The FlowBuilder is a marketing automation tool that allows you to automate email workflows. In MarketingPlatform you can set up automated flows that will send the right message to your customers at the right time.
With our FlowBuilder, you have a wide range of possibilities to build, shape and customize your flows as you wish. All you need to do is outline an effective marketing strategy, create the segments, i.e., the target groups and tailored campaigns, and with this amazing tool, you can customize and build your automated flow in a matter of minutes.
This is a fully automated process, which once set up, can save you significant amounts of time. The automation will do everything for you, and you’ll only have to look at the statistics and “pick the fruits” of your labor.
Types of Flow
Here are a few ideas for automation flows:
- Welcome flow for new subscribers and customers
One of the basic flows is the welcome flow. You can use it to introduce your business to new subscribers in an interesting and engaging way, while giving them an idea of what they can expect from you.
- Product recommendations
With this flow, you can recommend products that your customer has already browsed or purchased on your web-shop. You can create interest-related campaigns featuring similar products, more products from that category, discount info/codes and the like.
- Discounts
Discount codes are a great opportunity to engage your customers. You can use discounts in the most creative ways. If someone has visited a specific category/product, you can set a trigger, E.g., when someone visits a product/category you can follow up with an email campaign with a discount code for the specific product.
- Celebrating Birthday/Anniversary
An effective way to show your customers that you care is to send them a birthday card. Celebrating anniversaries by sending email campaigns with special offers is a great chance to engage with them. With our automation tool, it can easily be set and done.
- Order confirmation
With the order confirmation flows you can send email campaigns after a purchase and thus inform your customer about the order. It gives a sense of security and comfort and creates a better image of your company.
- Abandoned cart
If a subscriber adds something to the cart without finishing the purchase, you can send them a follow-up email reminding them of the items they left in the cart. In this way, you can prompt the customer to complete their purchase.
- Customer feedback review
If customer feedback is something you value greatly, you can set up a flow requesting feedback a few days after a purchase has been made. With this flow, you can improve your company’s image and increase the chances for new prospects. Collecting reviews from customers can be done in different ways. For instance, you can offer discounts or freebies and ask for feedback or recommendation on a recent purchase.
- Re-engagement flow
With this flow, you can target inactive subscribers. If they’ve been inactive for a longer period of time and do not open your campaigns, with the re-engagement flow featuring new offers, recommendations or discounts, you can increase your chances of winning them back or, at least, clean your list of inactive subscribers.
Start creating your own flow
Just for illustration, we will demonstrate one way to create a Product recommendation flow.
It’s based on recognizing customer behavior and triggering a series of responses that will ideally lead to conversion.
This flow is ideal for subscribers who showed some interest in certain products, but haven’t made a purchase yet. What you can do is engage them with intelligently crafted email campaigns featuring similar or discounted products. Additionally, you can use a variety of recommendation types such as trending, top rated or most popular products, new arrivals and the like. The idea is to use email automation to send customers emails featuring products that will be interesting and relevant to them. Without knowing your subscribers’ interests, you can’t target them with personalized emails.
For instance, you can use data from Tracking to target subscribers with specific activity, such as:
- subscribers that have bought from a category/product,
- subscribers that have visited a category/product,
- subscribers that have removed a product from cart, or
- subscribers that have purchased an X number of times.
Furthermore, you can dive more deeply by combining subscriber’s activity with their interests; for e.g. a book store can have interest-based segments such as fiction, biography, romance, sci-fi, historical novels etc.
To start building your flow, you need to select Automated flows → Flowbuilder from the menu on the left.
The first step in creating a flow is selecting the list the flow is built for. Next, you click on Create Flow, which will lead you to a blank FlowBuilder. Name and start building your flow in line with your marketing plan.
Again, it’s important to have the tailored email campaigns and segments prepared in advance.
Step 1
Just like the campaign builder, the flowbuilder also works on a drag and drop method. Open your flow by choosing a Start Point, which can be any event from the range of events in the right panel. For instance, you can start with a LeadScore higher than an X value, or an activity such as Opened/Clicked in Autoresponder/Trigger/Campaign.
Step 2
So, you start your flow with more engaged subscribers, let’s say those with a lead score higher than 50. Taken that you already know your subscribers’ interests (either from their previous activity in your campaigns or interests they’ve selected in a survey), you’ve created a segment for each. The next step in your flow would be using a Segment Split, which would allow you to send campaigns with personalized content to each group.
Very often, subscribers will fall into more than one segment, and here you can decide if they’ll only be part of one segment (and receive one interest-based campaign in the flow) or all (and receive all interest-based campaigns).
Step 3
The next step is sending customized campaigns to each segment.
The campaigns are made beforehand and selected in the flowbuilder along with sending time, sender info and Google analytics tracking.
Step 4
In the next step you can use a Wait Timer to allow some time for your subscribers to interact with your campaign, so you can track their activity accordingly.
If opens or clicks in the campaign is one of the metrics you’re following and it’s part of your marketing strategy, you can follow up with campaigns featuring different incentives for the ones that opened/clicked in the campaign as opposed to those that didn’t.
When the flow is complete, simply end it with the End Flow icon.