Hey friends,

If you're in the US, I hope you had an incredible Labor Day weekend and I hope your brand crushed it.

But before we start handing out trophies to celebrate our performance, I want to share a few numbers with you. If your brand did $1 million over Labor Day weekend, somewhere between $100,000 and $400,000 of that should have come from automated email and SMS flows on top of campaigns your team sent. If your numbers don’t look like this, you just made a huge mistake. The best brands I know saw 10-40% of their Labor Day weekend revenue come from flows that were automatically sent to their shoppers while they were outside hosting a BBQ with their family and friends. If your automated email and SMS flows were not dialed and delivering results like this, you need to pay attention to what I’m about to say.

That’s because these numbers are about to get a lot bigger. Black Friday is coming and on average, brands do about 3X their Labor Day numbers in November during BFCM. So take whatever your flows just left on the table from the weekend and triple it. That's $300,000 to $1.2 million in automated email and SMS flow revenue during BFCM that you either capture or let your competition earn. For an 8 figure+ brand, that's somewhere between a Lamborghini Urus and a new house worth of revenue that you’re about to fumble if you don’t get this right!

So today I want to break down why this is the biggest revenue blind spot for most brands and how you can literally fix it in 20-30mins. This way you can have your email & SMS running at peak performance before BFCM and avoid your most painful mistake of Q4.

A few stats that will completely change your perspective before BFCM

Last year before Labor Day, I was looking at the email revenue breakdown for a brand I was consulting with. They were doing $2.1 million per month at the time. It’s a super solid business and it looked like they were crushing it.

Then I looked at their abandonment flow revenue. They only had $48,000 per month in revenue from these which is only 2.3% of site revenue. This is super low compared to some of the other brands I was working with so I knew something wasn’t right.

IMO, abandonment flows at a brand this size should be driving at least 10% of site revenue. That's around $210,000 per month which means this brand had a $162,000 monthly gap to fill. That’s almost $2 million per year that could have been converted but it wasn’t.

Then I got them onto Instant and we were able to get their flows to drive 8.4% of site revenue within 30 days, and they hit 16% during BFCM last year. This time around their monthly revenue is up 21% YoY and half of that growth comes directly from smarter flows (now at 25% of their site revenue)!

It only took getting these 4 core things right, and you can make huge progress starting today. Let me tell you how.

The 3 things that are quietly killing your flow revenue

After looking at hundreds of brands over the last few years, the problems are almost always the same if your flow revenue is way less than it should be. It basically comes down to the fact that:

1. You don't have enough flows, and the flows you do have don't have enough emails in them.

2. Your ESP is missing a huge chunk of the shoppers who should be entering those flows.

3. Every shopper is getting the same generic message on the same generic timer.

Now let’s attack these one by one.

Problem 1: One welcome flow and one cart flow is not enough

I've written about this before, but there are 10 flows every brand should have live which are abandoned checkout, abandoned cart, browse abandonment, abandoned collection, low stock, back in stock, price drop, welcome, win-back, and post-purchase.

Most brands have two or three of these live and think they are operating with best in class execution. And by the way, when you go to review what they have in place, it’s usually a 1-2 email flow that someone wrote 18 months ago.

IMO, each of those flows should have three to five possible emails. Now, before you say "Nik, I don't want to spam my customers!" That's not what this is about. The goal is not for every shopper to get five emails. The goal is for email one to be so good that most shoppers convert immediately and never need emails two through five. The rest of the sequence exists for the shoppers who need more time, more proof, or a better offer to actually convert.

Here's what this looks like in practice. A large fashion brand I know called Fayt had exactly two flows live which were abandoned cart and checkout with one email in each. Instant replaced them with new 3-5 step flows across the board. Flow revenue went up 14X! Abandoned cart revenue alone went up 33X and a brand-new collection-view flow, one they never had before, immediately added five figures in monthly revenue.

That all happened with the same traffic and same products. The only thing that changed were the flows. And by the way, these guys at Instant are complete magicians when it comes to the velocity of shipping products. They've shipped 100+ features in the last month, and they are expecting to ship 100+ more next month. They're one of the fastest-moving AI SaaS brands in the space, and they ship like crazy.

Problem 2: You're missing a huge percentage of the shoppers you should be messaging

This is super under-rated so you should pay attention to this. First, a lot of brands intentionally suppress older or "lower intent" contacts because their ESP charges based on list size. They get all worried about their open rates, click rates, and the last 90 day engaged list and so they begin removing contacts to focus on higher intent “warmer” audiences. IMO, If you adopt this strategy, you are literally paying to not email people who opted in to hear from you.

Second, even for the contacts you keep, your ESP's identification is weak. An opted-in shopper comes back to your site five days later, browses three products, adds one to their cart and leaves. Your ESP has no idea it was them so no flow triggers and now that shopper, the one showing you fresh buying intent gets no communication exactly when they needed it most.

Instant fixes both of these problems. It remembers opted-in shoppers, recognizes them when they return days or weeks later, notices when their intent changes, and drops them into the right flow at the right moment in order to get them to convert. Having the perfect 10 flows means nothing if the system can't find the people who should be entering them right when they need it most.

Problem 3: A first-name tag is not personalization

Two shoppers looking at two different products should never receive the same email. Real personalization means the exact product and variant shown, the subject line, the copy, the customer review featured, the offer, the coupon, and the send time all change based on what that specific shopper actually did on your site. Instant does all of that automatically, and it learns from every single send. It's constantly testing which message, image, product, urgency angle, coupon, and timing generates the most revenue, and it’s getting smarter with every email. They have data from 2000+ brands which have driven hundreds of millions in revenue from their flows. Their logic gets smarter every week and the personalization engine is improving all of the time.

Bonus: Your SMS is just your email, five minutes later

Most brands either ignore SMS entirely or blast the exact same message they just emailed but with shorter copy. During BFCM, SMS should be another genuine chance to convert, not just a mirror of the same message on a new channel. Instant now runs email and SMS together as one system. When SMS is the right move for a specific shopper, it writes a true one-to-one message for them and keeps it to a single text and they send it at the best time for that person. When SMS is not required, it doesn’t send the text.

What the data actually looks like:

I've been looking at more of the latest numbers from the Instant team, and some patterns across their $1M-$3M/month brands are worth sharing:

• Flow revenue was above $100K in the last 30 days for every single one of them, on one-day last click with zero open credit.

• Average repeat purchase rate is 43%.

• Browse abandonment was the #2 flow for every fashion brand they work with. If you sell apparel and don't have it live, that's your fastest win.

• Brands with 3+ loyalty flows live saw a 10% higher second-order average value versus first order, with a median of just 20 days to the second purchase.

What blew me away is how bought in their customers are. The case studies are super powerful, but here’s what leaders at these companies have been saying about them as well:

“Since starting with Instant, our email flows have never been simpler and have driven us more revenue than ever before. Total game changer.” – Yentrang Phan, Director of Performance Marketing, TRX

"At Neuro, we're always looking for ways to deliver the most personalized experience possible. Instant made that easy to achieve, with no additional work from my team, and delivered immediate ROI. It's helping us drive profitable retention by turning traffic into long-term, loyal customers." – Brooke Cullison, VP of Media & Acquisition, Neuro

"We already had strong traffic and Klaviyo flows in place, but Instant unlocked a layer of incremental revenue we simply couldn't access before. The impact was immediate, measurable, and scalable." – Charlotte Hamrin, Head of E-Commerce, Kind Patches

“Instant’s capabilities are the best we’ve seen and we’ve tried them all. What impressed us was how quickly we started seeing results, and how knowledgeable and committed their Customer Success team was.” – Leanne Chan, Senior Director of Retention & Growth Marketing, ThirdLove

I think it’s pretty hard not to get excited when a ton of great operators have such good things to say like this.

What you should do next:

BFCM is coming very, very soon. The brands that win in November are locking in their retention and reactivation tools and strategy right now. Wait until the end of September and it will be too late.

If your brand is doing $250K+ per month on Shopify, go book a demo with the Instant team. Make sure you ask for Anna, she's the star that set up Liquid IV, David Protein and Naturium for success. Run your own numbers with them. Look at your flow revenue as a percentage of site revenue and see how big your gap is. If it's anything like the audits I've been doing, you'll want this fixed ASAP before Black Friday. And if you go live before BFCM, you get 50% off your first 60 days and just for showing up to the demo, they'll send you a $100 gift card of your choice. The worst case is you get a free look at exactly how big your flow revenue gap is and a gift card for your time.

Book your demo here.

Are you going to be the one person who reads this and lets your competitors get their flows dialed in before you? I truly hope not!

Thanks again for reading and I'll see you at the next send!

Nik