Automated email flows are the backbone of any eCommerce retention program that actually makes money. Campaigns (the one-time sends) get all the attention, but it's the always-on automations running in the background that quietly generate most of your email revenue. We're talking 40 to 60% of total email attribution in a well-built account.
Industry data backs this up: automated workflows generate 30x higher returns than one-off campaigns. And yet, a huge number of brands either don't have these flows set up at all, or they're running on default settings that leave serious money on the table.
Here are the 8 flows every eCommerce store on Klaviyo should have running. We'll cover the strategy behind each one, the numbers that matter, and the mistakes we see over and over again.
1. Welcome Series (Your Revenue Foundation)
Your welcome series will be the single best-performing email flow you ever build. That's not an exaggeration. MailMend's 2026 analysis found that welcome emails hit an average 68.6% open rate (compared to 32.67% for regular eCommerce campaigns) and pull in 320% more revenue per email than promotional sends.
Despite that, 42.3% of brands don't send welcome emails at all. That's almost half of all eCommerce stores just... leaving this revenue sitting there.
How to Build It
- Email 1 (Immediate): Deliver whatever you promised (discount code, free resource, whatever). Briefly introduce the brand. One clear CTA. Keep it focused.
- Email 2 (Day 2): Social proof time. Reviews, user-generated content, "here's why people love us." Build trust before you push for a sale.
- Email 3 (Day 4): Product education. Best sellers, buying guides, "how to pick the right one for you." Help them make a decision.
- Email 4 (Day 6): Turn up the urgency on your welcome offer. "Your 10% off expires in 48 hours."
- Email 5 (Day 8): Final nudge with a different angle. Founder story, brand mission, "here's what makes us different from everyone else."
Things Most People Get Wrong
- Turn off Smart Sending for this flow. Seriously. These emails are expected and high-intent. Smart Sending's suppression logic will just cost you money here.
- Multi-email series increase revenue by 51% compared to sending just one welcome email (MailMend data). A single welcome email is not a series. Build it out.
- Use conditional splits. Someone who signed up through a Facebook ad popup should get a different welcome than someone who found you through a Google search. The context matters.
What good looks like: A well-optimized welcome series should hit a 5 to 10% placed order rate across the full sequence. If you're under 3%, there's a lot of room to improve.
2. Abandoned Cart Flow (Revenue Recovery)
Cart abandonment happens on roughly 70% of eCommerce shopping sessions. Rejoiner's analysis found that 68% of abandoned carts trigger a follow-up email, but only 21% of brands send more than one, and just 16% send three or more.
That's a huge missed opportunity. Multiple emails in the cart sequence consistently outperform a single reminder.
How to Build It
- Email 1 (30 min to 1 hour): Simple reminder. Show the product they left behind with image and price. No discount yet. Keep the subject line straightforward: "You left something behind" or "Still thinking about it?"
- Email 2 (4 to 6 hours): Layer in social proof. Reviews for the specific product, star ratings, "X people bought this today." Address whatever the most common reason people hesitate is (shipping cost? return policy?).
- Email 3 (24 hours): Scarcity. "Only X left in stock" or "Your cart is about to expire." If your margins support it, this is where a small incentive can make sense.
- Email 4 (48 hours): Last chance + your strongest offer (if you're going to use one). "Final reminder" energy.
- SMS touchpoint (2 to 4 hours after email 1): Short and conversational. "Hey [name], you left [product] in your cart. Need help deciding? [link]"
Settings That Matter
- Smart Sending: OFF. Cart abandonment emails are basically transactional. Suppressing them costs you money.
- Filters: Exclude anyone who's already placed an order since entering the flow. Also exclude VIP customers from the discount-heavy later emails (they'll buy without the incentive).
- Product feed: Use Klaviyo's dynamic product blocks so the email automatically shows the exact items they abandoned.
What good looks like: Recovery rate of 5 to 15% of abandoned carts for a well-optimized sequence. The money window is the first 3 days, with the first 30 to 60 minutes being the most valuable.
3. Browse Abandonment Flow
This one targets a wider audience than cart abandonment. You're going after anyone who looked at products but never added anything to their cart. The intent signal is weaker, so you need a softer touch.
How to Build It
- Email 1 (1 to 2 hours): "Still looking?" Show the products they viewed. Focus on imagery and reviews rather than urgency.
- Email 2 (24 hours): Product education or a comparison. "Here's why [product] is a customer favorite." Include some related items too.
- Email 3 (48 hours): Broader category recommendations. "Based on what you were looking at, you might also like..."
Important Details
- Filter out cart abandoners. If someone actually added to cart, they belong in the cart flow, not here. Don't send duplicate messages.
- Don't discount at this stage. Browse intent is too early for incentives. Save discounts for cart and checkout abandonment.
- Watch the volume. This flow fires a lot. Set minimum engagement thresholds (like requiring 30+ seconds on a product page) so you're not pestering casual browsers.
What good looks like: Lower conversion than cart abandonment (expect 1 to 3% placed order rate), but the sheer volume of triggers makes this a significant revenue contributor.
4. Post-Purchase Flow (The LTV Builder)
This is where most brands drop the ball. They celebrate the sale and then go silent. That's backwards. The period right after purchase is when customer engagement is at its peak and the likelihood of a repeat buy is highest.
How to Build It
- Email 1 (Right after purchase): Order confirmation + a genuine thank you. Set clear expectations for shipping.
- Email 2 (2 to 3 days after delivery): Product tips, care instructions, creative ways to use what they bought. Pure value, no selling.
- Email 3 (7 days after delivery): Review request. Make it as easy as possible. One-click rating + a direct link to leave a review.
- Email 4 (14 to 21 days): Now you can cross-sell. "Customers who bought [their product] also love [related product]."
- Email 5 (30 days): For consumable products, send a replenishment reminder. "Running low? Reorder now."
Segment Within This Flow
- First-time vs. repeat buyers: First-timers need more brand-building content. Repeat buyers are already sold on you. Focus on cross-sells and referrals for them.
- Order value: High-AOV purchases might deserve a more personal follow-up or some kind of VIP treatment.
- Product category: Tailor the education and cross-sell recommendations based on what they actually bought.
A solid post-purchase flow has a direct impact on your repeat purchase rate, which is one of the biggest levers you have for increasing customer lifetime value. We go deeper on this in our guide to high-performing email campaigns.
5. Winback Flow (Re-Engaging Lapsed Customers)
This targets customers who haven't bought anything in a while, usually 60 to 120 days depending on your product's natural repurchase cycle.
How to Build It
- Email 1 (60 to 90 days since last purchase): "We miss you" energy. Remind them what they bought before, show them top-rated products they haven't tried.
- Email 2 (7 days later): New arrivals or best sellers since their last visit. "Here's what's new."
- Email 3 (14 days later): Now offer an incentive. "Come back for 15% off." At this stage, you're competing against losing the customer entirely, so a discount makes strategic sense.
- Email 4 (21 days later): Last email + a sunset warning. "We'll stop emailing you if we don't hear back." This also doubles as a list hygiene play since it's better to lose an unengaged subscriber than let them drag down your sender reputation.
What good looks like: Winback flows typically bring back 3 to 8% of lapsed customers. That sunset email matters more than people think, both for recovering stragglers and for keeping your list clean.
6. Sunset / List Cleanup Flow
Not glamorous, but critical. Mailgun's deliverability research shows that sending to unengaged subscribers actively hurts your sender reputation with mailbox providers. And 70% of senders aren't even monitoring it.
How It Works
- Trigger: No opens or clicks in 90 to 120 days AND no purchases in 120 to 180 days
- Email 1: "Do you still want to hear from us?" with a clear re-subscribe button
- Email 2 (7 days): "Last chance to stay subscribed. Click below or we'll remove you from our list."
- No response? Suppress them. Don't delete, just move them to a suppressed segment. You can still target these people through paid ads if you want.
Regularly sunsetting unengaged profiles does two things: it improves deliverability for everyone else on your list AND it saves you money on Klaviyo (since you pay based on active profile count).
7. VIP / Loyalty Flow
Your top 10 to 20% of customers by revenue deserve a different experience. VIP flows reward loyalty, push up average order value, and turn happy customers into brand advocates.
Triggers
- Customer hits a cumulative spend threshold (say $500 lifetime)
- Customer places their 3rd or 5th order
- Customer falls in the top percentile by predicted CLV (Klaviyo's predictive analytics makes this easy)
What to Send
- Early access to new products or upcoming sales
- Exclusive discount codes that aren't available to the general list
- A personal thank-you note from the founder (even if it's automated, it still resonates)
- Referral program invitations with better-than-normal rewards
- Product feedback requests. VIP customers want to feel heard, and their input is genuinely valuable.
8. Back-in-Stock Flow
If you sell products that go out of stock regularly, this flow captures demand that would otherwise just disappear.
How It Works in Klaviyo
- Setup: Add a "Notify Me" button on out-of-stock product pages (Klaviyo provides the form for this)
- Trigger: When inventory gets replenished, Klaviyo automatically notifies everyone who signed up
- Email content: Keep it dead simple. Product image, "It's back!" headline, and a straight-to-the-point "Shop Now" button
- SMS option: Back-in-stock is one of the highest-converting SMS use cases out there because the urgency is built in
What good looks like: Back-in-stock emails tend to have some of the highest conversion rates of any flow type. Makes sense: these people already wanted the product. They told you so.
Mistakes We See All the Time
After managing dozens of Klaviyo accounts, these are the flow mistakes that come up again and again:
- Leaving Smart Sending on for high-intent flows. Smart Sending suppresses emails to people who've gotten another email recently. For cart abandonment and welcome flows, that just costs you revenue. Turn it off.
- Not enough emails in the sequence. One welcome email is not a series. One cart abandonment reminder is not a flow. Multi-email sequences beat single emails by 51% for welcome and even more for cart.
- Treating all subscribers the same. A brand-new visitor and a loyal repeat customer shouldn't get identical abandoned cart emails. Use conditional splits to personalize the experience.
- Setting it and forgetting it. Flows need regular attention. Check the metrics monthly. If email 3 in a sequence has a 0.5% click rate, it needs to be rewritten or replaced.
- Skipping SMS. For cart abandonment and back-in-stock especially, an SMS touchpoint adds a high-converting channel. Just make sure you're doing it legally. Our SMS compliance guide covers what you need to know.
If You're Starting From Zero, Build Them in This Order
- Welcome Series first. Every subscriber flows through this. Highest volume, highest impact.
- Abandoned Cart. Direct revenue recovery from existing purchase intent.
- Post-Purchase. Drives repeat purchases and reviews. Builds lifetime value.
- Browse Abandonment. Captures wider intent signals from your site traffic.
- Winback. Recovers customers before you lose them for good.
- Sunset. Protects your deliverability and saves on platform costs.
- VIP. Rewards your best customers and keeps them coming back.
- Back-in-Stock. Captures niche demand (only matters if you regularly run out of inventory).
If you want to understand what the investment looks like, read our breakdown of how much email marketing costs. And to see how all of these flows work together in a real account, check out our BrickHouse Nutrition case study.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many flows should I have in Klaviyo?
At minimum, every eCommerce store needs the core 5: Welcome, Abandoned Cart, Browse Abandonment, Post-Purchase, and Winback. As your program matures, add VIP, Sunset, Back-in-Stock, and more niche flows like price drop alerts, birthday sequences, and replenishment reminders. Most well-optimized accounts run 8 to 15 active flows.
Should I offer discounts in my flows?
Strategically, yes. Welcome series and winback flows often benefit from incentives because you're either converting a new subscriber or saving a lapsing customer. Be more careful with cart abandonment. Try scarcity and social proof first before reaching for a discount code, otherwise you train people to abandon carts on purpose.
How often should I update my flows?
Look at flow performance monthly. Refresh creative and copy at least every quarter. Bigger structural changes (adding emails, adjusting timing, building new conditional splits) should be tested and iterated on continuously. Flows are never truly finished.
What's the difference between flows and campaigns?
Flows are automated sequences that trigger based on something a customer does (signs up, abandons cart, makes a purchase). Campaigns are one-time sends to a segment of your list (promos, announcements, newsletters). You need both. Flows build the revenue foundation while campaigns keep engagement fresh. Read about why batch-and-blast is dead to understand why your campaigns need segmentation to be effective.
Want these flows built and optimized for your store? Book a free strategy audit and we'll review your current Klaviyo setup, find the gaps, and show you exactly where money is being left on the table.
