Everyone says, “You need a welcome series.”
But very few people show you what happens when you do them wrong.
Well, this morning, I got some data back from a client that proves not properly building a welcome series could be costing you a fortune … without you ever knowing about it..
Here’s what went down:
About 2 months ago, I talked to this client about the email flows they had running on their store.
At a glance, it seemed like they had all the core flows they needed already firing.
Welcome series, cart abandon, browser abandon, post purchase.
You name it, they had all these series turned on.
But …
When I looked closer inside their email account, my jaw hit the floor.
Because each flow was only sending 1 or 2 emails.
To some, this might look like a box checked.
But in my experience, you need 10-20x that amount of content to really get the most out of each email flow.
I estimated NOT having the appropriate amount of emails in each flow was costing this business $50,000 … every month.
I HATE seeing businesses make this mistake so I offered to create these additional emails for them.
Now …
I didn’t promise a $50k increase in their sales, but in the back of my mind, that was the number I was shooting for.
So what happened once all the emails were turned on?
Well, I was wrong.
They did NOT see a $50k increase in their sales.
They saw an almost $100k increase … in just the first 30 days.
One place you can see the starkest changes was in the welcome series.
Before, they were only sending a single welcome email to their list.
And that email was pulling in about $24k/month.
| After, I lengthened the series to 10 emails across 12 days. |
I know, it’s hard to see it in the screenshot because there’s so many emails in it.
But here’s how the revenue per email broke down in the last 30 days:
Email 1 -$48.3k
Email 2 – $6.31k
Email 3 – $2.38k
Email 4 – $2.71k
Email 5 – $2.16k
Email 6 – $3.33k
Email 7 – $1.32k
Email 8 – $1.41k
Email 9 – $2.45k
Email 10 – $2.74k.
Does anything stand out to you?
The first thing I see is that big jump in the first email’s sales.
You might be think, “How’s it possible Rob?”
Because by sending additional reminder emails, it makes the first email (with basically no changes) do better. Because people see the others and go back to it!
The second thing I see is that all the way up until the 10th email, there were still sales to be made.
In fact, there was an additional $24.81k made AFTER the first email.
Most people stop following up after the 3rd or 4th email. But I kept going and sales kept coming in.
(And actually, this is one of the shorter welcome series I’ve worked on).
Now obviously you need to have good copy in your emails. You can’t just spam people for 10 days. It’s got to be engaging.
And you need to know how to properly build and time these flows (which I why I’m excited to host an advanced Klaviyo workshop in July on exactly that).
But a massively underrated piece is simply following up enough to give your readers a chance to get to know you and buy.
(Note: this doesn’t just apply when you’re writing funnels. It goes for when you’re getting clients too. Probably 80% of the cold email clients I’ve signed have come after the 4th follow up email I’ve sent).
So if your clients aren’t sending enough emails in their flows, consider this a $100k/month case study you can share with them as a wake up call.
And if you aren’t following up enough yourself, well, you know what to do don’t you? 🙂
Rob “King of Conversion? Psh. More Like King of Follow Up!” Allen
P.S. Would you like to see that welcome series I mentioned PLUS all my top tips for writing a converting welcome series?
See all my best email flow tips, tricks and segmentation secrets here.