Promoting High-LTV Products in your Welcome Series

You have a new subscriber on your contact list. Congrats! This is a critical moment in the customer lifecycle, as it's now time to make them fall in love with your brand and products.

Your welcome series sets the tone for your rapport with your prospects, especially when your brand is already top of mind. Sending these emails is a great way to stay in touch, build trust, and lay the foundation for a loyal customer relationship. One challenge brands typically face when setting up a welcome series flow is deciding which products to feature most prominently. But the answer is clear: Promote your retention drivers! Let's explore how to identify and implement these in your welcome series.

1. What the Welcome Series is all About

2. Welcome Series Best Practice

3. The Secret Sauce: Identify Products that Drive Loyalty

4. Create Effective Product Blocks

5. Monitor the Performance

What the Welcome Series is all About

But first, the fundamentals: A welcome email series is a sequence of emails automatically sent to people after they sign up for your newsletter. The moment after an opt-in is when your new subscriber is most excited. That's what makes a welcome email series so important. It's what you use to capitalize on "sign-up momentum”.

The majority of people who sign up for the newsletter and decide to make a purchase do so within the first 10 days. This is mainly driven by people who sign up for the newsletter intentionally to get a discount on their first order. For everyone else, the welcome series is your best opportunity to say hello and convert leads into customers. A welcome series typically consists of 3-5 emails, usually spread out over about 10-15 days.

Welcome Series Best Practice

To set up your welcome series, decide what the unique purpose of the sequence should be, and then determine the timing and frequency of your future emails. Once you have all these elements together, you can start writing compelling messages and selecting your products. To get started, you are welcome to follow the structure below:

• Email 1: Your Welcome Email (Day 0)
  While every step in your email series is about welcoming a new subscriber, this is especially true for the very first email you send. Thank them for subscribing to your newsletter, remind them of the benefits they can expect, and provide them with the incentive you promised.
  
  
• Email 2: Introduce Yourself (Day 2)
  Show your customers what makes your brand and products stand out. What makes you unique, what differentiates you from the competition, and why they should buy from you.
  
  
• Email 3: Inspire to Buy (Day 5)
  Show your subscribers the variety of your products, what they look like, and how to use them. Use social proof by implementing positive customer reviews.
  
  
• Email 4: Share a Purpose (Day 8)
  Convince your customer of your vision and mission. Tell them about your motivation and show them you share a greater purpose.
  
  
• Email 5: Close the Deal (Day 11)
  If all your efforts so far have been unsuccessful, use this last email to showcase your best products again and ramp up the urgency and remind your customer of their unused incentive.

There's no universal "right answer" to when in your welcome email series you should start promoting product recommendations to get that first order. There's only the right answer for your audience, which you'll discover testing. In addition to deciding when to promote your products, it's important to choose the right recommendations: Products that lead to high customer retention and, ultimately, high LTV.

The Secret Sauce: Identify Products that Drive Loyalty

Now let's use the insights provided by RetentionX to identify your products that lead to the highest LTV. Under Products > All Products you’ll find all metrics needed to understand your products' performance. Monitor the connection between the purchased product and the resulting customer quality with the help of the product LTV. 

LTV 1 Year of New Customers calculates the average lifetime value after the first year of all customers that have purchased that product in their first order. Products with a high LTV 1 Year of New Customers are true magnets for high-quality customers. 

To ensure that the LTV 1 Year of New Customers is calculated over a significant sample size, filter by the number of new customers, which should be at least 100 customers per product.

Let's take a look at the following example brand: Although the Hydration Starter Set is not the most popular product with new customers, it is the one that results in the highest LTV after the first year and should be advertised to your newsletter subscribers.

Now, of course, you could argue that the Hydration Starter Set is more expensive than a single juice, which results in higher margins and therefore a higher LTV.

So especially if you sell products across a wide range of selling prices, it's a good idea to also monitor the percentage of orders that result in a follow-up. Your best products will have high scores on both metrics: LTV of New Customers and Share of Orders Leading to a Follow-Up. This ensures that the high LTV is not just driven by a single high-value purchase, but also by high retention rates.

For our example brand, we can confirm that the Hydration Starter Set leads to a high repeat purchase rate and that customers continue to shop at the store.

Create Effective Product Blocks

Once you have identified the products you want to promote to new email subscribers, create a product block to feature them in your welcome series. To do this, follow the steps below, as shown for Klaviyo as example:

• Log in to your Klaviyo account
• Navigate to Content > Templates, where you can either create a new template or use an existing template.
• Click on Product in the content area on the left side and then Static > Add Products.
• Select your high LTV products that you have identified in RetentionX.
• Customize the product block to match your CI and add the product block to your welcome series email.

Monitor the Performance

Everything is set up? Excellent! Now, it is important to monitor the results and make sure that the included products really do lead to a better result. Obviously, it would be bad if the promoted products converted subscribers with a significantly higher LTV, but the number of conversions would drop so much that it would have an overall negative impact on your bottom line.

Therefore, it is recommended to test the selected products against your new customer's bestsellers. To do this, simply create another product block following the instructions above and create a conditional split so that the product blocks used are randomized 50/50.

Using UTM parameters, you can then analyze the number of conversions and LTV of your new customers from each welcome series version. Our Best Campaigns report helps you see both KPIs at a glance.

For our example brand, while the welcome flow promoting the bestseller results in more conversions, the brand's total profit over time from conversions that purchase the starter set in their first order is nearly double that of the bestseller shoppers ($1.1 million vs. $595,000).

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