The advanced marketing automation guide: how fast-growing brands automate to scale

Of course, for most marketers, that advice is preaching to the choir.

Still, while 78% of ecommerce executives believe personalization at scale is a must-have in marketing, 41% say they are unable to execute all the personalized marketing tactics they deem important, according to a recent survey from Klaviyo and research firm BWG Strategy.

Marketing automation is one way to close the gap.

The magic of marketing automation is that even though your technology, if it’s doing its job, is carrying the bulk of the lift, the end customer experiences your 1:many content as relevant and interesting—and like it’s been specially crafted just for them.

Importantly, marketing that’s automated and personalized at scale achieves that 1:1, “I’m a priority” feeling—without costing you the effort of maintaining a personal relationship with each and every customer.

As Murray points out, “especially for brands with a large client base, you would need an incredibly large marketing team to be able to provide the level of customization and personalization at the same number of touchpoints if it wasn’t automated.”

On that note, Donahue says marketing automation is a way for marketers to create “meaningful experiences” without needing to have “hands on a keyboard all day long, building emails and getting them out.”

Instead, “we can initially build it, set it, and forget it,” he explains. “We can find these core different areas in the customer journey, set up the automations so they’re sending at all different times around the clock, and then make it so that we don’t need to be manually punching all this in on a constant basis.”

Of course, following the initial set-up, Power Digital continues to track automations month over month to “determine areas of opportunity and optimization,” Donahue adds. “It’s an iterative process that we continue to update through the lifetime of the automation” (more on how that works a bit later).

But compared to manual marketing efforts, “marketing automation for us is just efficiency,” says Heather Browne, director of performance marketing at Blue Acorn iCi. “Especially when we’re working with these larger brands with large portfolios and large subscriber lists, we want to make sure we hit those touchpoints with as little human error involved as possible.”

And because it frees up your team from investing time and effort into monotonous, repetitive tasks, marketing automation also contributes to employee productivity and retention.

“It really allows you to have a lean team,” Murray points out. “You get to actually spend your time digging into data and working on campaigns that require more human input and creativity.”

The numbers here speak for themselves:

• For every dollar spent, marketing automation returns $5.44 over the first 3 years with a payback period in under 6 months, according to Nucleus Research.
• Marketing automation results in a 451% increase in qualified leads, according to a study by the Annuitas Group.
• More than 75% of businesses increase conversions after implementing marketing automation, according to a study by Aioma and the Institute of Marketing Management.
• Compared to email campaigns, email automations achieve, on average, nearly 1.5x higher open rates, over 4x higher click rates, and over 17x higher conversion rates and revenue per recipient, according to Q222 Klaviyo benchmark data.

“We know these are proven tactics,” Murray says. “It’s ongoing revenue. You put in the effort up front, and then outside of some updates here and there, it really works on its own.”

Beyond data integrations, Donahue encourages marketers to ask themselves a few other questions when selecting the right marketing automation technology for their business:

How complex is our marketing program?

“It’s important to understand the status of your lifecycle marketing program during the ESP consideration process,” Donahue advises. “What level of personalization are you hoping to achieve? Will you utilize the platform to its full extent? Do you have the data available to leverage every area of the platform effectively?”

If you’re looking to greatly expand your reach in the next 12 months and therefore investing heavily in lifecycle marketing, for example, you’ll need to “ensure that there’s enough functionality and accommodation for greater complexity of automation, alongside data mapping that matches your CDP or back-end schema,” Donahue suggests.

Think hard, too, about which marketing automation features you can’t live without. That might include:

• Segmentation-based emails
• Behavior-triggered emails
• Email and SMS in one platform
• Pop-up forms for collecting email addresses
• Dynamic content personalization
• Automated A/B testing

The key, Donahue says, is to “find a platform that meets you where you are, with some headroom to grow.” In other words: “Don’t buy a Ferrari if you’re only planning on doing laps around the parking lot.”

What kind of reporting capabilities do we need?

“Finding a platform that has great out-of-the-box reporting metrics and charts is key for most brands,” Donahue points out. But beyond that, reporting needs can vary drastically business to business.

Think about what, specifically, you’re trying to accomplish, Donahue advises. Do you just need to pull metrics for a marketing manager to make quick business decisions? Or are you introducing a data intelligence team that needs to drill down into each KPI?

Whatever your reporting goals, your marketing automation platform should be able to help you meet them.

What’s our budget?

This one’s “probably the simplest to measure a match,” Donahue says, but that doesn’t make it any less important.

Does your budget align with the platform? What’s the fee structure like? Is flexible pricing important to you? What commitment windows do you need to be aware of?

…and more

Here are a few other questions worth asking yourself:

• What vertical are we in?
• What does our product look like?
• Am I looking to integrate SMS?
• How big are my lists?
• What’s most important to us? This might include:
  • Ease of implementation
  • Customizability
  • Low learning curve
  • Ability to scale as your business scales
  • All of the above
• How’s the customer support?

Of course, technology is only half of the marketing automation equation. Ideally, the data is what gives you insights about your customers and the technology is what helps it all make sense.

Once you have a solid understanding of your various audience segments, though, you also need to ask:

• What messages should I send?
• Which customers should receive those messages?
• Under which circumstances, and when?

Sure, your tech needs to be smart enough to make those kinds of decisions. But when it comes to being strategic about marketing automation, nothing can beat what you know about your own brand.

“The automations can help bring that to life for you,” Murray says. “But you still need that human input to really make it work well.”

With that in mind, here are 3 crucial steps to take when determining your marketing automation strategy:

1. Define your marketing automation goals

The biggest challenge in marketing automation, Gordon says, “is trying to prioritize your goals and figure out what’s most important for you as a company.”

Are you trying to boost customer lifetime value (CLTV)? Acquire new customers via inbound marketing? Improve lead generation, lead nurturing, and lead management in general? Increase up- and cross-sells? Enhance customer satisfaction?

Donahue emphasizes the importance of building a “goal-aligned plan” so that you understand everything you need to implement in order to reach your business objectives.

If your goal is to simply increase revenue, for example, you might start with email automations that target big spenders, or basic automations, like cart abandonment, that are proven to drive big-time conversions. If your goal is to nurture and strengthen your relationships with your most loyal customers, on the other hand, you might look into SMS automations that make subscribers feel like VIPs.

“Consideration No. 1 is just, ‘Where do we want to be?’ We need to set a target somewhere and determine how to get there,” Donahue points out.

2. Collaborate with other teams

Marketing automation shouldn’t only live on your marketing team. Your sales team, IT team, developers, customer support folks, and creatives should all be on board with your automation strategy.

“Thinking about some of the teams within the company you’re working for,” Murray advises. “What kind of input do you need from them? If there are any automations based on contacts to your customer service team after product receipt, for example, you’re going to want to loop them in.”

Your creative team, meanwhile, can help you make sure your content is on-brand and optimized for UX.

“Back in the day, we worked with some smaller brands that really hadn’t established their voice and tone,” Browne recalls. “Honestly, it’s hard to create some of these journeys and automations when you don’t know how to talk to your customers.”

3. Use product journeys to map content strategy to customer lifecycles

Speaking of the customer journey: Creating marketing content and experiences mapped to each trigger event is where the heaviest up-front effort of marketing automation comes in.

Of course, this requires understanding your own products—and the various customer journeys that could lead a consumer to purchase them.

The key to getting this step right is to think like a customer. Identify which customer touchpoints would benefit most from automation, then build out the communications and processes that have the most potential to ease customers between those touchpoints.

One way to get this right is using if-then flowcharts for various trigger events.

When mapping this out, experts recommend considering factors like average order value and number of SKUs. Here are a few examples:

• If you sell replenishable consumer-packaged goods, “you need to understand the typical timelines between ordering and replacing that item, so that you know when to trigger a reminder email to repurchase,” Murray says.
• If you sell high-ticket items, consider building out product-specific automations for your top performers. Here, Gordon points to mattress company and Noticed/Klaviyo client Layla Sleep, whose two hero products clock in at around $1.5K. “Each one of those purchases is a huge, huge deal every time that sale comes through,” Gordon says. “That makes it worth it to put in the time and effort to build out product-specific abandon cart flows” (more on what this might look like in the next section).
• On the other hand, if you have a high number of SKUs, stick to the basics. Consider a company that sells Mustang parts with incredibly granular fitments: In a case like this, where the number of SKUs could be in the hundreds of thousands, “you’d probably be better off taking an overarching category-based approach” to marketing automation, Gordon says—category-broad abandon carts, for example, for cars vs. rims vs. engines.

Predictive intelligence can help here, too, Murray adds. In Klaviyo, for example, you can estimate important dates like when a customer is most likely to purchase again, when they’re likely to lapse, and more—and develop an automation strategy that keeps your brand top of mind at the most opportune moment possible.

Overall, know your audience. If a customer just spent $2K on a mattress or a waterproof winter coat, don’t show them a similar mattress or waterproof winter coat. “That’s where you can get into ‘complete your set-up’ kinda stuff,” Gordon says. “You bought the mattress, now get the sheets, get the pillows. You bought the camping chair, but you don’t have the table, you don’t have the cot, you don’t have the full experience.”

“You don’t want it to be one size fits all,” Murray agrees. “Those types of ‘You may also like’ cross-sells should vary for every client and every product.”

Or, skip the cross-sell altogether (we’ll explore options for creative post-purchase automations next). There are some industries and business models where it doesn’t make sense at all, warns Gordon—for example, a company that sells only wiper blades.

“That’s something you only need every two years or so, so they have a really long customer win-back timeframe,” Gordon points out. “Unless the product is faulty or the customer has a second vehicle, there’s not really a post-purchase opportunity there once someone buys.”

Over half of US shoppers abandon their online carts because they’re either just browsing or not ready to buy, according to a quantitative study by the Baymard Institute.

That’s a massive target market—so it’s perhaps no surprise that “the automation that drives the most revenue is abandoned cart, by far,” Donahue says.

An abandoned cart email re-engages shoppers who add a product to their cart but leave your site without making a purchase—“a reminder in their inbox saying, ‘Hey, don’t forget about this,’” Donahue says.

According to Klaviyo’s Q222 email marketing benchmarks, these emails clock the highest average click rate at 6.82%, the highest average conversion rate at 3.54%, and the highest average revenue per recipient at $3.41 (the next closest contender is welcome series at 1.95% and $1.99, respectively).

And because they’re so successful, they don’t require a ton of effort to get off the ground. Browne recommends keeping abandoned cart emails “simple and straight to the point—not too fussy.”

“We typically go with a pretty templated approach with abandoned cart emails,” Murray explains. “Those don’t tend to need as much customization as a one-off email campaign.”

Pro tip: Try setting up your abandoned cart flow as a series rather than a one-off email. It might look something like this:

• Email 1 (after 2 hours): just a friendly reminder
• Email 2 (after 24 hours, to those who didn’t act on the first email): a discount or free shipping offer
• Email 3 (after 3 days, to those who still haven’t purchased): At this point they’ve either purchased somewhere else or decided not to buy, so send a request for feedback to see if you can learn something for next time.

“You don’t always want to start off with big discounts to get someone to check out,” Murray cautions. “Sometimes just that reminder is enough. Once you start heavily using lots of promotions, it’s really hard to go backwards.”

In other words, it doesn’t hurt to err on the conservative side—and use discounts as a last resort.

“It’s great to use automations to personalize with different incentives, but you want to make sure you’re not using them too heavily when you don’t need to,” Murray explains. “Test it first to see if you can get the results you’re looking for without that always-on discounting approach.”

How to set up an abandoned cart automation in Klaviyo

Visit our help center to learn:

• How to adapt Klaviyo’s standard abandoned cart flow for your purposes
• How to build an abandoned cart flow from scratch
• How to time your abandoned cart flow
• What content to include in your abandoned cart flow
• How to incorporate SMS into your abandoned cart flow

Like abandoned cart emails, browse abandonment emails are designed to lead wayward shoppers back to your website—and, hopefully, the check-out page.

Unlike abandoned cart emails, however, browse abandonment emails are triggered when a shopper merely looks at a product page without purchasing.

Conversion rate for browse abandonment is lower than both abandoned cart and welcome series flows (.94% compared to 3.54% and 1.95%, respectively), according to Klaviyo benchmarks.

And that makes sense—over half of shoppers like to do research before they buy to make sure they’re making the best choice, according to a study conducted by Google. A consumer might be looking at 10 different sweaters just to figure out which one they like best, but never intend to actually purchase more than one.

But if you’re careful about setting up your flow filters, you don’t have to choose between abandoned cart and browse abandonment automations. You can—and probably even should—use both.

The buyer intent may be lower for someone who hasn’t added an item to their cart, but browse abandonment flows have the second-highest open rate at 53.19% (just below post-purchase flows at 57.8%), and their average click rate clocks in at 5.77% (just below welcome series at 5.88%), according to Klaviyo’s Q222 email marketing benchmarks.

“It’s not the level of cart abandon,” Murray says, “but considering how quick they are to implement, I’m always surprised by how well browse abandonment emails perform.”

The reason browse abandonment works so well is because of how easy it is for a shopper to lose track of everything that has piqued their interest when they have dozens or even hundreds of shopping tabs open at once.

Especially if you sell products with longer buyer journeys, have a high number of SKUs, or sell complicated, high-value items that require a longer research period before purchase, browse abandonment could seriously benefit your bottom line.

Bonus: Browse abandonment emails are also a great way to build out robust customer profiles, Donahue says. “There’s a ton of volume there because of all the web surfing people are doing,” he points out. “As long as you can tie all that activity on your site to an email address within your database, the data you can build out behind browse abandonment is just incredible.”

Pro tip: Try using Klaviyo’s personalized product recommendations, based on predictive analytics, to make the products in your browse abandonment emails feel “hand-picked, even when they’re not,” Gordon suggests.

“We use personalized product recommendations anywhere and everywhere,” Gordon says. “They just perform really, really well. We try to make them as granular and personalized as possible, so we’ll build in category exclusions and inclusions.

For example, “if the category is dresses, Klaviyo will choose the dresses for us, and make sure they’re the most popular ones, and that if one of them goes out of stock, it doesn’t get shown,” Gordon explains.

The same goes for products that are discontinued. “Especially when we’re talking about clothing, basing it off of manual picks just isn’t something that can be done,” Gordon says. “I’ve done lots of audits where I’ve looked at a brand’s most key flows, and they’re filled with discontinued products that 404 when you click on them.”

That’s why, for brands that sell seasonal product lines with catalogs that are constantly shifting, personalized product recommendations aren’t just a nice-to-have. As Gordon emphasizes, “you actually need to use dynamic product recommendations in that case.”

How to set up a browse abandonment automation in Klaviyo

Visit our help center to learn:

• How to monitor the viewed product metric
• How to adapt Klaviyo’s standard browse abandonment flow for your purposes
• How to build a browse abandonment flow from scratch
• How to display the product viewed in an email
• Which audiences to target with your browse abandonment flow

The post-purchase email category is broad—it includes any email that goes out based on the purchase trigger, which may include:

• Transactional communications, like order, shipping, and delivery confirmations
• Thank-you emails
• Review or referral requests

According to Klaviyo’s Q222 email marketing benchmarks, post-purchase automations have the highest open rate of all flows at 57.8%. That makes sense—people who just purchased something from you want to make sure everything’s going smoothly with their order.

But while transactional emails are often the most seen emails your brand will send, click rate, conversion rate, and revenue per recipient, here, are all the lowest averages of the flows Klaviyo measures (3.75%, .43%, and $0.25, respectively)—which means there’s a lot of opportunity to do more than just confirm order details.

When Noticed conducts email marketing audits for clients, Gordon says post-purchase emails are often a missing link: “They have their abandonment flows and they have their welcome flows, which are the basic building blocks, but what happens after that person buys? Are you still communicating with them?”

Whether you’re simply expressing gratitude for someone’s business, educating them about how to use a product, or nudging them to refer your brand to a friend or show you some love on social, post-purchase automations are a prime opportunity to turn transactions with customers into long-term relationships.

“After somebody buys something, they shouldn’t be dead to you, right? You need to create an opportunity to continue the conversation,” Donahue says. Considering repeat purchasers spend 3x as much as first-time customers, according to Adobe, “that’s really important.”

Pro tip: Asking for reviews is a top recommendation Blue Acorn iCi makes to brands, Browne says, because social proof and user-generated content are particularly powerful—and authentic—ways to transform prospects into customers.

Just make sure you time it right so that the review request doesn’t arrive before the customer has had a chance to use the product—or even receive it.

With a marketing automation platform like Klaviyo, you can set up your post-purchase emails to dynamically trigger based on the actual ship and receipt dates of your products. But if that’s not possible with the tech you’re using, “you at least need to know your consumer and the details about processing time and time in transit,” Murray cautions.

“You never want a customer to receive an email that’s asking, ‘How was your order? Rate it, tell us about your experience,’ and they’re like, ‘Uh, yeah, I’m still waiting for it,’” Murray points out. “That actually makes them more annoyed because it heightens the fact that the order hasn’t arrived yet and may be delayed.”

How to set up a post-purchase automation in Klaviyo

Visit our help center to learn:

• How to target customers using splits
• What content to include in a post-purchase flow
• When to send post-purchase emails
• What kinds of post-purchase flows work best, including:
  • Transactional emails
  • Thank-you emails
  • Instructional emails
  • Review requests
  • Cross-sell emails

As long as it’s targeted to the right person, with the right product, at the right time, Gordon doesn’t believe there’s such a thing as a bad marketing automation. “Anything is better than nothing,” he says.

In other words, if you’re using a generic abandoned cart template, “just showing the product feed image and the product title, that’s still going to help you convert a couple customers,” Gordon says. “I don’t think that email could really ever hurt.”

But there’s also always room for improvement.

From good to great: how to muscle up an abandoned cart flow

Sticking with the abandoned cart example, Gordon points to product-specific abandoned cart automations as one strategy for taking a core automation to the next level.

“Instead of just showing the product feed image, the product title, the product price—all of those things that come with your standard abandon cart template—we’ll build it out so there’s different versions depending on what was in their cart,” Gordon explains.

Remember Layla Sleep? The company sells pillows, sheets, and other bedroom accessories, but its hero products are its hybrid mattress and memory foam mattress—both of which have a price tag around $1.5K.

“If you abandon one of those products in the cart, you get a product-specific, multi-part abandoned cart series that doesn’t look like an abandoned cart email—it looks like a campaign,” Gordon explains. “It shows that product’s lifestyle image, it’s got fun, well-written copy, and it includes reviews for the product you were specifically looking at.”

Plus, since financing is a major part of selling mattresses and Layla has Affirm set up on their website, “we can put in the product-specific Affirm pricing, too,” Gordon says. “So the email says, ‘As low as $89/month.’”

“All of that’s been hugely successful,” Gordon adds. “We see a way, way better conversion rate than we do with the generic version, for pretty obvious reasons.”

Go deeper with flows in Klaviyo, the “gold standard for documentation”

Whatever you’re hoping to experiment with in Klaviyo, there’s probably a Klaviyo Academy or help center resource ready to walk you through the whole process.

“We reference Klaviyo as our idea of gold standard for documentation,” Murray says. “It’s incredible to me how some of these other platforms can be so lacking. I think Klaviyo goes above and beyond, but there’s a big gap between Klaviyo and some of the others.”

“Klaviyo gives real examples within those documents,” agrees Browne, who recalls a recent major implementation where she and Murray leaned heavily on Klaviyo Academy articles and tutorials. “We were able to look up literally everything we needed.”

“There’s no guessing there,” Browne adds. “It’s like, ‘OK, you want to do this? Here’s how you do it.’ That’s so valuable, because we just want to learn. If I ask somebody to do it for me, I’m not necessarily going to learn. So it’s just super helpful to have that documentation—it takes the anxiety away around setting it up correctly or incorrectly, and then you can focus more on strategy.”

How to go deeper with flows in Klaviyo

• Guide to flow branching
• Understanding flow triggers and filters
• How to create a list-triggered flow
• Guide to creating a segment-triggered flow
• Guide to creating a metric-triggered flow
• Understanding the timing of a flow
• Troubleshooting a flow

SMS is a relatively new marketing channel, and Browne says most brands—even the larger ones—are sticking to a batch-and-blast approach for now.

“But we would definitely recommend SMS automations if we had a client who was at that point and ready to expand,” she says. “Giving your phone number to a brand is so personal, so you know these people really love you. We always see strong conversion rates with SMS.”

“The nice thing about SMS is it’s low lift,” Donahue agrees. “It’s easy to get off the ground because the amount of content you actually have to put together is minimal. So from an ROI perspective, it’s easy to get your money back.”

Ready to start incorporating SMS into your marketing automations? Here are a few things to keep in mind.

SMS automations: best practices

The fact that people are much more reluctant to hand out their phone numbers than their email addresses is exactly why “SMS is kind of a different beast” than email, Donahue says.

“SMS is more of a reminder system,” Donahue explains. “It drives conversions, certainly, but it’s a quick flash. It’s not meant to provide a whole lot of content or context because you don’t have a whole lot of real estate to work with.”

“Content-wise, SMS copy needs to be way more focused and efficient than email,” which offers more flexibility, Gordon agrees. “You need to, in a very small amount of characters, tell the customer why they should be excited, and then turn the message’s attention immediately to the CTA.”

That CTA, by the way, should send the customer as low in the funnel as possible—“preferably directly to a shoppable category landing page or to a product detail page, because the tolerance for exploring a site from the homepage on mobile is especially low,” Gordon explains. “Help the user get where they’re going ASAP.”

SMS messaging is also “far more invasive than email messaging,” Gordon cautions—which means “you need to be much more careful with how frequently you send via that channel.”

For high-intent automations such as welcome series and abandoned cart, “it still makes sense to send a burst of messages in a few days because the user has shown obvious intent to purchase and you want to strike while the iron is hot,” Gordon says. Otherwise, though, “we find that 1 message per week is usually the sweet spot for SMS marketing.”

SMS + email: partners, not adversaries

Email and SMS are both crucial components of your marketing mix—they’re just distinct channels that each serve a different purpose. Understanding consumer expectations around emails vs. texts can help you finetune how you use them to reach prospects and customers.

When Klaviyo surveyed nearly 2K consumers about their SMS communication preferences with brands, we found that 49% of consumers are not interested in receiving “interesting” or helpful” articles via SMS, for example—save those for email. Same goes for abandoned cart reminders (44%) and announcements (37%).

By contrast, consumers want to receive more SMS messages from brands that contain transactional details such as delivery confirmations (64%), shipment confirmations (60%), and order confirmations (50%), as well as coupons and promotional codes (50%) and birthday deals (39%).

In an ideal world, any automation you set up could use both email and SMS, depending on what each message in the sequence is trying to accomplish. “The flows we want to set up are kind of a hybrid model,” Donahue says—perhaps a post-purchase flow incorporates both order, shipment, and delivery confirmations via SMS, plus a “How to use your product” email, for example.

Just remember: “It’s always best to stagger sends timing-wise between the two channels,” Gordon says. “This gives you two opportunities to get the click onto the website”—and it also shows respect for the privacy of consumers, many of whom (39%) will unsubscribe if they receive the same message over email and SMS, according to our survey.

Why you need SMS and email in the same platform

Although Noticed is platform-agnostic when it comes to SMS, the agency only does email marketing work on Klaviyo—and they strongly recommend Klaviyo SMS because of how much sense it makes to combine email and SMS marketing in the same automation platform.

Why? For starters, “if you have them set up on different platforms, you’re going to get double attribution constantly,” Gordon explains. “That becomes a huge problem because you can’t really trust your numbers at that point. Klaviyo, having them both under the same roof, is able to say which one happened most recently.”

Second, don’t underestimate the impact of being able to view both SMS and email data “side by side within the analytics tool of the platform,” Gordon says. “If they’re on different platforms, it can get very difficult to jump between them and try to make comparisons. That gets out of control very quickly and it’s simply not scalable. It’s not an effective use of time.”

Imagine you’re putting together a major Black Friday/Cyber Monday flow that involves both email and SMS messages. As Gordon explains, “when we want to compare email and SMS against one another, and see which channel these customers are preferring and what kind of engagement rates we’re getting across each, that’s super easy to do when it’s all under the same roof in Klaviyo.”

By using your core KPIs as a roadmap, you’ll be able to “figure out what’s working, what’s not, and then do some testing around that,” Donahue says. “There’s all these different ways we can pivot the messages.”

In Klaviyo, you can set up both automatic and manual A/B testing to compare variables like:

• Message frequency
• Send time
• Time delays between messages
• Subject lines
• Copy
• Images
• …and more

“We always want to increase, or at least maintain, our engaged customers, so A/B testing is a non-intrusive way to see if something is working or if we need to make adjustments,” Browne explains. “We look to gain statistical significance in these tests in order to determine if we change things up now, or keep testing.”

“After we get everything launched, it’s an iterative process where we’re continuing to review how things are performing and then taking an educated guess and saying, ‘OK, we think if we tweak this specific thing, that it’s going to move this specific needle,’” Donahue agrees. “And then we make that change, see what happens, and just continue that process over and over again.”

How often should marketers modify their existing automations? “It depends on volume and cadence,” Donahue explains. “We’re going to get much better and quicker response data with flows that are going out on a more consistent and regular basis.”

It’s “much easier for us to make data decisions within a month” on an automation that sends multiple times a week, for example, than on a welcome series where sends are 14 days apart, Donahue points out. “The data coming in is going to be much slower, in that case, so it’s also going to be much slower for us to figure out what changes we need to make.”

How to A/B test a flow in Klaviyo

Visit our help center to learn how to:

• Create a new test
• Edit, add, and delete variations
• Choose the weight of each variation
• Configure winner selection
• Publish a test
• Delete a test
• View and understand test results

Overall flow performance is, of course, important to track. “You want to understand what’s working for you,” Gordon says. “If your welcome series is a big part of what drives revenue for you, you’ll want to prioritize that. If your abandon cart is a big revenue driver for you, prioritize that.”

On the other hand, if your welcome series is underperforming, for example, “maybe you’re not explaining your brand enough, or maybe you’re not providing enough social proof to show the customers who have tried this product really love it,” Gordon suggests. “Look at your data, figure out what it’s telling you from a very high level, and then, from there, build your roadmap.”

But getting a bit more granular with your data can reveal equally important insights, Murray points out—and also help you make sure you’re respecting customers’ inboxes.

“Because people are typically more engaged early on in a flow, we have checks built into our lengthier flows. If someone has not opened or clicked within the last 3 messages, for example, we might drop them out of the flow,” Murray explains. “We don’t want to continue sending someone emails if they’re clearly uninterested.”

“We like to look at the overall flow and just see how it’s performing, but it doesn’t really tell us the whole story,” Donahue agrees. “You could have a first message that’s just crushing it, driving all of the revenue, but then everything else just drifts off. It’s important to look at every single one of those steps and figure out what’s going on.”