How to Build a Flow from Scratch

Now that you know what are the basics steps of creating a flow in Yotpo SMS & Email. let us walk you through the process of building your first flow from scratch.

To start building your custom flow:

1. In your Yotpo SMS & Email main menu, go to Flows > My Flows.
2. Click Create Flow, and give your first flow an exciting name, preferably related to the event the flow will be built for (abandoned cart, customer winback, product upsell, etc.). 
3. Click Save. 

Next, work your way around all the available triggers you can choose from to build your flow around. These fall into 6 different categories: 

• Order-related: triggers such as order placement, order shipping, delivery, etc. 
• Shipping: order fulfillment and shipping confirmation 
• SMSBump: new subscriber confirmation 
• Customer-related: new registration, customer winback, etc. 
• Product-related: new product created, updated, or deleted 
• Integrations-related: triggers based on integrations with our partners. You should activate the integration before using the trigger. 

When you’ve decided how you want to start off your flow, simply click on the respective trigger and it will show in place of the Choose Trigger field.

Before you continue, see how to set the frequency of your flow.

And now it is time to move on with your flow and choose one of these 3 options:   

Add a condition

This is a Yes/No scenario where the users are divided on a selected filter. For instance, if you specify a certain total cart value (e.g. more than 200), then the users will be split into 2 groups - those who have products worth 200 or more in their abandoned cart and ones with a cart value under 200. Note that the currency of this amount is based on the currency you have in your store. 

If you want your flow to target an even narrower group of people (for instance, only your high-value customers), you can add a second condition simply by clicking +And. Let us specify this second condition to be number of orders greater than or equal to 2.  Setting it up this way will ensure that your flow only targets customers whose total cart value is 200 or more but have also made 2 or more purchases at your store. If you have customers who have made 5 purchases but their total cart value is less than 200, they will be excluded from this flow. 

Besides this, you will also see the +OR option, which allows you to broaden the scope of your flow. Let's say that you set up your first "IF" condition to be total cart value greater than or equal to 200, and you want to configure an OR condition to be number of orders greater than or equal to 2: in this case, the flow will include customers who meet either one of these conditions, not necessarily both at the same time. So even if you have a customer who has only made 1 order but has spent 200 or more at your store, they will be targeted by this flow. 

Add an action

Selecting the action will allow you to configure what should happen if you have customers who’ve abandoned their carts and meet (or do not meet) any other conditions you’ve specified. These actions could be: 

• Send an SMS: a simple 160-character text message
• Send an SMS/MMS with responses: send a message with certain keywords which trigger automated personalized responses.
• Send an MMS: a multimedia message that can contain a GIF from GIPHY, a high-res picture from Pexels, or one uploaded by you. For abandoned carts, you can also enable the image grid that will show your recipients all the products they’ve left behind.
• Add to list: This action will add the customers to a separate list. You can select among the ones you already have or create a new one.
• Send Slack notification: this is a notification that you, as a store owner, will receive, reminding you in case your inventory is running low, you have a new subscriber, etc.   

You can either Delete or Clone the MMS and SMS you set up as an action, as well as your Delay that we will show you how to set up in just a few steps. Cloning will allow you to easily replicate and edit an action and will make the entire process of creating a Flow much lighter and quicker. 

How do you know which SMS or MMS to replicate? But of course, you want to copy the strongest of them all! And what can help you determine that? Our Strength Meter! Its 8 useful suggestions will pave your way to creating an effective text message that will convert!

You know what else makes a text message better? Personalization. With the help of our Short Codes you can include your store's name, your customer's name, and many more automatically-fetched details that will give your text a personal touch. 

What would grab your customer's attention quickly? Emojis. Who doesn't love emojis. We know they are the equivalent of human emotions in texting so we've paid extra attention to making them easy to access and simply attractive. 

Add a delay

This will let you delay the actions following this step. The delay can be anywhere between 5 minutes and 7 days. Choose the most suitable time depending on the following step. For instance, if you’ve selected abandoned cart as a trigger, you can set a notification to be sent 10 minutes after the cart has been abandoned. 

These are the basic steps you have to configure when building any flow. Of course, you can omit some of them, or add even more steps, especially in case a condition you specify is not met. For instance, you can send out different messages to your customers based on the value of their abandoned carts.

1. If the total value of the abandoned cart does exceed 200: send an MMS reminder with a small discount as this is a high-value order and is worth investing a bit more effort into recovering it.
2. If the total value of the abandoned cart does not exceed 200: try to recover the cart with a simple SMS notification, maybe a discount, but definitely still have a catchy copy and call-to-action.  

Either way, the process of creating a flow from here now on is the same and includes the same options: adding a condition, action, or delay.

Once you are done customizing your flow, it is time you learn how to run A/B testing in order to maximize results and performance.