Relationship-Based Automated E-mail Flows

by Foodbevy
August 28, 2022

If you’re like most other e-commerce brands, you’ve seen a slowdown in sales over the past few months. It’s a combination of a bunch of things happening that are out of your control – Recession scares, pandemic-related behavior change, nice summer weather – and a bunch of things that are in your control – not building a robust customer relationship process. 

Today, let’s talk about how to build a robust customer retention strategy and how to use e-mail marketing to do so. 


Relationships Compound, Transactions Don’t.

– Yash Chaven

Are you investing in building relationships with your customers or do you simply view every order as a transaction? If you don’t aren’t building relationships, your customers are churning and you’re slowly going to run out of new customers. 

That’s why right now you need to be focused on getting every customer you have to stay with your brand as long as possible. 

There are 3 reasons consumers will stop buying from you:

  1. Product isn’t for them (bad taste, bad usage experience, too costly).
  2. Bad one-time experience with the brand.
  3. Customer forgets to re-order.

Without a relationship with the customer, you won’t know which of the 3 reasons it is, and what you can do to fix it. To do this, have a clear metric to measure success, and setup e-mail automations to track them. 


Use This Metric as Your E-Commerce Northstar

As an e-commerce brand, I recommend using 3 – Month Customer Value as your Northstar metric.

Dallas Crum from Inspiir first introduced this to me, and it make a ton of sense. We all know that customer lifetime value is important, but those first 3 months are critical. If a customer doesn’t repurchase within the first 90-days, you’ve effectively lost them forever. Read more here.

So you need to do whatever it takes to develop strong relationships with every customer during this time. 

Let’s develop a process to develop a relationship with every customer through automated e-mail flows. 


Relationship-Focused Automated E-mail Flows

As a new brand, I highly recommend personally reaching out to every new customer in a non-automated way. As you begin to grow, you won’t always have time to do this, so automated e-mail flows become really important.

I recommend using Klaviyo as they’ve built out robust automation tools that connect directly with Shopify.

The first thing to know is that you likely aren’t communicating enough with your customers. You should be sending at least 1-3 emails per week to stay top of mind.

You’ll do this through automated flows and campaigns. But for today, let’s talk about the 3 automated flows you need to have.

  • Pre-Purchase Flow
  • Post-Purchase Flow
  • Win-Back Flow

Pre-Purchase Flows


Lead Generation Sequence

Audience: Signed up for e-mail list but haven’t purchased.
Communication Goal: Educate about Brand, Product, and provide discounts to get first sale.
Number of E-mails: 5-10
Email Inspiration:

  • Product Giveaway
  • About the brand
  • Why the founder started
  • Discount to purchase 15%
  • Discount to purchase 25%
  • Best selling products
  • Video reviews of customers using product
  • Discount to purchase (15% off or free shipping)
  • Discount to purchase (20% off or free shipping)


Abandoned Cart Sequence

Audience: Added product to cart but didn’t purchase
Communication Goal: Get buyer over the purchase hurdle 
Number of E-mails: 5-10
Email Inspiration:

  • Whoops, looks like you left something in your cart
  • Friendly reminder
  • Personalized video message from founder using Maverick
  • 5 Reasons why to use the product
  • Discount to purchase (15% off or free shipping)
  • Discount to purchase (20% off or free shipping)
  • Best selling products
  • Video reviews of customers using product


Post Purchase Flows


First-Time Purchase

Audience: Customer purchased for the first time
Communication Goal: Build a relationship with the customer and engage them with the brand. 
Number of E-mails: 10-15
Email Inspiration:

  • Thank You personalized video message from founder using Maverick
  • What to expect from your order
  • Order update
  • How to use the product
  • Founder message
  • Customer support message. Did you have any issues with your order? What can we fix to make it better?
  • What do you think of the product?
  • SMS Signup
  • Blog post sharing vision / mission
  • Time to re-order
  • Re-order the same product
  • Re-order best-selling products
  • Discount to purchase (15% off or free shipping)


Repeat Purchase

Audience: Customer purchases 2x, 3x, 4x+ times
Communication Goal: Convert into loyal advocates
Number of E-mails: 5-10
Email Inspiration:

  • Thank you for purchasing “2x / 3x / 4x” times
  • Here’s a free gift with your purchase
  • Invite to VIP SMS club
  • Why do you like your favorite product and how are you using it?
  • Sign up for a subscription and get a discount
  • Time to re-order

 

Win-Back Flow

Audience: No purchase for 60-120 days
Communication Goal: Win-back churned customers
Number of E-mails: 5-15
Email Inspiration:

  • Sale (15% off)
  • Message from founder asking, how are you?
  • Message from founder asking how can we improve?
  • Thank you for being a customer (15% off)
  • Flash sale (20% off)
  • Thank you for being a customer (25%)
  • Come back to us (40%) repeat weekly 


And there you go, a bunch of e-mail flows you should be utilizing in your e-commerce business to build a relationship with your customers.

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