The Promoter

Hello! am youngfisay a professional a top rated plus email marketer with over 5years of experience in creative email designing, campaign marketing, strategy, and automation, i specialize in responsive email template, effective email campaigns, deliverability, and e_commerce automation. how i will help you to obtain optimal performance from your campaigns, creative email design, responsive email coding (PSD to HTML), test across all major email clients in email on acid, ecommerce automation _welcome series, abandoned cart, birthday messages and segmentation personalization.

[youngfisay]

SELLING ON REDBUBBLE: TIPS FROM SOMEONE WHO HIT 20K SALES

Over on Instagram, I shared that I recently hit 20k sales on Redbubble and started getting a lot of questions about selling on Redbubble! This blog post details all of my best tips for selling your work on Redbubble from starting out to sharing your shop. Make sure to follow me on Instagram for more tips on selling your work! Click here to follow me!

what is it?

Redbubble is a website similar to Society6 and Casetify, where artists, designers, and photographers can upload their work to sell on various items like stickers, tshirts, prints, and more. The best thing about Redbubble is that they handle all of the production, shipping, customer service, etc. so all you have to do is create the artwork and upload it! I began selling on Redbubble in 2017 when I was a sophomore in college starting my brand. I knew I didn’t want to be shipping products or keeping an inventory as I was living in a dorm room at the time. I highly recommend selling on Redbubble for everyone, but especially those who don’t want to deal with shipping and keeping inventory!

how does it work?

When listing an item on Redbubble, you want to export your artwork as either a PNG or a JPEG, depending on the design. If it’s a digital design, I usually do a PNG. If you are uploading a pattern or a photograph, you may want a JPEG. When creating your work, you do want to keep in mind your resolution and artboard size. I usually made mine at least 10x10” (I would think of it in terms of inches because I often uploaded my designs to work for both stickers and tshirts) and at a resolution of at least 300. After you create your piece, you upload it to Redbubble and select which products you want the design on. I’d usually go through and format it for most of the products but stickers and tshirts were my most popular.

is it free?

YES! It is free to signup and it doesn’t have a listing fee like Etsy does. The downside to selling on Redbubble is you only get paid an artists margin. So, a shirt could sell for $20 but you may only see $6.00 from that sale. I usually make 20-75 cents per sticker I sell, which is my most popular item. While this may not seem like a lot, I don’t have to do anything after uploading the artwork. I rarely even check my Redbubble shop, usually once or twice a month do I even look at my analytics!

I totally understand that 20 cents does not feel like a lot. It isn’t. My first paycheck from Redbubble was like $3.00 so I get it. However, Redbubble is something that once you build it up, it runs itself. In the last year, I’ve maybe uploaded like 20 new designs. It took me about a year to hit 1k sales, then I hit 10k the next year, and I just celebrated hitting 20k sales about a year and a half after that. It’s one of those things where you put the effort in up front and it can pay off. It’s now something that I don’t even have to think or worry about- the only thing I have to check is to make sure I claim my Paypal earnings each month!

getting started

To create your Redbubble shop, you can click here!

It’s super easy to create an account and start selling!

tagging your work + collections

I’ve found that tagging your work is SO important! Once you upload and format your work, there is a section near the publish button that includes tags. Here is where you should add words that customers may search for to find the design. I think of this like a hashtag on Instagram. Think about it like this, what would your ideal customer be searching for?

I’ve also found that sorting your work into collections can be helpful when people find your shop. If you have a lot of designs like I do, this can help customers find similar stickers. For example, one of my collections is named Ohio and one is named Baseball. Any stickers that have to do with baseball are found in that collection so if someone is interested in baseball stickers and they like my style, they could find other designs!

sharing your work

After you publish your art and create your shop, you want to share about it! Make sure your shop link is in your social media bios or linktree to help drive traffic. One tool that Redbubble has that is really neat is the mockups and resources they provide to help artists share their work. While I think this is a GREAT resource, my biggest tip involves taking your own photos.

biggest tip for selling on redbubble

While Redbubble provides mockups for their artists, I personally preferred taking my own photos for social media when I had the time! I would order a couple products and then take my own photos so they matched my personal brand and stood out on Instagram. When you post to Instagram, make sure you’re using hashtags.

Some examples of good Redbubble hashtags:

#redbubblestickers

#redbubbleshop

#redbubbleartist

#redbubblelaptops

#redbubblestore

#redbubbleart

When you scroll through these hashtags, you see a lot of Redbubble’s mockups. I would take my own photos for social media instead which helped me stand out. While I obviously couldn’t order and take photos of each product- I have 295 designs on a variety of different products- I would order a couple every now and then.

need some photo ideas? here’s a list!

Order a shirt with your design and post a photo of you wearing it! People love seeing the person behind the work. Some caption options include making it a #FridayIntroductions post and mentioning that it’s a shirt from your shop or wear it to an event like a pop up shop or craft fair. If you take brand photos, that’s another great chance to wear one of your shirts!

Purchase stickers and showcase them on your laptop or water bottle! This shows how multiple of your designs work together and could encourage multiple sticker sales from your shop. You could take the photo in your work space- whether that is in your bedroom, dorm room, home office, or in a coffee shop! Another note: I cannot tell you how many times my stickers have started a conversation - when someone compliments them, PROUDLY say you designed them!!

Order a mask with your design on it and wear it! My whole family has been wearing masks I made with our enneagram type patterns on them.

Purchase a print with your design and showcase it hanging in your work space while you’re brainstorming new designs. include some behind the scenes with your work in the background!

Order a mug with your design on it and share a shot of your morning coffee! Ask your audience how they like their coffee (I’m an iced coffee girl through and through) in the caption and/or do a $5 coffee giveaway!

Design a journal or sketchbook and use it to keep a list of your ideas! Post behind the scenes shots of you brainstorming new ideas on your account and show off your journal. People love seeing how designs and concepts come to life AND you’d be promoting your own products.

Incorporate some products into your home decor! A couple ideas could be purchasing a throw pillow and sharing a shot of your couch with the pillow and some of your artwork hanging above it. Or put your designs on some coasters and style your bar cart or coffee cart with them!

Do a giveaway! Giveaway a collection of stickers or a tshirt (whatever your budget allows) and do an instagram giveaway where people have to follow/like/tag others to enter! This will help get you new exposure AND give back to your followers.

other tips

Upload a profile photo and a banner! This helps people see and connect with who they are supporting!

Include a bio on your page with links to your social media and portfolio. This can help direct people who find you on Redbubble to your social platforms!

Post about Redbubble sales- especially around holidays, black friday, etc. Share them on stories and make sure your link is in your bio!

If you utilize Pinterest, try pinning some of your designs! Redbubble does create and run ads with your work but Pinterest is such a good resource!

Upload new designs as frequently as you can! I used to set a goal for like 5 a week when I was really trying to grow my shop.

Wear and use your products! You never know when someone might ask you where you got something and you can share your shop. When they do ask, be proud of your work and you shop!! You’ve worked hard so own it.

Offer to create custom designs for people or put a suggestion box up for your social media followers to give you ideas!

Order a couple of your stickers or an item and do a giveaway on Instagram!

[youngfisay]

10 Ways to Promote your Referral Program

1 – Make it easy to find when users log in

When you want to benefit from the advocacy of your customers, it’s critical that you focus on making your referral program easy for them to find when they have the chance.

Instead of burying it within levels of account settings, let it stand out in your main menus and navigation. The best-performing programs are accessible on every screen of your app. In fact, we’ve seen program performance more than double simply by making it more visible

Check out how Blink Health, a prescription management platform, uses dedicated and highlighted links in both the navigation and user menu to promote their referral program. A common practice is to use a small icon (such as a gift box) and/or a contrasting color for the referral program link to draw attention.

Here’s another example from Flytographer, using both text and imagery to promote the program in the user’s profile.

2 – Create an explainer page

Not only does an explainer page help with boosting awareness, but it helps ensure customers understand how your referral program works and how they can participate.

Create this page on your website to outline the structure of your program and how a user earns and redeems rewards. It’s a great place to direct users who want to get started and can be used as CTA links in your emails, social posts, etc.

Start by answering these questions on your page:

What rewards are available?

How do you make a referral?

Who can make a referral?

How many referrals can you make?

Are there any exceptions?

How do you get started?

Even if your referral program is not open to the public and only accessible by customers, it’s a good idea to build a public-facing explainer page that anyone can access to learn more about how it works, and so they can share it with others who are not yet customers.

Below is an example explainer page from home security brand Brinks.

3 – Write a blog post announcement

Writing a longer announcement about your new program on your blog can be a great way to engage your subscribers and provide some of the finer details that people might be looking for.

You can include additional info like quotes from your team members, the story behind the program. instructional screenshots and GIFs, reward examples, and more. Don’t forget to send out an email to your blog subscribers with a link to the blog post!

Adzooma, a leading PPC management platform, released a post on their blog to demonstrate how customers can participate in their refer a friend program with GIFs and screenshots and a link to get started.

4 – Use email marketing

To get the most out of your email channels and subscribers, consider an official launch email and consistent promotion in your regular newsletters. This is where you can leverage the new content on either an explainer page or blog post.

An official email announcing the launch of your new or improved referral program is a great way to drive initial action. Leverage the contact information you already have on file to send an email that explains the following:

What’s in it for your users

How the program works

How they can participate right away (include a link or instructions in the email)

Information about your referral program can also be included in onboarding emails to new customers, and as standard sections in your regular newsletters to keep it top-of-mind.

Here’s an example email from financial company KOHO that lets customers know about the referral program as part of an onboarding email sequence, sending about a month after the user first signs up:

Newton, a crypto trading application, adds a standard snippet about their referral program into the footer of almost all of their marketing emails:

5 – Promote it on social media

Depending on where your target audience spends their time online, leverage your following on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and other platforms to spread the word. The average person spends about 145 minutes on social media every day, so it’s worth your time to utilize these channels.

Social media is free, and the short lifespan of each tweet or Facebook post means you can frequently share news and info about your program and any updates.

In your post, include eye-catching imagery, a small blurb about why someone should participate, and a link to your explainer page or blog post to learn more.

Consider entering users into a prize draw when they share the post with friends to drive a little extra momentum around the launch date.

6 – Ask at the right time with in-app triggers

The best time to promote your referral program to your customers is when they feel positively towards your brand. Positive emotions increase a user’s likeliness to further engagement with your product or service, and in this case, make a referral.

Start by identifying the moments when your customer is most likely to be satisfied with your product or service, then use the opportunity to remind them of your referral program.

For an e-commerce model, this moment could be once the user has completed a purchase and is excited to receive their order.

If you provide a CRM tool, this might be when a user closes a sale using your software or has collected a certain number of leads.

If you run a monthly subscription box, this could be after the customer has been delivered their 3rd consecutive box, clearly indicating satisfaction with their purchase.

Online design tool Canva does this by asking a user to refer a friend right after they’ve downloaded their completed design project, likely proud of what they have just created.

7 – Promote it throughout your app

Depending on the nature of your product, there may be opportunities to add referral program promotion within the pages of your app that users interact with on the regular. While this goes hand-in-hand with making your program easy to find when users log in, this goes beyond menus and navigation.

For example, if you have a feed of new content that users scroll through, referral program promotion can be added throughout, or after a user has scrolled for a given length of time.

Front Finance does this in their mobile app by adding a referral program CTA within the home feed. This helps keep the program top-of-mind and makes it easy for anyone to come across while browsing new posts.

8 – Use custom email signatures

Add in a bit of extra promotion with each email your team sends by designing a signature with a quick message and link to your referral program.

This way you can engage everyone from your sales, customer success, and marketing teams to generate awareness.

This can be especially powerful for support staff who help solve customer problems and create happy moments on a daily basis. However, even threads with prospects and professional connections represent an opportunity to promote your program and help you stand out.

With an email signature in place, the recipient is presented with a foolproof way to access your program that you don’t have to worry about maintaining. Here’s an example from Typeform:

9 – Incorporate it into your value proposition

A well-designed referral program is actually considered a welcomed feature by your customers, and can help win-over prospects who might be evaluating similar options.

Because of this, don’t be afraid to put it front and center as a primary way for customers to save money or get rewarded.

Mobile phone provider Visible does this by promoting their referral program as a benefit for new customers as well as existing ones. The home page prominently features how you can save on your monthly bill by participating in the referral program.

10 – Add promotion to your invoices

If you offer credit or a discount as part of your referral rewards, adding a note to your customers’ invoices is a great way to get them involved in the program.

When a customer is reading over their monthly invoice, they’ll be extra receptive to earning a discount or perk to lower the grand total on the next payment.

Add a note like “Refer a friend to earn 10% off your next invoice!” with a link to where they can get started. This could also be included in the invoice notification email, or billing page within your app.

In case the amount due makes the customer question whether your value is worth their investment, this is a great opportunity to remind them how they can pay a lower fee next month by inviting a friend.

[youngfisay]

basic of affiliate marketing

Do you want to make money from affiliate marketing?

Promoting affiliate products is one of the most effective ways to make money from your blog. But a lot of bloggers are still too afraid to give it a go.

If you choose a trusted affiliate program that you know and love and then promote it properly, you’ll find that you can create a long-term (pretty) stable source of income.

Today, I want to show you a few solid ways to make a bit more using affiliates.

Hope it helps!

What Is Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate marketing is a blog monetization method where product companies incentivize bloggers and publishers to refer their product by offering them a commission for every sale they refer. With affiliate marketing, you choose a product you like, promote it online with a referral link, and earn commissions when someone purchases it through your referrals.

The easiest way to find a product you want to promote is by joining an affiliate program like ShareASales 

ale, Amazon Associates or Commission Junction and browsing through their site.

After selecting a product, you can get an affiliate / referral link and promote the product through that link on your blog.

Is Affiliate Marketing Worth It?

Why get started with affiliate marketing? Here are a few advantages over other ways of making money with your blog.

Advantage #1: Monetize Your Blog From Day 1

To start monetizing your new blog, you don’t have to wait for a few months until you grow a massive following. Even if you monetize your blog from day 1, it doesn’t look amateurish because affiliate links are seamlessly and naturally integrated with your content.

Advantage #2: Earn Money Even Without a Massive Following

Unlike other modes of monetization like advertising, you don’t have to grow a massive traffic base in order to start making a solid income. All you have to do is to ensure your website is attracting the RIGHT traffic that actually wants to read your product recommendations.

For tips about driving the right traffic to your blog, check out our guide on blog SEO.

Advantage #3: Generate Passive Income

With affiliate marketing, you can write a single blog post recommending an affiliate product and have that post generate money for you again and again.

That’s called passive income. Passive income is any income that requires no effort to earn and maintain. You already write blog posts anyway, and likely recommend products that you like, so why not make passive income from doing so?

Advantage #4: Make MORE Money

With affiliate marketing, you earn money based on the number of successful referrals you generated. For example, if you could successfully refer a premium product, like WPForms, you can earn up to $59.90 per referral.

Let’s say your affiliate conversion rate is 2%. That means for every 100 referrals you sent to the affiliate website, 2 people are actually purchasing the product. That also means regardless of the size and reputation of your website, you can make $100 from those 2 referrals provided that the affiliate commission is $50 per sale.

Now let’s take a look at how much you can earn with advertising.

The average CPC (cost per click) of AdSense, the largest advertising network in the world, ranges from $0.15. The average CPC that you can earn from AdSense depends on a lot of different factors, including the size and reputation of your website.

For example, if your average CPC is $0.25, then you can earn $25 for 100 ad clicks; whereas, with affiliate marketing from our above example, you can potentially earn $100. Without a doubt, affiliate marketing is a better way to make MORE money.

How to Start Affiliate Marketing (Step by Step)

There’s a huge potential for you to make a big income with affiliate marketing if and only if you follow the right strategy. Here are the exact steps that experts follow when they do affiliate marketing.

Step 1: Start a Blog for Affiliate Marketing

Of course, to start affiliate marketing, you’ll need to have a blog or a website. Majority of the companies that run an affiliate program only approve you as an affiliate if you have a blog or a website. That’s because having a blog establishes authority on your niche and it gives some assurance that you’re not a spammer.

While there are a lot of blogging platforms out there, we always recommend WordPress for starting a blog because not only is it free, but it also gives you full control over your content.

To start a blog, aside from choosing a platform like WordPress, you’ll need to own a domain name and web hosting.

A domain name is your blog’s address (URL) on the internet, like BlogTyrant.com or Google.com, and web hosting is where your blog’s content and files are stored online.

When a visitor tries to access your blog by typing in your web address (domain name), they’ll be directed to the blog you’ve set up in your web hosting server.

To start a blog, we always recommend using Bluehost for web hosting.

Bluehost is one of the largest web hosting companies and an officially recommended hosting provider by WordPress.org.

The combined cost of a domain name and hosting can be quite expensive, especially if you’re just starting out.

That’s why we’ve worked out a deal with Bluehost to offer our users a FREE domain name and over 60% off on web hosting.

For a complete step-by-step guide, check out this guide on starting a blog.

Get started with Bluehost today!

Step 2: Choose the Right Affiliate Products

Everyone has different rules and ideals when it comes to promoting affiliate products.

For example, successful entrepreneur and affiliate marketer ShoeMoney once said that he doesn’t promote private affiliate products unless he has met the owner in person to judge whether they are a trustworthy character.

Here’re a few ways to choose the right products for promoting on your blog:

Promote the products and services that you use and love

Join an affiliate network such as ShareASale and find some reputed products that fall under your niche

Refer the products that offer a money-back guarantee, so even if your reader makes a mistake of buying the wrong product they don’t want, they can get their money back.

Now that you have a better understanding of the kind of products that you want to promote, the next thing you need to do is to sign up as an affiliate for those products and grab the affiliate link.

Check out our list of the best affiliate marketing programs and networks that you can join today.

Step 3: Attract the Right Audience With the Right Keywords

To generate affiliate sales, you need to ensure you’re attracting the right audience who actually wants to try out the service you recommend.

Now the question is, how can you determine if your blog is driving the right traffic and understand their intention?

If you’re like most bloggers, Google is the #1 traffic source that brings traffic to your blog.

You’re more likely to make affiliate sales from your blog if the search engine traffic you drive has an investigational intent.

Generally speaking, there are 4 types of user intents:

Navigational intent: Users search for a particular website. They just want to navigate to the website that they’re looking for.

Informational intent: Users want to find answers to their pertinent questions.

Investigational intent: Users search for information that may eventually lead to a transaction.

Transactional intent: Users are ready to buy or download a free product.

As an affiliate marketer, you’ll want to rank your blog for investigational keywords. Your potential audience uses investigational keywords when they’re not yet ready to purchase a product. They want to compare products and search for reviews and recommendations before making a final purchasing decision.

Some of the phrases you’ll often see in investigational keywords are:

Best

Review

Compare

Alternative

If your site is ranking for keywords with these phrases, you’re likely driving the right audience to your site.

To see the actual searches your users used on search engines to find your site, you can go to the queries report in Google Analytics by navigating to Acquisition » Search Console » Queries.

To know more about keyword research and ranking for the right keywords, refer to OptinMonster’s keyword research guide.

Step 4: Promote Your Affiliate Products Within the Content

One of the best ways to make a long term affiliate income is to write a detailed piece of long-form content (like a tutorial) and make your affiliate an integral part of that content.

I really like this strategy because you benefit from the initial promotion, and then all the long-term traffic that comes from your blog’s Google rankings.

It’s also a nice one because you don’t have to shove the product down people’s throats. You just gently recommend this or that product as being a good choice for that particular part of the process.

Before you add any affiliate links to your WordPress site, I strongly suggest you install Pretty Links, one of the best affiliate marketing plugin.

Pretty Links helps you cloak the affiliate links that you promote on your website.

Affiliate links are typically long, ugly-looking URLs like this:

http://example.com/products/?product_id=123&affiliate_id

Pretty Links helps you cloak such affiliate links and make them shorter and neater:

http://www.yoursite.com/refer/productname

In addition, this plugin lets you manage your affiliate links from a single location on your WordPress dashboard. The benefit is that even if the companies change the affiliate URL in the future, you don’t have to dig deeper into your blog archives to change the affiliate link. You can easily change it by replacing your affiliate URL right from the Pretty Links dashboard.

How to Make Even More Affiliate Income

Now that you know how to get a head start with affiliate marketing, let’s take a look at how to make even more money by recommending products on your blog.

1.Track the Clicks on Your Affiliate Links

While almost every affiliate program out there allows you to track the clicks on your affiliate links, it’s in your best interest to use Google Analytics as well for affiliate tracking. That way you can compare the performance of each affiliate link on your blog even if those products use different affiliate program.

The easiest way to track affiliate link clicks on your blog is by installing the MonsterInsights plugin. MonsterInsights is the most popular Google Analytics plugin for WordPress that comes with a lot of built-in features for publishers, such as download tracking, affiliate link tracking, outbound link tracking, and more.

When you track affiliate link clicks on your blog, you can…

Understand what affiliate products your audience are interested in.

Determine the top performing affiliate products.

Figure out the page from where you receive the most clicks.

Get to know the number of traffic you send to each affiliate product from your Analytics account. This helps you better negotiate with the companies for higher payouts.

Find out if there are any missed affiliate link opportunities.

And more…

2.Boost Your Affiliate Revenue With Exit-Intent Popups

Did you know that 70% of your abandoning visitors would never return after leaving your site? With an exit-intent popup, you can show an affiliate offer to your visitors at the last moment when they’re about to leave.

An exit-intent popup detects the mouse movement and prompts the users with a targeted campaign such as an affiliate promotion when they’re about to leave. You can use OptinMonster, the best popup solution ever built, to create an exit-intent popup.

Top 6 Digital used this strategy and increased their revenue by 30%.

Check out our round up of more email popup examples to inspire you.

3. Drive Traffic to Your Article With Facebook Ads

If you have a really high-quality tutorial or piece of content, you can then drive a little bit of traffic to that article with Facebook Ads.

The good thing about this is that if your affiliate product has a pretty high payout price (like above $50) you can make quite a lot of money even if you’re spending a bit on the ads. As long as your page is converting and there is enough traffic in the niche you can do quite well.

If you decide to go this route make sure you do a lot of tracking and testing so you know exactly what is converting and why. Try not to guess too much as you often can’t be sure what’s bringing the sales.

4.Incorporate the Affiliate Product Into Your Email List

One of the most powerful ways to add extra affiliate income to your blog is by promoting an affiliate product to your mailing list once people sign up.

The reason this is so powerful is that…

It’s automatic and ongoing: Services like Constant Contact allow you to create follow-up emails which go out to every subscriber once they sign up to your list. You can create one or 100 emails all at once and then never need to touch them again .It’s perfectly branded: If your blog and mailing list are tight and on-brand you’ll find that an affiliate promotion in the course of some valuable mailing list content is a perfect fit. It goes in there very naturally as you go about helping your subscribers. really important to not just say things like “Go out and buy X product now” because it is way too pushy. Rather, you want to still be providing huge value and mention affiliate products only if and when it could help a subscriber.5.Highlight Your In-post Messages With Graphics Highlighting your affiliate mentions in your article is a good strategy to make sure that people see the message. This can be done in so many different ways and you’ll need to measure the effectiveness for your own particular blog and individual blog post. One way is to use a plugin like Short codes Ultimate which allows you to add buttons, quotes, highlighted text, etc. with just a few clicks. Here’s a screenshot showing you all the different things you can add with this plugin.6.Build Backlinks to Your ArticlesBuilding backlinks to your affiliate article is a great way to drive more traffic to your site.For example, if you land a guest post on a high authority blog you’ll want to write an article that naturally allows you to mention your original post. Blog owners will allow this if it isn’t a direct “buy this product” type of article – especially if it’s a high-value piece.We have one of the largest how to start a blog guide on the web that I’m not ashamed to link to when I do blogging guest spots.Remember, the more work and value you provide in your guest posts the more shares and links they’ll get.This also applies to forum posts, comments and other places where you think you might get a lasting (but useful) slice of traffic.7.Become an Expert at Using the Product You Want to PromoteSome of the most successful affiliates become so successful because they get really, really good at using the product or service either directly, or as an incidental part of their business.For example, Darren Rowse on DPS has a lot of photographers taking excellent photos with Canon and Nikon SLR cameras and then mentioning those cameras in their posts and/or tutorials. Although he might not directly sell or pitch those cameras, he would be making an absolute fortune from people who get inspired to purchase after seeing what gets produced.The same is true for people who get inspired to start a podcast because they have seen Pat’s and want to use the same set up that he does.If you want to ramp up your affiliate product sales, consider producing more content that displays your skills using the actual product or service. Give people an idea of how powerful it is, and how good you specifically are at using it to get results.That’s it!I hope this guide helps you get a head start on affiliate marketing. If you liked this article, you might also want to check out some of the best plugins for affiliate marketers.Facebook

[youngfisay]

The top 10 email marketing automations (or flows) to set up right now

1. Create a personal experience with a welcome series automation Your website traffic may have increased during 2021, and this growth presents an opportunity to grow your subscriber base, too.

The welcome series is the perfect automation to welcome new subscribers to your brand. It’s an opportunity to highlight all the aspects that make your brand unique, and tell your brand story to newcomers as you begin to build a genuine relationship with them.

You can also promote your social media channels and find out how your customers would like to hear from you in future communications. Once you’ve made your introduction to customers, consider how you want to continue to build the relationship.

Welcome email example from Parade.

Pro tip: Create a signup form that routes subscribers to a holiday shoppers list. You can then trigger a holiday-specific welcome series from that list to give those subscribers a unique experience based on how they first interacted with your brand. Remember, it isn’t just BFCM that is a holiday. Build campaigns off of your customers’ birthdays, Memorial Day, April Fools’ Day and any other holidays that are important to your customer base.

2. Use browse abandonment automation to bring users back Shopping in-person is fun because you can browse different products, get a feel for the brand, and understand what all of your options are. Why not create a similar experience through an email or a text?

You can do this with a browse abandonment automation. Your subscribers will receive messages based on the items they’re looking at on your website, and you can control how often this message is triggered and what audiences you want to receive it.

This is similar to an abandoned cart email and automation (which we’ll cover next). Abandoned cart emails have long been popular in ecommerce, and browse abandonment emails and automations take this one step further––reminding customers of what they were looking at even if they didn’t put it in the cart.

Browse abandonment email example from Charlotte Stone.

Pro tip: Keep your messaging for this automation simple. The customer has already shown interest in the item by looking at it on your website, so don’t distract them with cross-selling or multiple calls-to-action (CTAs). Capture the passerby’s attention with a gentle reminder of the items they were interested in by creating a personalization flow that brings them back

3. Abandoned cart email automations that make communications unique Let’s say that your customer gets as far as adding an item to their shopping cart—but then they get called away because the baby’s crying or dinner is ready.

Fear not! The abandoned cart automation can help.

It can be difficult for customers who are intending to purchase to remember every item they’ve added to their cart before they’re distracted by something. The abandoned cart email reminds your customers of the items they’ve left sitting in their shopping cart.

Additionally, the abandoned cart automation populates with dynamic content, like an image of the specific product they added, so each shopper’s card is unique to them and their items.

Abandoned cart email example from Moment.

Pro tip: Segmenting users and A/B testing time delays for sending the first abandoned cart email will allow you to create unique automations. For instance, brands that sell higher ticket items may benefit from a longer delay. This is because the buyer has more time to research and think over the potential purchase—especially compared with brands that sell impulse purchase items. Those less expensive items may benefit from a shorter time delay.

4. Thank you email flows that will foster loyalty Who doesn’t love a nice thank you? The thank you flow, which goes out after a shopper completes their purchase, helps you to foster brand loyalty by expressing gratitude to your customers for their business.

A small thank you can go a long way, especially with the popularity of online shopping, where deals are endless and competition is fierce. Someone chose your products and services—make them feel special with a personalized thank you.

A thank you email example from Paravel.

Pro tip: A/B test text-only emails versus text and image-based emails for this type of automation. It may surprise you that some audiences respond better to a plain text email that looks more like a letter from an individual rather than a flashy message with tons of imagery.

5. Instructional email flows that educate users By this point, you’ve already told your customer how much you appreciate their business, but how do you keep them coming back? You’re going to wow them with your amazing products, of course!

The instructional email automation educates your customer on how to use, clean, or assemble the product they’ve purchased. This helps cut down on customer service inquiries and reduce poor product adoption. An instructional email streamlines the process and creates a pleasant experience for the shopper. And a happy customer is more likely to turn into a repeat customer.

An instructional email example from Ilia Beauty.

Pro tip: As long as there aren’t any sales or marketing content in this email series, you can get this email tagged as transactional. This way, all customers are eligible to receive this important messaging.

6. Product review automations that grow your brand You’ve told your customers how important they are to you—now let’s see if you can get a little love from them. This next automation will help you identify your brand ambassadors.

The product review automation is your chance to hear from your customers about their experience with your product. By using a time delay, you can let time pass after a customer places an order and then trigger the product review series to request product reviews from your customers.

When buying online, customers don’t have the luxury to feel and test the products in person, so reviews are more important than ever. It’s one thing for a brand to highlight how their products or services are exceptional, it’s another to have others echoing a similar style sentiment.

A product review automation email example from Buffy.

Pro tip: Not every product review’s going to be a positive one, and that’s okay. Critical feedback will help you grow and improve your product or service offerings. If someone leaves a negative review, this is your chance to listen to the customer, understand their pain points, address the issue, and flip them from being an unhappy customer into an ambassador for your brand. Or, you can use it the way Liquid Death does, as a way to draw a line in the sand.

7. Set-up cross-sell and up-sell automations Sometimes the number of options you offer on your online store can be overwhelming. Other times, shoppers just don’t have enough time to do a thorough search.

The cross-sell or up-sell automation will help inspire struggling shoppers to find exactly what they’re looking for.

Use this automation to showcase some of your other products or services. You can do this by handpicking some of your flagship or best-selling items, or by leveraging product recommendations. This way, you can make suggestions based on a user’s purchasing history and that of similar customers.

An upsell email example from Athletic Greens.

Pro tip: Implement time delays so that after someone buys an item, you can send a message to them to buy a complementary item, or the next progression of that item in an up-sell.

8. Bring users back with a replenishment automation For brands that sell products that customers purchase repeatedly within certain timeframes—most often consumer packaged goods (CPGs)—a replenishment automation can be a welcome reminder.

It informs customers that their supplies may be running low, and that it’s time to get a refill.

Show your customers that you’re looking out for them by sending a reminder email just before your product is scheduled to run out.

For example, if you sell daily vitamins that typically last a customer six weeks, automate a replenishment campaign at the five-week mark. If your customers use the product regularly, they will appreciate the email.

A replenishment email example.

Pro tip: Set up separate replenishment automations if you have products that have their own unique average lifetime.

9. Set up back in stock automation Regardless of your industry, one goal that all ecommerce business owners have in common is the desire to generate revenue.

That’s why it’s so important to have back-in-stock automations so you don’t miss out on a sale—even if you’re running into inventory shortages.

Implementing a back-in-stock journey will prompt your customers to sign up for an alert when a specific item is back in stock. You can then make these customers feel special by contacting them first when the item becomes available.

A back in stock email example from Athletic Brewing.

Pro tip: Set minimum inventory rules to control the threshold for notifying a customer after you restock the item. You don’t want to tell 100 customers a popular item is back in stock if only 10 are available. You can also set up an advanced back-in-stock automation to give your VIP customers a little extra love by giving them early access to restocked items.

10. Personalize with birthday or anniversary automation Use signup forms to gather information about your audience.

Who are they shopping for? What collections are they most interested in? What’s their first and last name? All of this information can put you on a path of personalizing your communications for each customer. This final email automation leverages information you can gather up front and help make that personal connection with your customers.

Connecting on a more personal level with your customers is unique to ecommerce—how many of your brick-and-mortar sales people remember your customers’ birthdays? That number is probably pretty low.

With a birthday automation, you can celebrate along with your customers on their special day by offering a discount, free shipping, free birthday gift, or simply just acknowledging the day.

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15 benefits 0f email marketing

Here are just some of the benefits of email automation workflows:

It's automatic and doesn’t require intervention

Nurture leads to make them more receptive

Benefit your sales team

Relevant to the email recipient

Increase brand awareness

Better personalization for prospects

Carefully planned email strategy

Reduce the potential for errors

Save time so you can focus on other tasks

Reduce costs

Boost business revenue

Better targeting and segmentation

Keep existing customers interested

More detailed reporting

Understand your customers more

1. It's automatic and doesn’t require intervention

One of the biggest benefits of an email workflow is that it works its magic all on its own. After they're set up, you can choose a specific criteria to trigger the workflows and off they go.

You don't need someone to click send. You can rely on the email automation to work 24/7.

2. Nurtures leads to make them more receptive

Some businesses get their sales team to contact new leads immediately before they go cold. However, it might be that these leads aren’t quite ready to be contacted by a salesperson yet.

Just because a contact has downloaded a free how-to guide from your website, it doesn't mean they want to talk to your sales team.

Email workflows nurture your leads by following up their interest with helpful information and resources. If these emails are relevant and engaging, the contact will learn more about your business and be more receptive when they’re approached by your sales team further down the line.

3. Benefit your sales team

As email workflows are designed to nurture potential customers, this is a huge win for your sales team too. They can see what emails and content the lead has engaged with so there's a higher chance they'll be interested in what your business has to offer.

Some email workflow tools, like HubSpot, will send internal emails to employees if and when an email recipient makes a specific action. For example, if a person has completed a free demo form, it would suggest they’re ready to be approached by a member of your sales team. Then your workflow can automatically send an email so they know it's time to pick up the phone.

4. Relevant to the email recipient

When you start planning your email workflows, you can make sure they’re completely relevant to the recipient.

There’s nothing more annoying than several emails from a company that aren’t tailored to you. They’re irrelevant, unhelpful and clogging up your inbox. Most people will unsubscribe or send your emails straight to their spam folder.

Your email workflows will entice more people if they’re relevant to the person reading them.

5. Increases brand awareness

When automation does the heavy-lifting the results are more consistent and professional-looking. In short, email automation makes businesses appear better organised and more responsive.

When the email contact receives helpful and relevant emails from your workflow at the right time, they’ll naturally have a greater awareness and understanding of your business.

So when it's time for a salesperson to contact them, they’ll know exactly who and what your business is and they’ll likely be more interested in what you have to say.

6. Better personalisation for prospects

When an email is automatically sent in personalised email workflows, it’ll have personalisation tokens that are filled with the contact's information. Instead of saying, 'Hi, there,' the email will instead say, 'Hi, Bill.'

Some email workflow tools can also add other personal information like location, the company they work for and much more. Getting personal in email automation adds a further layer of relationship strengthening between a prospect and your business.

Personalisation is being used more and more to engage with contacts and it's incredibly beneficial in relation to inbound marketing. Adding a personal touch can also increase the open rates and click-throughs of your emails.

7. Carefully planned email strategy

While some companies just like to send the occasional email to their contact database, email workflows are carefully planned and have one key goal.

It benefits your overall email marketing strategy because with each workflow, you have the opportunity to plan out how they’ll work. So ensure each email is relevant and has a purpose.

8. Reduce the potential for errors

If you currently have one person writing and sending emails to new leads, then there’s a high chance a mistake can happen. Getting somebody’s name wrong is a cardinal sin - it’s right there in the email!

Making spelling mistakes or hitting send prematurely can cause the email recipient to have less trust in your company. It shows a lack of interest and attention to detail but with email workflows, they can be proofed and checked over and over before you put them live.

9. Save time so you can focus on other tasks

When everything is automated, it saves a lot of time. You can just let the software handle repetitive tasks that would be time-consuming to complete.

You and the rest of your team can focus on other tasks while the email workflows independently work. You can nurture leads and contacts while doing other jobs and then approach your leads when they're ready.

10. Reduce costs

You don't need a large sales team making cold calls every day. They can approach people when they're ready to be contacted and you don't need additional admin teams ensuring emails are sent out regularly. Paying for a large team to constantly contact prospects isn’t needed.

Also, you don’t need to be tech-savvy to use marketing automation, meaning that even less-experienced marketers can manage workflows.

11. Boost business revenue

Using email automation workflows to implement a successful lead nurturing system can dramatically increase conversion rates.

Increasing the probability that a lead will convert with targeted communications - even by a small amount - has a huge effect on overall revenue figures.

Once you find the right formula and timing of your emails, you can speed up the conversion process, freeing up your salespeople to pursue meatier prospects.

12. Better targeting and segmentation

One of the most effective, yet often overlooked, ways to use automation is to segment email contacts into different groups or lists based on their attributes, behavior patterns and other relevant conditions. This can all be stored in your handy CRM.

You can also implement advanced workflows like lead scoring so you can gauge interest and purchase potential for different leads. This means you follow-up with the right message accordingly.

By dividing your main list into smaller lists, you can send more targeted emails to subscribers. This not only increases engagement rates and conversions but it also improves customer satisfaction. How great is that?

13. Keep existing customers interested

Marketing isn’t all about attracting new customers. A key way to boost revenue is by getting existing customers to spend more throughout their lifetime with your brand.

Email automation makes retention and loyalty strategies a breeze, increasing customer lifetime value like it’s child’s play. It allows you to automate requests for feedback, send exclusive offers to high spending customers and trigger re-engagement campaigns if subscribers are straying.

These tactics all strengthen your relationship with your customers after they’ve purchased with you and it increases customer lifetime value.

14. More detailed reporting

The reporting function of email automation workflows makes your team more accountable. Any marketing automation software worth its salt comes with useful reporting capabilities.

Comprehensive reporting means you can quickly see how your marketing activities support your sales pipeline. This allows you to pinpoint the exact areas where results can be improved, empowering your team to make the changes needed for better results.

15. Understand your customers more

How do you learn about your customers when you have a million other tasks to do? Email automation allows you to understand your customers better.

You discover what links they tend to click on, which pages they visit more and the types of content they are interested in. Email workflows are an optimised way of marketing to your ideal customers.

Ready to create your own email automation workflows and see the results of inbound marketing?

Now you've seen the benefits of email automation workflows, try creating your own in your inbound marketing campaigns. In our Year of Inbound guide, you’ll see all the strategy involved in implementing it, learn how long it takes to start seeing results and also how you convince your colleagues it’s the way to go.