Make Money While You Sleep: How to Grow Your Revenue with Flows

Alexandra Edelstein
​Senior Product Manager, Klaviyo
Klaviyo Boston
Boston Convention and Exhibition Center

One of the best ways to grow your business is to build a marketing automation strategy that makes money while you sleep. Klaviyo Flows allow you to create automated touch points across the entire customer journey—ensuring you’re consistently engaging your customers with personalized, relevant messages. Don’t miss our resident Flow expert teach you strategies guaranteed to help grow your business.

"Make Money While You Sleep" sounds like a pretty click-baity, if not downright spammy title, but Alexandra opened with statistics showing how flows outperform campaigns, including having average open rates that are 1558% higher.

She then presented a slide of two dozen flows she contended were all important to develop the customer relationship, just as you would nurture a friendship, when most people create four flows and stop there.

Here are Alexandra's tips on a flow-by-flow and topic basis.

Welcome Flow

Add a branch for customers versus prospects at the top and then tie back into the main flow.


Abandoned Cart

Add a split so that only high-value carts get discounts to better maintain margins.
Add a location split to offer free shipping domestically and a discount if international to control shipping costs.


Browse Abandonment

Provide category splits for your top categories to tailor copy just to that topic and send general subject lines and copy to everyone for whom no specific category split has been created. This tactic should be used for many flows.

Data Science

Also, Alexandra urged the audience to use data science by using the lifecycle touchpoint from the Klaviyo library, noting that one customer sent a flow with 9 emails and still got a 32% Open Rate on the ninth email.

Predicted Customer Lifetime Value and Predicted Gender also enable much more targeted flows.

She underscored the importance of continuing to test. Even if you just send to a small sample set an email that reflects an untried idea, you will statistically grow revenue by testing. For example, optimize your series length by testing adding an additional email or two while monitoring engagement.

Finally, Alexandra recommended tagging profiles with first purchase date. One flow tags each profile with the specific date of the initial purchase, then a second flow follows up with specific content to celebrate the anniversary of the first purchase. Depending on how many years are involved and whether additional purchases have taken place since, the content and discount change.

Another example of tagging profiles includes adding categories to target initial purchases, continued purchases and categories abandoned altogether. Flows can also tag customers into particular loyalty tiers: customers who have purchase X times, X+Y times, etc.

To design a flow, consider your goals, triggers, customer personas and benchmarks for open rates, clicks and conversions.

Besides smart sending, tagging recipients as "in flow" (and then running a separate flow to remove the tag) will prevent a prospect from receiving too many emails.

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