The 3 Klaviyo flows every Shopify store needs.
Three flows do most of the work.
Email & SMS
4 minute read
Free to read
Written to be quoted
Every Shopify store needs three Klaviyo flows before anything else: a welcome flow that turns new subscribers into first-time buyers, an abandoned cart flow that recovers checkouts, and a browse abandonment flow that follows up window shoppers. A healthy store gets 20 to 30% of its revenue from email and SMS, and these three flows carry most of it, on autopilot.
In detail
Who it catches: the person who just gave you their email and has never bought. They are the warmest lead your store will ever have, and their interest has a shelf life measured in days.
What it does: a short series over the first week or so. Introduce the brand in one honest email, show the products people actually buy, answer the one objection that stops first orders, and make one clear offer. Then stop.
Why it earns: subscribers who get a welcome series buy at several times the rate of subscribers who get silence, because barely 2 in 100 visitors buy on their first visit. The welcome flow is the second visit, delivered to their inbox.
The common mistakes
- One email, then nothing. A single "thanks for subscribing" is not a flow. The buying decision happens across days.
- The discount does all the talking. If the only reason to buy is 10% off, you have trained a discount hunter, not won a customer.
- No consent wiring. The pop-up feeds the flow. If the pop-up is broken or ugly, the flow starves.
Who it catches: the buyer who got all the way to checkout and stopped. About 7 in 10 carts are abandoned, and most of those people were one small hesitation from paying.
What it does: a reminder within the first few hours while the intent is hot, a second touch that answers the hesitation (shipping cost, returns, trust), and a final nudge. The product they left sits in the email, one click from the checkout they abandoned.
Why it earns: this is consistently the highest revenue-per-recipient email a store sends, because the person already chose the product. You are not selling. You are reminding.
The common mistakes
- Waiting a day to send. By then they bought elsewhere or moved on. The first email belongs in the first few hours.
- Leading with a discount. Do that and you teach regulars to abandon carts on purpose. Discount last, if at all.
- Ignoring checkout abandoners vs cart abandoners. Klaviyo can tell them apart, and the message should too.
Who it catches: the window shopper. They looked at a product, maybe twice, and left without carting anything. On most stores this is the biggest group of all, and nobody follows them up.
What it does: a light touch. One or two emails that bring back the product they looked at, plus what other buyers paired with it. Softer than the cart flow, because the intent is softer.
Why it earns: volume. Fewer of these convert than cart abandoners, but there are many times more of them. A small percentage of a big number is real money, every month, for no ongoing effort.
The common mistakes
- Being creepy. "We saw you looking" copy reads like surveillance. Good browse emails read like a helpful shop assistant, not a security camera.
- No frequency cap. A daily browser should not get a daily email. Smart filters keep the flow polite.
- Skipping it entirely. Most stores have welcome and cart in some form. Almost none have browse. It is the most commonly missing of the three.
Post-purchase and win-back flows are the natural next layer: the first turns one-time buyers into repeat ones, the second recalls customers who have gone quiet. They matter, and they are where we go next on stores whose core three are live and earning. But they compound an engine that exists. Built first, they are a roof with no house.
One more thing worth saying straight: flows only count if they are measured. Klaviyo attributes every dollar a flow makes, so a built flow is either visibly paying for itself in your own dashboard or it is not done. That is the standard we hold our own builds to, in writing.
Questions people actually ask.
Building one flow properly, with branded emails, timing splits and testing, takes a day or two of focused work. The three core flows together are usually a week of work, which is why FLOVO FLOWS is a 7-day build.
Retainer agencies commonly charge $2,000 to $5,000 a month, with the flow build folded into the retainer. Freelancers quote anywhere from $500 to $3,000 per flow. Flovo builds all three core flows for one flat fee with no retainer, quoted at a free audit and locked in writing.
They work harder for a small store. Ads get expensive fast, and flows are the cheapest revenue a small store has because they run on traffic already paid for. A store doing even a few orders a day has enough volume for all three core flows.
SMS slots into the same flows once email is earning. Australian law requires express consent and a working opt-out, so consent capture is wired first and SMS added where the numbers justify it, not by default.
Want this done for you?
A person walks your site with you and names what is costing you money. You keep everything we find, even if we never speak again.