I built an 8-fig/yr email program, but getting there was a nightmare.
Why? Because I founded my first brand before Klaviyo existed.
In the scale of ecommerce time, this is ancient history, but gather ‘round the fire. . .
I founded the furniture retailer Design Public Group (still alive and kickin’ today) from a SF basement apartment.
Not long after the dot com bubble burst.
Pretty much no software existed to help a brand selling online, because this was the >early days<.
After I’d. . .
→ Hacked together a site on custom software (hello Dreamweaver — this was pre-Shopify, too)
→ Figured out some SEO hacks (anyone remember Spiderfood? SEO Moz?)
→ Started driving traffic and sales
I was running ridiculously messy, spray-and-pray email campaigns.
Like, I was basically writing emails to people in PHPlist (my open-source email software) saying, “Hey, man, ya like design?”
But I’m not one to back down from a challenge, and my challenge was to make email not suck.
I set out to create a systematic approach.
I first observed customers’ major behaviors (helped by a lot of customer interviews):
1. Someone wants to see more emails
2. Someone almost buys something
3. Someone buys something
4. Someone “window shops”
So, what do you do?
Send them emails based on those four major behaviors to make email not suck and drive first or additional purchases.
Now, imagine the action movie training montage of me coding deleting code on the phone hitting my head against the wall hitting up chat rooms to see if anyone had any tips about how to see what happens in a digital cart.
Eventually:
→ The Welcome Flow
→ The Abandoned Cart Flow
→ The Post-Purchase Flow
→ The Browse Abandonment Flow
Turns out, these became pretty popular.
The years of hacking away and testing I did led to what became the foundational elements of email at all of my other brands.
BTW. . . these flows got a heck of a lot easier to implement when Klaviyo was founded (thanks, Andrew and Ed!).