The seven Klaviyo flows that actually pay for themselves
Everyone builds an abandoned cart flow and stops there. These are the ones we build next, in the order we build them, and roughly what each one is worth.
Written by Alex Price
Almost every Klaviyo account we open looks the same from the inside: a welcome series, an abandoned cart, and then nothing for two years. Between those two flows and a weekly campaign, most of the money is sitting untouched.
Here's the order we build them in, and why. The order matters — each one below tends to be worth less than the one before it, so if you only get through four, get through the first four.
1. Welcome, but properly
One email saying "thanks for subscribing, here's 10% off" is not a welcome flow. Five or six emails that introduce the brand, handle the two objections that stop people buying, and only *then* get around to the discount — that's a welcome flow, and it routinely does three or four times the revenue of the single-email version.
2. Checkout and cart recovery, separately
Someone who reached the checkout and stopped is a different person from someone who added to cart and wandered off. Treat them the same and you'll under-send to the first and over-discount to the second. Split them, and send the checkout one sooner.
3. Browse abandonment
The least-built flow with the best return, in our experience. Someone looked at a product three times and didn't add it to cart. That's a real signal and almost nobody acts on it.
4. Post-purchase
Not the shipping notification — Shopify does that. This is the flow that gets people to use the thing they bought, which is the single biggest predictor of whether they buy again.
- Day 1: what happens next, and how to get help.
- Day 4: how to get the best out of it.
- Day 14: the review request, once they actually have an opinion.
- Day 30: the complementary product, not the same one again.
5. Replenishment
If you sell anything consumable, work out the real median gap between first and second order and send at about 75% of it. Most stores guess this, guess high, and email people a fortnight after they've already bought elsewhere.
6. Winback
Cheap to build, and honest: someone who bought twice and then went quiet for six months is worth one good email. Not a panicked discount — a genuine "here's what's changed since you were last here".
7. VIP
Your top few percent of customers behave completely differently from everyone else, and sending them the same Thursday campaign is a waste of the best relationship you have. Even just excluding them from discount emails is worth doing.
Flows earn while you sleep. Campaigns earn while you work. Build the flows first.
The bit everyone skips
Suppression. A flow that emails people who bought yesterday, or who are already in three other flows, will make your numbers look busy and your deliverability worse. Every flow needs to know what the others are doing, and getting that right is about half the job.
For a healthy Shopify store, email and SMS together tend to land somewhere between 20% and 35% of total revenue. If you're well under that, it's almost never because the copy isn't good enough. It's because four of the seven above don't exist yet.
