Back in Stock Product Request Report link in the sidebar. You can export it as a CSV file and also subscribe to receive email notifications for the report. 

According to Klaviyo, Back-in-stock flows are one of the highest revenue drivers per recipient as the performance shows almost 50% open rates. The reason for this is very simple; people subscribe to these flows expecting to have their item of interest, and the chances of conversions are very high when someone has actively shown interest in being notified of its availability.

So, now you know the basics of the flow, how it works and how it can be built into your ESP. If you need help with setting up or simply have the experts set them up for you, book a call with us, we’ll do the job for you.