As anyone in digital marketing knows, email automation marketing is a cost-effective way to engage your brand’s customers and drive conversions. If you’re investing time and energy into paid marketing, that is awesome but you should also be supplementing your paid efforts with email automation. It gives your business a more personalized way of communicating with your various segments of customers based on their specific characteristics or behaviors. To add to this excitement, email marketing automations can be set up to nurture your customers at every stage of the customer journey.
Now that we’ve convinced you that you need to set up your email automations, you might be wondering which automations are best for your direct-to-consumer brand. We’re glad you’re here because we’re about to tell you all about a few of our go-to core email automation flows that you should consider adding into your email strategy.
Welcome Emails
This one is kind of a no-brainer. If you are collecting anyone’s email, the first email automation you’ll want to implement is a Welcome flow. This automation is triggered any time a user signs up or subscribes to your email list. Think of it this way – you wouldn’t invite someone over to your house and not say hello to them when they walk in the door. This is the same thing in email form.
Through welcome emails, you are saying hello and thanking your new subscribers for joining your brand’s email list. You can also tell them a little bit more about your brand’s story and purpose, possibly include a note from the founder, and educate them on your best-selling products. Welcome emails are also an excellent way to get your new subscribers to convert by offering them a coupon code to apply towards their first purchase. If you are feeling fancy, you can even set up specific welcome pop-ups on your site that trigger different welcome emails based on where the customer came from (a specific social ad or campaign, direct from Google, etc.)
The number of emails in your Welcome automation can depend on your brand and how much information you have to share but we generally would recommend 2-4 emails sent within the first week or two.
Abandoned Cart Emails
We can all appreciate a good abandoned cart email, right? These emails are triggered anytime a customer or potential customer adds a product to their cart and… abandons it. This email is really just a friendly reminder to the customer to go back and finish what they started, aka completing their purchase.
There are a few different strategies that we like to implement with our Abandoned Cart series. You can send different Abandoned Cart emails to customers based on if they are new or returning customers, and you can also send different emails depending on the value of the product in their cart. We generally recommend offering a discount at some point in this flow to be more likely to recover those abandoned carts. It doesn’t have to be a huge discount, sometimes even just a free shipping code can go a long way.
Purchase Confirmation Emails
This one may seem slightly obvious but we always recommend setting up an automation that’s triggered by a customer making a purchase. This email automation is a bit more transactional but there is definitely an opportunity to make it a bit more personalized to your brand. In the Purchase Confirmation email, you should be thanking the customer for their business and letting them know what to expect next in terms of their order.
These emails are great real estate to show any related products or best-sellers that they might have missed. Aside from communicating the details about their current order, you want to plant the seed for their next order. If it’s a new customer, you may even offer them a small discount as a token of gratitude to be applied to their next order.
Request a Review Emails
If you are a modern-day consumer looking to purchase almost any type of product or service, chances are you probably read reviews before making a purchase. Reviews are an important way to build trust in potential customers and to help drive more conversions on your site. We highly recommend setting up an automation to collect reviews from your customers. These automations are triggered any time a customer makes a purchase. We generally recommend including a time delay between the automation being triggered and when the email is sent. This will depend on what the product or service is but you are probably good anywhere from a week to a month after the order is fulfilled. These automations can be set up in an email platform like Klaviyo or sent directly through a review platform such as Yotpo.
Win-Back Emails
Win-back emails are a great tool used to reengage customers who have at one time purchased from you but have not shopped with you in an extended period of time. You can also set up a similar win-back automation to reengage contacts who subscribed to your email list but stopped engaging or opening your emails.
The emails in a win-back flow should be personalized and should offer some type of incentive or discount to reengage with your brand or make another purchase. We suggest getting creative with your subject lines and email copy so that it captivates your readers enough to follow through with whatever action you are asking of them.
Birthday/Anniversary Emails
Birthday and anniversary automations are an easy and great way to personalize your emails and let your customers know that you value them. Obviously, you will either need to collect customers’ birthdays in your signup forms or have a way for customers to enter their birthdays into their profiles for this to work. Once you have this data, you can trigger an automation based on a contact’s birthday. The email should be personal and should thank the customer for being loyal to your brand. We always recommend offering a discount for customers’ birthdays. If you frequently send discounts or coupons, this discount should be slightly more significant than what you typically offer.
There are plenty of email automations to implement to give your contacts a personalized experience while keeping them converting and engaged with your brand. While the possibilities are endless, the automations we discussed in this blog post are a solid foundation to get your email marketing working hard for your business. If you’re interested in setting up some email automation flows for your DTC brand, let’s talk!
About BuzzShift
BuzzShift is a digital growth strategy agency with a focus on mid-market, scaling DTC Brands. By combining the ideologies of branding, performance marketing, and retention agency, we can create memorable experiences with measurable results and build long-term success for our clients with scalable, sustainable growth. Learn more about BuzzShift.
