The welcome series is probably the most badly treated automated flow out there. Too many brands go into their ESP, set up a templated flow, and send email after email ramming home their acquisition offer until someone buys or unsubscribes.

It’s a shame. The flow is a great way to convince those ummer's and ahhers' your products are the best option out there. And with the right strategy you’ll be surprised how much room for growth there is.

Here are 6 things you should be doing to turn it into an automated profit machine.

1. Make. The. Offer

This isn’t the time to mess around with clever angles and creatives. Give new signs-ups their discount straight away. Make it clear and obvious and, if possible, avoid burying it in paragraphs of text.

To squeeze out extra sales, try making this offer time limited. This will usually require a unique code for each person, something that’s straightforward to set up if you have a standard store>ESP integration, but can prove fiddly if you’ve got a custom store or if your payments are through a third party.

2. Educate, Educate, Educate

If someone hasn’t bought from the first email, you need to spend time nurturing them. Too many brands don’t do this. They repeat the initial offer over and over again until someone either buys or unsubscribes or marks it as spam.

But they’re missing out on a big opportunity. Some top angles that work well are:

- Hero product benefits

- Brand comparison emails

- Testimonial emails with a problem/solution angle

- Case studies

3. Don't Be Too Keen

Bombarding someone with emails isn’t the best way to start a relationship. It’s super annoying and can turn people off your brand. So make sure you exclude people in this flow from campaigns and other promotions.

Depending on the ESP, there are two ways to do this. Either tag them as in the welcome sequence or create an excluded segment in each of your campaigns for people who are in the flow.

4. Dangle Them Carrots

If someone still hasn’t purchased 3-4 weeks down the line give them a upgraded offer. So many brands avoid doing this because they’re worried about affecting margins. But these are also the brands that have CRMs filled with prospects who signed up over a year ago.

5. Use Different Channels

How you do this will depend on your comms set up. If you’re collecting mobile numbers in opt-ins then reiterate the offers via SMS. Be clever here though. You’ll notice a lot of brands double up with both channels at the same time. They need to complement each other without adding to comms fatigue.

The same goes for push. If they’ve signed up to in-app comms push notifications will keep them involved. And if you really want to squeeze out sales this is also the time to put non-buyers in a list and export them back to your Facebook Ad account.

6. Tag Them As Prospects

If someone still doesn’t purchase after the automated flow, tag them as prospects and send them targeted campaigns. Sending emails that encourage engagement work really well here. A few ideas:

- Surveys asking for feedback

- Gamified emails that nudge people to click

- Personalised emails that ask for a reply

Experiment with this. Try things out. You’ll be surprised how many people haven’t bought from you just because they never got round to it. If you really pay attention to these 6 things and implement them properly, you're guaranteed to seeing an uplift in conversions. Good luck with them.