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August 2, 2024

Klaviyo Audit Expert Series: Advanced Flows

WHEN YOU FINISH READING THIS ARTICLE YOU’LL KNOW: 

  1. Which Klaviyo advanced flows you should be using.
  2. How using predictive analytics can increase your conversions.
  3. How to audit your advanced email flows to make sure they’re effective.
  4. Advanced optimization techniques to accelerate your success.

Klaviyo is loaded with phenomenal features to help businesses of all sizes grow. But the truth is, most businesses (even large ones) are only using the basics. If you’re not looking deeper into Klaviyo’s predictive analytics and how you can use them to create even more advanced email flows, then you’re missing a trick. 

If you ARE using them, you’re on the right track. Make sure you’re auditing your advanced flows regularly to make the most of them and bump up your conversion rates.

What Are Advanced Email Flows? 

Advanced email flows are automated sequences of emails triggered by specific customer actions or behaviors. They go beyond the basic core flows and use more detailed and specific user data to engage customers at various stages of their journey through a smart series of emails. These kinds of flows can go a long way towards building customer loyalty. 

Generally, advanced flows are only implemented once you’ve already got your core flows and transactional emails up and running. Getting these right can give your business a big boost. But you’re going to be wasting your time with advanced flows if your core flows aren’t set up right first.

The Importance of Using Advanced Klaviyo Flows 

Advanced flows take data analytics and personalization a step further. If your core flows are already performing well, implementing strong advanced flows is the natural next step. They’re a way to take your customer by the virtual hand and lead them down the path you want them to follow in their customer journey.

1. Leverage Predictive Analytics to Boost Conversions 

Predictive analytics in Klaviyo uses past customer data to forecast future behaviors. As they say, the best indicator of future behavior is past behavior, so this feature can be invaluable when it comes to putting together advanced email flows that really speak to your buyer

Things like purchase history, demographics, and web activity can build a picture of what your customer is likely to do next. It can also indicate which customers are likely to be high-value buyers. But it goes much deeper than that. Klaviyo’s advanced analytics include things like: 

  • Next order date 
  • Lifetime value 
  • Spending potential 
  • Average time between orders 
  • Churn risk 
  • Predicted demographics 

That’s useful information to draw on when making decisions about products, stock, and how to speak to your email subscribers based on where they are in the customer journey

That means turning more prospective customers into paying customers and rescuing sales that are about to walk out the door. Ultimately, this helps you create more personalized experiences, drive more conversions, and make more email-attributed revenue at the end of the day.

Klaviyo advanced email flows

2. Improve Customer Experience and Satisfaction 

You’re only as successful as your customer experience is good. Customers will jump ship quickly if they’re having a negative experience, so if you aren’t already using analytics to improve your UX, then you’re behind. 

Rather than sticking to the general same old welcome flows, abandon cart flows, and post-purchase flows, advanced flows give your customer something different, something exciting. Things that increase customer satisfaction include: 

  • Personalized content and recommendations 
  • Birthday or anniversary discounts 
  • Getting “VIP” opportunities or offers 
  • Reminders when their favorites are back in stock

Happy customers are more likely to become repeat customers. Expand beyond your simple flows and you open up a whole new world of opportunities for your buyers.

3. Increase Customer Lifetime Value 

Customers who stick around for a long time and continue to buy are gold. The higher your customer lifetime value (CLV), the better. But how do you get customers to become loyal fans instead of trying other brands? 

Klaviyo’s advanced flows are a good start. They’re easy to implement and extremely effective, and with built-in advanced analytics you can easily identify high-value customers and present targeted offers to keep them coming back for more.

Why Audit Your Advanced Flows? 

Firstly, auditing your advanced flows in Klaviyo helps you identify any possible gaps or bottlenecks in your customer journey. What flows do you have in place, and what are you missing? Where do customers drop off and why? 

You can use this info to refine the user experience and make sure your customers stay happy throughout every step of the process. Plus, you’ll catch any possible issues early so you can fix them before they have detrimental effects. 

Secondly, regular audits keep your flows compliant with industry standards and regulations. If you already have advanced flows in place, it’s worth auditing them often to make sure you’re still doing everything right to maintain customer satisfaction.

What Klaviyo Advanced Flows Should You Implement? 

  • Product Replenishment Flow
  • VIP Flow
  • Milestone Celebration Flow
  • Cross-Sell Flow
  • Back In Stock Flow 

How to Audit Your Klaviyo Advanced Flows 

Open up your Klaviyo, navigate to “Flows” in the left-hand menu, and find your advanced email flows. Here’s a quick guide on how to audit each one we mentioned above.

1. Product Replenishment Flow 

This email sequence reminds the user that their last stash of product should be coming to an end and to order now so they can keep using it without interruption. To make sure your product replenishment flow is running as it should, check the timing and content to make sure they align with the expected product lifecycle. 

If the customer is getting their replenishment emails too early, they won’t be motivated to buy and they may forget by the time they need more. If they get it too late, they may end up buying something more convenient and quick. 

  • Action: Double-check the average consumption time and adjust the email delay to make sure it’s going out at the right time. 
  • Set It Up: Navigate to “Flows”, select the “Placed Order” event, and add a time delay corresponding to your product’s average consumption time. 
  • Predictive Analytics: Use “Expected Date of Next Order” in Klaviyo to predict when customers are likely to need a replenishment and automate reminders based on this. 
  • CLV Impact: Evaluate how effective replenishment reminders are in increasing customer retention and overall lifetime value. 
  • RFM Analysis: Segment customers based on their purchasing frequency to tailor replenishment reminders to their specific needs. 
klaviyo advanced flows

2. VIP Flow 

Your VIP flow welcomes buyers to a special club once they’ve bought a certain number of times or spent a specific monetary amount. These customers are your most valuable ones—those who’ve shown their loyalty and invested a good bit of money in your products. 

  • Action: Craft a personalized VIP welcome series for your most valuable customers, who’ve spent over a certain threshold. Offer rewards for loyalty and incentivize future purchases.
  • Setup: Create a segment for your top customers based on purchase frequency, total spend, or other criteria. 
  • Trigger: Customer reaches or exceeds your chosen VIP customer spending/number of orders threshold. 
  • Exclusive Offers: Include unique promo codes, special offers, early access to sales, faster shipping times, or invitations to special events. Highlight the benefits of being a valued customer. If you have a VIP loyalty program/tier, welcome the customer with excitement.
  • CLV Impact: Analyze how the VIP flow influences customer retention, average order value, and long-term customer value.

3. Milestone Celebration Flow 

This email series celebrates special occasions like your buyer’s birthday, the anniversary of them joining your email list, making their first purchase, and so on. It’s a fun and meaningful way of interacting with customers that makes them feel special. 

  • Action: Trigger personalized emails to mark customer anniversaries, birthdays, or achievement of loyalty tiers. 
  • Setup: Within Klaviyo, create flows based on customer properties or events (eg. “Customer Anniversary” or “Loyalty Tier Reached”). 
  • Trigger: Depending on the milestone. eg. customer birthday, 1 year after first purchase, upon 10th order, etc. 
  • Engagement Boost: Use milestone celebrations to re-engage dormant customers and foster a sense of feeling cared about and noticed. 
  • “Thank You” Offers: Offer something as a “thank you” gift to encourage them to continue. A discount or free gift with their next purchase is ideal and makes them feel important.
  • RFM Analysis: Depending on your business model, products, and wants, you can use all 3 (recency, frequency, monetary) to set certain milestones. Eg. anniversaries of first purchase, “it’s your 10th purchase with us”, or “You’ve officially spent over $X with us!” 

4. Cross-Sell Flow 

Cross-sell flows share other products you think the customer may enjoy based on their previous purchases. Klaviyo’s analytics and dynamic content help you send out personalized emails that your customer is likely to be interested in. 

  • Action: Review purchase patterns and adjust product recommendations for better relevance. Use Klaviyo’s predictive analytics to make informed decisions on what other products the user may be interested in. 
  • Setup: Create a new flow with the “Placed Order” trigger. Add conditional splits based on the items bought to personalize the emails and suggest relevant related products. 
  • Trigger: “Placed Order” event + time (allow time for your Post-Purchase flow to end before sending cross-sell flows). 
  • Predictive Analytics: Use purchase history and browsing behavior to recommend relevant cross-sell products.
  • CLV Impact: Track how cross-sell recommendations affect overall order value and customer lifetime value. Predictive analytics should help you personalize offers to increase conversion rate, pushing CLV up.

5. Back In Stock Flow 

Notifying your customer when their favorites are back in stock is a great way of showing that you appreciate their business. It’s also a good way to remind them of something they wanted, which can encourage a sale. 

  • Action: Set up automated emails to alert subscribers the moment an out-of-stock product becomes available again. 
  • Setup: Create a “Back in Stock” flow in Klaviyo, using dynamic elements to be adapted to any product. 
  • Segmentation: Target specific customer segments with back-in-stock notifications based on their previous purchase history or product preferences. You could also set up a “Notify Me” segment and offer customers a chance to get on the list to be notified when the specific product is back on the shelves. 
  • Trigger: Sent when a certain product’s stock is replenished in your store.
  • Conversion Boost: Analyze the conversion rate of your back-in-stock emails to measure their effectiveness and optimize the flow for better results.

Optimization Tactics for Advanced Flows 

1. Understanding Klaviyo’s Predictive Analytics 

Klaviyo’s predictive analytics use data science and machine learning to predict future customer behavior. You can find this data in the left-hand menu under “Audience,” and “Profiles.” By choosing a profile and scrolling down, you can see the analytics on the specific account. 

Note that not every account has this capability. Predictive analytics isn’t unavailable for accounts who have fewer than 500 clients who’ve placed an order, those without orders in the last 30 days, and stores with an order history of less than 180 days​. 

Even if you tick all the boxes, you may still find profiles who don’t have this data, because they’re brand new subscribers or they haven’t purchased anything yet. Here’s what this powerful tool contains:

Next Order Date 

Klaviyo’s predictive analytics can quite accurately forecast the next order date by analyzing patterns in customer purchase behavior. If a customer has a consistent ordering pattern, Klaviyo uses this data to predict their next order. If there’s not enough data, Klaviyo will make a prediction based on the behavior of similar customers. 

Customer Lifetime Value 

Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) is divided into three metrics. Keep in mind that this obviously refers to email revenue only, and may be skewed if the user ends up signing up on multiple email addresses. 

  • Historic CLV: This measures the total value of all previous orders made by a customer, accounting for any refunds or returns. 
  • Predicted CLV: This predicts how much a customer will spend in the next year. 
  • Total CLV: The sum of historic and predicted CLV gives the overall expected value of a customer​. 

Spending Potential 

Klaviyo identifies high-spending customers by analyzing historic CLV. This allows businesses to focus their marketing efforts on customers who have shown a pattern of significant spending, maximizing return on investment​. 

Average Time Between Orders 

This metric calculates the average number of days between a customer’s orders. By understanding this pattern, you can better time your marketing efforts to align with when customers are most likely to make a purchase​. 

Churn Risk 

Klaviyo predicts the probability of a customer churning based on their buying frequency and history. The churn risk is color-coded: green for low risk, yellow for medium risk, and red for high risk. This makes it easy to spot customers who are at risk of leaving​ and take proactive measures to encourage engagement. 

Predicted Gender 

Klaviyo’s algorithm predicts the most likely gender of each customer based on customer name and general census data. This is still an approximation, though—so you won’t be getting hard and fast data here, more like a guess. It also won’t show up in a customer’s profile but you should still be able to use it for targeting purposes. 

2. Evaluate Your Advanced Flow Triggers 

Triggers are the most important part of advanced flows. Get your trigger wrong, and your messaging won’t even matter that much, because it’ll be delivered to the customer at the wrong place in the customer journey. 

Make sure each of your flows has the correct triggers in place: 

  • Product Replenishment Flow: Placed Order + X amount of time (based on consumption rate) 
  • VIP Flow: User reaches your present VIP bar. For example: 
    • Placed Order is at least X over all time. 
    • Total Customer Lifetime Value is greater than Y. 
  • Milestone Celebration Flow: Date (birthday), or time period (eg. 1 year after first purchase) 
  • Cross-Sell Flow: Fulfilled Order 
  • Back In Stock Flow: Item back in stock 

Make sure to check both the trigger and the time delay of when the email is sent once the trigger activates.

Klaviyo advanced flows
advanced email flows

3. Assess Advanced Segmentation 

Consider which segments customers are in and if they should be removed from certain segments when they’re added to another one. For example, once a buyer moves up a VIP tier, they should be removed from the previous VIP tier segment. 

  • Action: Make sure segments are correctly set up and personalized emails are designed to speak to the customer at their stage in the buyer journey.
  • Setup: To personalize your communication even more, create separate segments for first-time and repeat buyers, sending personalized messages like thank-you notes or exclusive discounts to each group.

4. Consider Adding Information to Your Sign-Up Forms 

If you want to use a Birthday flow, as an example, you’ll need to know your user’s birthday. Consider adding this to your sign-up form so you have the data right from the moment someone joins your mailing list. You can add it as an extra step to sell it a little more easily (“Get a surprise every year on your birthday!”). 

You can also gather other zero-party data in your sign-up forms. If your product is gender-specific, you might ask your user to specify their gender. Or, you could ask preference-based questions, like “What’s most important to you in a protein powder? 1. Consistency, 2. Taste, 3. Price.” 

5. A/B Test Your Advanced Flows 

A/B testing gives you more helpful data to use to create even more personalized, targeted advanced flows for your customer base. Here are some ideas for each flow: 

  • Product Replenishment Flow: 
    • Urgency vs. friendly reminder in subject lines. 
    • Different discount levels or no discount.
    • Sending the email a few days before the expected replenishment time vs. on the expected replenishment day. 
  • VIP Flow: 
    • Different types of offers such as free shipping vs. a discount on the next purchase. 
    • A simple, clean design vs. a more elaborate, image-rich design. 
    • Test sending monthly updates vs. quarterly updates. 
  • Milestone Celebration Flow: 
    • Different types of rewards such as discount codes vs. loyalty points. 
    • Including a brief story or timeline of the customer’s journey vs. a straightforward celebration message.
  • Cross-Sell Flow: 
    • Test cross-selling related products vs. best-sellers. 
    • Test promoting product bundles vs. individual items. 
    • Offering a discount on the cross-sell item vs. no discount. 
  • Back In Stock Flow: 
    • Test urgency vs. excitement (“Your Favorite Item is Back in Stock!” vs. “Hurry! [Product] is Available Again!”) 
    • Emphasizing limited quantity vs. just announcing availability. 
    • Small discount or free shipping to encourage immediate purchase vs. no incentive.

YOCTO’s Klaviyo Audit Services: A Strong Foundation for Success 

YOCTO specializes in optimizing your email marketing strategy through in-depth Klaviyo audits. We scrutinize every aspect of your Klaviyo account to make sure it’s performing optimally. 

Our services encompass: 

  • Data Analysis: We identify industry trends and growth opportunities by meticulously examining your historical data. 
  • Deliverability Audit: We evaluate and enhance your email deliverability performance, making sure your messages land in inboxes, not spam folders. 
  • Sign-Up Paths Audit: We streamline your lead capture process and guarantee a high-quality subscriber list by reviewing all your sign-up paths. 
  • Flow Automation Audit: We fine-tune your email flows to maximize lead generation and conversions. 
  • Lists & Segments Audit: We make sure your lists and segments are clean, organized, and precisely targeted for optimal results.
  • Campaigns Audit: We thoroughly assess your email campaigns for relevance, design, and content effectiveness, providing actionable insights for maintaining engaged customers.

Why Work With YOCTO, a Klaviyo Master Platinum Partner? 

By choosing YOCTO, you gain a trusted Klaviyo Master Platinum Partner with a proven track record of successful growth strategies. Here’s what sets us apart: 

  • Industry Recognition: Independently acknowledged by Klaviyo as a leading agency in the USA and Europe, we bring unparalleled experience and expertise to your audits. 
  • Proven Success: Our email strategy approach consistently delivers results, providing a clear roadmap to achieving your revenue and retention goals. 
  • Experience with Industry-Leading Brands: We’ve collaborated with globally recognized B2B and ecommerce brands like Tesonet and high-growth startups like Miracare. Our extensive experience across industries and business sizes allows us to offer tailored solutions that truly work. 

YOCTO’s Klaviyo Audit Process: Detailed and Actionable 

We leave no stone unturned. Our detailed audits provide clear, actionable feedback to enhance your email marketing performance and boost your ecommerce business. 

  1. Discovery Call: We start with a complimentary, no-obligation discovery call to understand your brand and specific requirements.
  2. Comprehensive Audit: We delve into your Klaviyo account, analyzing data performance, deliverability, sign-up paths, flow automation, lists and segments, campaigns, and experimentation maturity.
  3. Detailed Audit Report: You’ll receive a comprehensive custom report pinpointing areas for improvement, complete with exclusive insights and actionable growth strategies tailored to your brand. 

Ready to transform your email performance? Schedule your discovery call today and unlock superior email deliverability and a boosted ROI.

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