Encourage someone to shop again via automations
Automations, also called flows in Klaviyo, can quickly become your best-kept secret to earning more revenue and encouraging repeat purchases. These messages are sent automatically, immediately after a customer completes an action or when a set amount of time has passed since they did something.
Hear how Raquel Caticha, Director of Marketing at Hazel Village, uses Klaviyo’s email and text message flows to keep customers engaged and remind them to shop again.
Retain customers with email and text message automations
Now that you’ve seen how Hazel Village automates its retention strategy, it’s time to consider how you can do the same for your own brand. Let’s walk through a few high-impact, retention-focused automations.
Note: Want to build your own automations along the way? Klaviyo has you covered. Head to the Flow Library and use our pre-built templates as a starting point. Then, review the following best practices to better understand and refine your strategy.
Post-purchase
Post-purchase flows can provide recent shoppers with timely alerts about their orders, including payment confirmation, shipping status, return policy, customer review requests, and even instructional content.
These flows create a positive shopping experience and can showcase items the customer may be interested in buying next. A good flow leads to a more positive customer experience, which makes someone more likely to shop again.
You will likely have 2 types of post-purchase flows, as they are both critical to customer retention in their own ways:
- Transactional post-purchase:
This flow serves as operational touchpoints after an order is placed. Use this flow to send only necessary order confirmations, shipping updates, delivery alerts, etc. - Post-purchase thank you and cross-sell:
Your post-purchase thank you and cross-sell will be promotional, meaning the messages are sales-driven. To receive them, a user must be subscribed to marketing. This flow will include content like a thank you message for your founder, next purchase recommendations, etc.
For more information, learn how transactional and promotional messages differ.
Subscription and replenishment
A subscription flow is useful if you offer subscriptions for shoppers; people are alerted of their upcoming shipment status, updates to their subscription, sneak peeks of what’s to come, and more.
Similarly replenishment flows are great if your product is usually consumed on a specific cadence, alerting someone around the time they are likely to finish the product with a reminder to buy again. For instance, if you are a makeup brand, you may send a replenishment message every 3 months to remind mascara shoppers to buy again now that this makeup is likely running low or getting old.
Milestones
Milestone flows begin to send once your customer reaches a specific milestone in the calendar year; thus it is a date-based flow. As a date approaches, you can send special incentives and even gifts, to encourage someone to buy again and feel valued by your brand.
Common milestone flows include:
- Birthday messages (or half birthdays)
- First purchase anniversaries
- Life milestones (maternity due dates, wedding anniversary, etc.)
Loyalty
Loyalty (i.e., VIP) flows power your loyalty program strategy. They can alert someone as they approach the threshold of qualifying for your VIP community and exclusive deals. Then, once they qualify, they will begin a VIP-specific welcome series that instructs them on what to expect from this program and delivers the very first set of VIP deals and incentives.
Use this flow to delight top shoppers and encourage them to spend more on your brand. This gamifies their experience, making it fun to shop again and unlock new incentives over time.
Winback
A winback flow is exactly what it sounds like: it reminds someone to shop after a long period of inactivity; thus, winning them back as a customer.
By not having this flow in place, you’re leaving money on the table. Why? It is 5X more expensive to acquire a new customer than it is to retain existing ones. (Harvard Business Review)
Refine your automations for higher conversions
Now that you know what automations to build and have access to pre-built templates in Klaviyo, let’s talk about best practices. In the dropdowns below, you will learn how to edit your flows to be more personalized and thus more likely to spur someone to buy.
Refine automations based on customer loyalty
Within automations, you can create distinct pathways of messages, ensuring that someone will only proceed down a certain path if they qualify for additional criteria. These pathways are created using conditional splits.
For instance, use customer lifetime value (CLV), or the amount of revenue a customer is likely to spend with your brand. Create a conditional split based on if someone’s CLV is above a set amount; then, create 2 unique paths based on how loyal a shopper is (i.e., a high value shopper vs. a low value shopper). Here’s what this looks like in practice:
High CLV customers are some of your most valuable customers who have historically contributed significantly to your revenue and are likely to continue doing so. For this flow pathway, focus on:
- Premium offers (e.g., exclusive content, early access products, high-value recommendations).
- Loyalty programming (e.g., integrate tiered rewards, exclusive benefits, VIP experiences).
- Feedback solicitation (e.g., automated surveys, personalized outreach).
Low CLV customers have made fewer purchases, have a lower average order value, or have shown signs of disengagement. For these customers, your automation should:
- Value proposition reinforcement (e.g., clear product benefits, best seller highlights, popular coupon codes).
- Educational content (e.g., informational resources, blog posts, quick tips).
- Incentivized actions (e.g., small incentives to buy again, bundled offers or gifts for a follow-up purchase).
Provide cross-sell or upsell opportunities
As you build out automations that engage existing shoppers, use their past order history to fuel your messaging strategy. In particular, you can:
- Cross-sell
- Offer complementary products to what they’ve already purchased.
- Examples: Suggest related items, showcase how other customers have purchased items together, send blogs or instructions with other items that work in tandem, and offer personalized recommendations of what they may like next.
- Upsell
- Encourage them to purchase a more expensive, upgraded, or premium product version.
- Examples: Highlight your premium or add-on versions of a product, offer upgrade incentives or discounts, feature higher-tier or quality items or subscriptions, send educational content around the benefits of your upsell opportunity.
Message shoppers on their preferred channel
As with all messages, it’s best practice to personalize your message for each individual shopper.
For instance, you should:
- Prioritize sending content via their preferred channel. If someone has only subscribed to email, send them an email. If someone prefers SMS, send them a text.
- Include dynamic elements like a person’s first name or an image of what they recently browsed on-site.