Chapter 1: Your Initial Email Marketing Audit

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The goal of this Email Marketing Growth Guide is to help you identify and work on the things that are holding you back from greater email sales growth and success. Each Chapter should take you about 45 minutes to execute. At each step, you can continue to evaluate your progress and determine what areas you want to focus on.

We’d love it if you’d share your results after implementing each chapter of the guide. That way, we can see each other’s work, understand each other better, and share our progress as we each work on this.

The most important part of starting solid growth is making sure that you have an accurate stock of where you are right now, which is where we’ll start in Chapter 1.

Audit & Validate Your Email Setup

There are 12 key features we’ll check on to make sure you’re account is in a good state. Making sure these features are set up, even if they’re not performing at their best, means you are well-positioned to start optimizing and improving your growth – or you can complete the setup and then immediately begin improving.

Make a copy of this checklist into your own Google Doc or other tracking software and as you go through the following steps make note of your current status (Yes // No // In Progress):

  1. Your ecommerce platform is integrated, and metrics are coming in
  2. Your open rate on campaigns is above 15%, and you’re getting sales from your campaigns
  3. You’re collecting newsletter signups on your homepage and on your checkout page
  4. You’re collecting newsletter signups into a master list, and have created your foundational segments
  5. Your revenue from flow emails is around 20% of your store revenue
  6. You have a welcome series turned on and generating sales
  7. You have an abandoned cart series turned on
  8. You have a browse abandonment series turned on
  9. You have a post-purchase flow for first-time customers
  10. You have a VIP flow live for your best customers
  11. You have an expected date of next order flow live to encourage repeat customers
  12. You have key data recording flows live

You probably aren’t going to check off every item on this list. That’s okay. This is going to help set the stage for where to start, and help you identify the most valuable places to work.

After you complete this course, revisit this audit checklist and see how you’ve improved! There are links to related content for each item if you want to dive in and tackle it right away.

#1: Your ecommerce platform is integrated, and metrics are coming in

Navigate to Integrations in Klaviyo or visit https://www.klaviyo.com/integrations. You should see your ecommerce platform listed under “Enabled”, and if you click through on it, recent activity listed at the bottom. If you don’t see any recent activity there, contact Klaviyo Support.

Next, go to Metrics in Klaviyo and look for one listed as “Viewed Product”. Click through on it and the chart shown should reflect recent activity – these are cookied website browsers visiting your product pages. If you don’t see a Viewed Product metric or there’s no recent activity listed on it, the code that powers this data may be missing. You can follow this guide from Klaviyo on reinstalling it: ShopifyOther platforms

You can also contact Klaviyo Support for help checking on the code and reinstalling it, or post a question about it in the forums.

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#2: Your open rate on campaigns is above 15%, and you’re getting sales from your campaigns

Review the last few campaigns you sent. How regularly are you messaging your customers, and how is the overall performance of those campaigns so far? If you’re not regularly sending out campaigns, we’ll work on some skills and setup tricks that will help make it faster and easier to deploy email campaigns and grow your sales with them.

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#3: You’re collecting newsletter signups on your homepage and on your checkout page

There’s a lot of good ways to collect signups for your subscriber list, but the two most important are when you can use the visitor’s immediate brand or product interest. That means making sure you’re collecting new subscribers who visit your homepage, which is generally your highest trafficked page, and your checkout page, where you can capture many of the people buying without having signed up and get them into your opted-in marketing list.

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#4: You’re collecting newsletter signups into a master list, and have created your foundational segments (Engaged list, repeat customers, VIPs…)

The marketing opt-in signups you’re collecting above should be going into one list in Klaviyo, and then all of your segments are based off of membership in that list and additional criteria. This includes your engaged list (used for sending campaigns), and then segments for identifying repeat customers, VIPs, etc.

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#5: Your revenue from flow emails is around 20% of your store revenue

We’ll review some of the major flows just below, but if they’re performing well they probably account for about 20% of your revenue. If you’ve just set them up, or you don’t have them all live, that’s fine! That’s probably the next valuable place to work.

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#6: You have a welcome series turned on and generating sales

Have you turned on an email series for new subscribers yet? This is an easy and high-value flow, that works well because it helps convert early interest in your brand into desire and action around their first purchase.

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#7: You have an abandoned cart series turned on

Have you turned on a flow that goes to people who abandon the checkout process? This is typically the highest revenue-generating flow in a store’s Klaviyo account, and people often find it pays for their Klaviyo subscription in itself with how many sales it can recover.

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#8: You have a browse abandonment series turned on

Have you turned on a flow that goes to people browsing products on your website but not checking out? This is a key flow for helping convert people who are browsing but not buying, often through product education or other material that helps them make a decision about your product.

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#9: You have a post-purchase flow for first-time customers

Right after a customer makes their first purchase is a great time to start a post-purchase nurture. Great post-purchase nurture flows can help reduce return rates, address likely customer support questions up front, and create upsells/cross-sells to related products that might also be useful.

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#10: You have a VIP flow live for your best customers

VIP customers are your absolute best resource in your marketing. They are a special group to cultivate and protect, and making sure you recognize them is really valuable. Your VIP flow will help develop this audience and make sure they stay engaged with you. This helps you get regular repeat purchases, and get product and experience feedback.

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#11: You have an expected date of next order flow live to encourage repeat customers

If you sell a product with any kind of replacement or replenishment cycle, it’s important to make sure you reach customers as that replacement begins. Using Klaviyo’s built-in data science features, you can make sure that customers are hearing from you at just the right time to encourage their next purchase.

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#12: You have key data recording flows live

Flows aren’t just great for messaging your customers. You can also use them to record value data by setting a profile property based on being in a flow. One key example of this is a “date of first purchase flow”, that records the date that someone first orders on. You can find this example in the Klaviyo flow library. We’ll review some more useful flows like this, how to implement them, and how to use the data that they collect in this chapter.

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In the next chapter, we’ll analyze the performance of each area of your email marketing in detail, and set up a system that makes it easy to track your growth from week to week.