Flows overview

Flows are a suite of customer journey enhancements that offers different experiences and incentives throughout the customer lifecycle to increase LTV. 

This article covers an overview of Flows, benefits, and pre-made templates to use. 

Before you start

• If you're interested in using a specific Flows template, you can sign up on the Recharge Product Roadmap. If you have an Account Manager, you can also reach out to them. 
• Flows are currently in Early Adopter Status. Refer to the Flows overview for more information on each template and links to their respective articles. 

Flows overview

Flows offers a suite of customer journey enhancements that offer various experiences and configurable incentives throughout the customer lifecycle. Flows allows you to customize and try new ways of acquiring, managing, and retaining customers. 

There are various individual Flows, also known as templates that target a specific customer journey enhancement:

• Surprise and Delight: Provides proactive incentives (like free gifts) to customers to increase retention. A/B test those incentives to determine the most effective strategy.
• Targeted Upsell: Offer a discounted product to targeted customers at specific points in the customer journey to increase LTV
• Active Churn Recovery: Use customer cohort data and order data to create targeted active churn reduction strategies and present targeted cancellation reasons and winback strategies
• Passive Churn Retention: Build custom strategies to notify customers in a dunning cycle to tactically reduce passive churn. (Coming soon) 

Flow types

These templates feature 3 types of Flows available for configuration:

• Basic: Decide when to send customers an incentive, what the incentive is and how they will find out. There are no splits in this Flow type. 
• A/B Test: A/B test incentives with a percentage of customers receiving an incentive, and the remaining percentage not. 
• Conditional Split: Offer different incentives to customers based on product or customer data.

Flows benefits

Flows offers several benefits and highlights to expand your brand: 

• Increase customer satisfaction and loyalty: Flows is targeted and personalized so your customers go through a tailored brand experience. With the right incentives offered at the right time, your customers will have a stronger affinity to the brand.
• Increase LTV: Flows empowers you to increase LTV by allowing you to quickly iterate and test your retention and growth programs. Choose from pre-made templates to help you get started or create your own.
• Save time: Flows offers a powerful, no-code implementation. Use Flows to execute impactful marketing strategies and tactics without the need for development resources. 
• Optimize touchpoints with advanced data and analytics: Scale effortlessly and quickly deploy A/B tests to get comprehensive data as well as insights that help you optimize every touchpoint in your customer journey.
• Connect everything: Flows seamlessly work with all of Recharge’s product lines and integrations so that you can offer rewards through Credits, trigger Membership perks, swap SKUs in Bundles, and much more.

Operational analytics

Operational analytics allow you to review in-line metrics such as number of customers who entered by the trigger conditions, number of emails sent, Average Order Value (AOV), and more. 

Complete results of a Flow will not display until all of the customers that enter the flow have their next charge processed or cancel their next charge. Additionally, if a customer delays their charge, then these metric results would also be delayed until the charge processes. For example, if the subscription frequency is monthly, metric results will be delayed until the next charge processes in a month. 

To access your metrics: 

1. Click Flows in the merchant portal and select the intended Flow to view metrics on. 
2. Click the bar graph icon at the top of your Flow.
   
3. Metrics for each section will be displayed under the card.
   

Test Flow

Test your configuration prior to activating a Flow. Testing a Flow allows you to force a customer through a Flow to evaluate the experience before proceeding with activation. The initial trigger criteria will be ignored when running a test and the customer will be forced through regardless. 

To test your Flow: 

1. Navigate to your inactive template and click Activate Flow. 
2. Select Test Flow. 
   
3. Search for the target customer using email or customer ID and once the customer is selected, select Run Flow. Note that the email notification configured in the template will also be sent assuming the customer has opted into marketing emails.
   
4. Once the flow is executed, you can review if the upsell offer or free gift was added by clicking View results.
   

Manage Flows

Duplicate Flow

You can duplicate a Flow to configure templates without having to start from scratch. 

To duplicate a Flow:

1. Click Flows in your merchant portal. 
2. In the Your flows section, click the ellipsis on the intended Flow and select Duplicate.
   
3. The duplicated flow will display under Your flows with ‘Duplicate’ next to the title.

Delete Flow

To delete a Flow: 

1. Click Flows in your merchant portal. 
2. In the Your flows section, click the ellipsis on an inactive Flow and select Delete.
   
3. Confirm deletion by selecting Delete.