Start with what actually pays for itself
Most Shopify stores treat email as a newsletter. You batch something out on a Thursday, watch a few sales trickle in, and call it done. The money is not in the newsletter. It is in the automated flows that fire when a customer does something, because those messages land while intent is still warm.
Set up properly, Klaviyo flows for Shopify quietly become the highest-earning marketing you run, per email sent. You build them once and they work every day without you touching them. The catch is that “set up” does a lot of work in that sentence. Most stores switch on the default templates, never look again, and leave a good chunk of revenue sitting in the dashboard.
Here are the flows worth your time, what each one is for, and the mistakes that make them underperform.
The welcome flow
This is your first impression, and it converts better than almost anything else you will send. Someone hands over their email, usually for a first-order discount, and you have their full attention.
The mistake: sending one email with the code and stopping. A welcome flow should be three or four messages. First, deliver the code and set expectations. Second, a day later, tell your brand story or point to your best sellers. Third, a nudge that the code is about to expire.
Segment on whether they have bought yet. If someone orders after email one, they should drop out of the discount chase and into your post-purchase flow. Nothing feels worse to a new customer than being chased with a “come back” offer the day after they spent money with you.
Abandoned basket
The workhorse. Someone adds to basket, reaches checkout, and leaves. You already know what they wanted, so remind them.
The common failures are timing and count. One email, sent 24 hours later, misses the window. Send the first within an hour while the tab is arguably still open, a second the next day, and a third after two or three days with your strongest reason to return. Lead with the product they left, not a generic banner. If your margins allow, hold the discount back until the final email so you are not training people to abandon on purpose.
Browse abandonment
The quieter cousin, and the one most stores skip. It fires when someone views a product but never adds it to basket. Intent is softer here, so the tone is softer too: “still thinking about this?” rather than “you left something behind.”
Keep it to one or two emails, and suppress anyone who is already in an abandoned basket or checkout flow, or you will pester the same person three ways at once.
Post-purchase
The order confirmation is not the end of the conversation, it is the start of the next one. A good post-purchase flow reassures the buyer they made a good choice, cuts down “where is my order” enquiries, and sets up the repeat sale.
Thank them, tell them what happens next, then a week or so after delivery ask for a review or point to how to get the most from what they bought. This is also where you earn the second order, which is the one that turns a buyer into a customer.
Win-back
For customers who bought once or twice and have gone quiet. Define “quiet” by your own numbers: if people normally reorder every 60 days, someone at 90 days is lapsing. Acknowledge the gap, remind them what they liked, and give them a reason to return.
Keep your win-back list clean. People who never open anything for months are hurting your deliverability, so this flow should end with a “still want to hear from us?” and then a quiet goodbye for those who do not answer.
Replenishment, if you sell consumables
Skincare, supplements, coffee, pet food, anything people run out of. If a jar lasts roughly six weeks, a gentle reminder at week five, timed to land just before they would otherwise reach for a competitor, is close to free money. Skip this one entirely if you sell furniture or one-off purchases. A replenishment email for a sofa just looks daft.
How to know they are working
Ignore open rates as your headline number. The metric that matters for a flow is revenue per recipient: total revenue the flow generated divided by how many people received it. It tells you what each email is genuinely worth, and lets you compare a two-email flow against a four-email one honestly.
A few other things worth watching:
- Placed order rate per flow, so you can see which step does the heavy lifting.
- Revenue as a share of total email revenue. In our experience, flows should be pulling a serious slice, often the majority, of what email brings in. If your campaigns dwarf your flows, the flows are underbuilt.
- Unsubscribe and spam rates per flow, so an over-eager sequence does not quietly poison your list.
The mistakes underneath all of these
Three problems show up again and again. No segmentation, so buyers and browsers get the same messages. One email where there should be three, leaving most of the revenue on the table. And templates that look nothing like your storefront, which quietly tell people the email is not really from a brand they trust.
Fix those three and your flows will out-earn almost everything else in your marketing, without another Thursday newsletter in sight.
If you want a hand auditing what you have running, or building the flows you are missing, get in touch and we will take a look.