Every Shopify store owner eventually lands on the same realization: email campaigns are great, but flows are where the real money is. Campaigns are one-time sends you have to keep creating. Flows run automatically, triggered by what your customers actually do, and they print revenue while you sleep.
The problem? Most brands either don't have enough flows set up, or they have a handful that are doing the wrong things. We've audited hundreds of Klaviyo accounts at this point, and the pattern is always the same. There's a welcome email, maybe an abandoned cart, and then... nothing.
This is the checklist we wish every Shopify brand had before they came to us. It's organized by priority, so you know exactly what to build first, what comes next, and what to layer in once the foundation is solid.
The Three Tiers of Klaviyo Flows
Not all flows are created equal. Some are non-negotiable, meaning your store literally can't function properly without them. Others are high-impact revenue drivers. And then there's a third layer that separates good email programs from great ones.
Tier 1: The Non-Negotiables
These aren't optional. If you're not sending people order confirmations, shipping updates, and tracking information, you will absolutely crush the customer experience. You can't even operate a store without these set up.
Think about it from the customer's perspective. They just gave you their money. The very first thing they want to know is: did my order go through? When is it shipping? Where is it right now? If they have to go hunting for that information, you've already lost trust before the product even arrives.
Order Confirmation
This is email #1 after someone buys. It should hit their inbox within seconds. Confirm what they ordered, show the total, give them an order number, and set expectations for shipping. Simple, but critical.
Shipping Confirmation + Tracking
The moment the order ships, they should know. Include the tracking number, the carrier, and estimated delivery. If you want to go a step further, include a "what to expect" section about the product they ordered. This is also a great place to introduce your brand story or social channels, because the customer is already excited.
Delivery Confirmation
The "your order has been delivered" email is one of the most underused touchpoints in ecommerce. This is the perfect moment to ask for a review, share care instructions, or point them to a "getting started" guide. They just got the product in hand. Their excitement is at its peak.
Tier 2: The Revenue Drivers
Once your transactional flows are solid, the next priority is abandonment flows. These help people who are already close to buying cross the finish line. The math is simple: someone who added to cart or started checkout has shown real purchase intent. A well-timed nudge can recover 5-15% of that lost revenue.
Browse Abandonment
Someone looked at a product but didn't add to cart. This is the lightest-touch abandonment flow, and the timing matters. Wait at least 30-60 minutes before sending, and don't be aggressive. A simple "still thinking about this?" with the product image and a link back is usually enough. Don't offer a discount here. The person was just browsing.
Cart Abandonment
This is the big one. Someone added to cart and left. Your abandoned cart flow should be 2-3 emails over 24-48 hours. First email: reminder with the product image and a direct link back to their cart. Second email: address common objections (shipping policy, return policy, reviews). Third email (optional): light urgency around stock or timing, but not a discount.
Checkout Abandonment
This person entered their email at checkout and bounced. They were one click away. This flow should be the most direct and urgent of the three. They already committed mentally. Something stopped them, so address the most common friction points: unexpected shipping costs, security concerns, or wanting to "sleep on it."
Here's an important note on discounts in abandonment flows: most brands default to throwing a 10-15% discount in the cart abandonment email. What they don't realize is that this absolutely crushes their business profitability, which chokes their acquisition and paid ads budgets in order to remain profitable. If you solve customer friction points up front first, most of the time they will buy without needing a discount. Discounts just remove risk, but you can remove purchase risk in so many other ways: showing reviews, highlighting your return policy, sharing social proof, answering FAQs. Try those first.
Tier 3: The Growth Layer
These flows aren't strictly necessary, but they're where good email programs become great. Every one of these drives incremental revenue and deepens the customer relationship.
Welcome Series
When someone subscribes to your list (but hasn't purchased yet), this is your chance to introduce the brand, build trust, and guide them toward that first purchase. Typically 5-7 emails over 7-14 days. Cover your brand story, best sellers, social proof, and a soft offer if needed.
Cross-Sell / Upsell Flows
After someone buys Product A, what should they buy next? This gets complex fast. If you have 10 different product categories, the cross-sell flow needs to understand what to recommend based on what they just bought. A supplement brand cross-selling from protein to creatine is totally different from a fashion brand cross-selling from handbags to wallets. The more categories you have, the more paths the flow needs.
Birthday / Anniversary Flows
Simple and effective. Collect birth dates (even just the month) and send a birthday email with a small gift or offer. These tend to have extremely high open rates because they feel personal. A birthday flow is usually just 2-3 emails: a pre-birthday teaser, the birthday email itself, and a "last chance" reminder.
Predictive Analytics Flows
This is probably the most underrated flow that almost nobody has set up, and it's like free money sitting on the table. Klaviyo's predictive analytics (through Marketing Analytics) studies user behavior signals with AI to identify when customers are likely to purchase again. It looks at individual buying patterns and tells you the perfect time to strike with a relevant offer or reminder.
Instead of guessing "send a winback at 30 days" for everyone, predictive analytics lets you hit each customer at exactly the right moment based on their personal behavior. Someone who buys monthly gets a different cadence than someone who buys quarterly. It's one of the highest-ROI things you can set up in Klaviyo, and most brands don't even know it exists.
Sunset / Re-engagement Flow
Not every subscriber stays engaged forever. A sunset flow identifies people who haven't opened or clicked in a set period (usually 60-90 days), sends a "we miss you" series, and if they still don't engage, suppresses them from future sends. This protects your deliverability and open rates across the entire list.
Winback Flow
Different from sunset. Winback targets customers who purchased before but haven't come back. The timing depends on your product's natural replenishment cycle. A supplement brand might trigger at 25-30 days. A fashion brand might wait 60-90 days. The goal is to re-engage buyers before they forget about you entirely.
How Flow Complexity Scales with Your List
Here's something most guides won't tell you: the size of your list changes what flows actually make sense to build.
If you're a smaller brand with a few thousand subscribers, it doesn't make sense to set up massive segmentation across 15 different flows. You won't have enough data in each segment to learn anything meaningful. It's the same principle as paid media buying. You can't segment paid campaigns super deeply if each audience is only getting $5 of spend and you can't get clear insights from the data.
But as your list grows, the investments in things like Marketing Analytics, enterprise-level segmentation, predictive send times, and complex conditional flows all become really fruitful. The more data Klaviyo has, the smarter its predictions get, and the more granular you can afford to be.
Under 10K subscribers: Nail Tiers 1 and 2. Add a welcome series and basic winback. That's your foundation.
10K-50K subscribers: Layer in cross-sells, birthday, sunset flows. Start experimenting with predictive analytics.
50K+ subscribers: Go deep. Complex conditional splits, predictive send times, product-specific cross-sell paths, VIP flows, post-purchase education sequences. This is where sophistication pays off.
How Many Emails Should Each Flow Have?
The honest answer: it depends. The average across all flows is probably 6-7 emails, but some flows are naturally 2-3 and others can be 10-20.
A birthday flow? Simple. Two or three emails and you're done. A cross-sell flow for a company with 10 different product categories? That can get really complex trying to understand what to recommend when each customer could have purchased from any one of those categories.
The key isn't hitting a specific number. It's making sure every email in the flow has a clear purpose. If you can't explain what email #8 is supposed to accomplish that emails #1-7 didn't, cut it.
Preventing Flow Overlap (The Coordination Problem)
One of the biggest mistakes we see is brands building all these flows and then not thinking about what happens when a customer qualifies for three of them at the same time. Someone buys a product. Immediately they're in the post-purchase flow, potentially in a cross-sell flow, maybe still getting the tail end of a welcome series, and they just browsed another product so browse abandonment is queuing up too.
That's four flows trying to email the same person on the same day. That's how you end up in the spam folder.
You need rules in place for all flows to ensure there's less overlap, or that customers don't receive certain types of emails if they just received one within certain timeframes. Klaviyo's flow filters and smart sending features handle a lot of this, but you need to configure them thoughtfully.
The one exception: crucial transactional emails always go through. Order confirmations supersede everything. A customer should never miss a shipping update because they got a cross-sell email an hour earlier. Set your priorities and let the important stuff through regardless.
The Complete Klaviyo Flow Checklist
Here's the full list, organized by when to build them:
Build immediately (Tier 1):
- ☑️ Order confirmation
- ☑️ Shipping confirmation + tracking
- ☑️ Delivery confirmation
Build next (Tier 2):
- ☑️ Browse abandonment (1-2 emails)
- ☑️ Cart abandonment (2-3 emails)
- ☑️ Checkout abandonment (2-3 emails)
Build as you grow (Tier 3):
- ☑️ Welcome series (5-7 emails)
- ☑️ Cross-sell / upsell flows
- ☑️ Birthday / anniversary flow (2-3 emails)
- ☑️ Predictive analytics flows
- ☑️ Sunset / re-engagement flow
- ☑️ Winback flow
- ☑️ VIP / loyalty flow
- ☑️ Back-in-stock notification
- ☑️ Price drop alert
- ☑️ Review request flow
The Bottom Line
Flows aren't a "nice to have." They're the backbone of your entire email revenue. Campaigns are the frosting. Flows are the cake.
Start with the non-negotiables, build the revenue drivers, and layer in the growth flows as your list and business mature. Don't try to build 15 flows in a week. Get the foundation right, prove it works, and expand from there.
And whatever you do, resist the urge to put a discount in every flow. Solve the friction first. The revenue will follow.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many Klaviyo flows does a Shopify store actually need?
It depends on where you are as a business. At a minimum, every store needs the Tier 1 transactional flows (order confirmation, shipping, delivery) and the Tier 2 abandonment flows (browse, cart, checkout). That's six flows. As your list grows past 10K subscribers, you should be layering in welcome series, cross-sells, birthday, and predictive analytics flows. Mature stores with 50K+ subscribers can benefit from 12-16+ active flows.
What's the difference between a flow and a campaign in Klaviyo?
A campaign is a one-time email blast you send manually to a segment or list (think: a product launch or a sale announcement). A flow is an automated sequence that triggers based on customer behavior, like adding to cart, making a purchase, or browsing a product page. Campaigns require you to keep creating content. Flows run on autopilot once they're set up.
Should I put discounts in my abandonment flows?
In most cases, no. Brands default to 10-15% discounts in cart abandonment emails without realizing they're training customers to abandon carts on purpose. It also crushes profitability and chokes your ad budget. Instead, address friction points first: highlight your return policy, show reviews, answer common objections. If you've exhausted those approaches and still want to test a discount, make it the last email in the sequence, not the first.
What is the best Klaviyo flow for increasing repeat purchases?
Predictive analytics flows are the most underrated tool for repeat purchases. Klaviyo's Marketing Analytics uses AI to study individual buying behavior and predict when each customer is most likely to purchase again. Instead of sending a generic "come back" email at 30 days for everyone, you can hit each person at the exact right time based on their personal purchase cycle.
How do I prevent Klaviyo flows from overlapping and spamming customers?
Use Klaviyo's flow filters and smart sending settings to prevent customers from receiving multiple flow emails on the same day. Set rules that suppress marketing flows when transactional emails have been sent recently, and build in minimum time gaps between flow emails. The exception: order confirmations and shipping updates should always go through regardless of other flows.
How many emails should each Klaviyo flow have?
The average across all flow types is about 6-7 emails, but it varies widely. A birthday flow is typically 2-3 emails. A welcome series is 5-7. A complex cross-sell flow for a brand with 10+ product categories can be 10-20 emails to cover all the recommendation paths. The key is making sure every email has a clear purpose. If you can't explain what an email adds that the previous ones didn't, cut it.
When should I set up a sunset flow in Klaviyo?
Set up a sunset flow once your list reaches a size where unengaged subscribers could hurt your deliverability (usually around 5K+ subscribers). The flow should identify subscribers who haven't opened or clicked in 60-90 days, send a 2-3 email "we miss you" re-engagement series, and suppress anyone who still doesn't engage. This protects your sender reputation and keeps your open rates healthy across the entire list.
