How do you turn your best email campaigns into flows?

Why move campaigns into flows at all?

Because a campaign has a short life. You write it, design it, send it, and a couple of days later it’s old news. A campaign is a flash in the pan. If you take that campaign and put it in a flow, that’s something that makes you money forever.

Think about who never saw it. Everyone who joined your list after that send missed one of your best emails. A flow puts it in front of each new person at the right moment, automatically.

It saves money too. Writing and designing flow emails from scratch costs time or agency budget, and you’ve already paid for the campaigns. Reusing the proven ones means your flows start out full of content you already know works.

My rule is simple. If they work in a campaign, they’ll work in a flow.

How do you find your winning campaigns?

Do a proper audit before you build anything.

1. Pull every campaign you’ve sent in the last six months.
2. Screenshot each one with its results next to it.
3. Rank them by open rate, click rate and conversions.
4. Pick the winners, and set aside any that only made sense for a particular date or sale.
5. Slot the rest into the flows where they fit.

Putting the screenshots side by side matters. You see six months at once, and it gets very obvious which topics people open and which emails actually sell.

If you’re moving email platforms, this is the perfect time to do it. I suggested exactly this to a business moving across to Klaviyo. Before rebuilding anything in the new account, screenshot six months of campaigns with their results, find the winners and build them into the new flows. You arrive on the new platform with flows already full of proven content.

Which flow should you build first?

A nurture flow for new leads, if you don’t have one already. These are people who’ve put their hand up by signing up or filling in a lead form, but haven’t bought yet.

The timing I use is front-loaded. We want to get people with two emails within the first 24 hours, then an email the next day, and then an email the day after that. After that you can start spacing them out.

Fill it with your bangers. The ones I’d look for in your campaign history:

• FAQs that clear up the questions stopping people from buying
• Reviews and UGC
• Meet the founders, and why you started
• A video tour of the product or the business

On one account we built a whole nurture flow this way for leads coming in from Facebook lead forms. Instead of writing it from scratch, we just used existing emails we’d already sent as campaigns. That kept the cost down, and every email had already been tested on real customers.

What about the campaigns that don’t fit a flow?

Resend them. It’s easy to feel like every campaign has to be brand new. It doesn’t.

On the accounts we run, a resend is the one thing we know we can always send without needing to ask for sign-off. When the week gets away from you and nothing new is ready, pick something that performed well, like a reviews email or a product-match email, and send it again. It keeps your list warm and your sending rhythm steady.

The same goes for planning. When we batch a run of campaigns, I don’t expect them all to be new. Some of them can just be resends, and some of them can be recycling stuff we’ve done last time. It doesn’t have to be all new content. That’s how you get roughly three months of emails planned in one batch, instead of scrambling for an idea every week.