Welcome, post-purchase, browse abandonment, abandoned cart, winback. Open the automations tab of almost any Shopify store and you will find some version of all five, switched on, quietly sending. Almost none of them are doing what they should. They exist. They just are not earning.
Here is the part nobody mentions when you flip the switch: the default flow and the flow that actually drives repeat revenue look identical in the dashboard. Both say “active”. One builds a customer base, the other sends a receipt and hopes. The difference is not the tool. It is whether anyone bothered to make the flow behave differently for different people.
Email marketing is where retention lives or dies for a Shopify brand, and these five flows are the whole game. So let us go through them properly, one at a time, and I will show you where the money leaks and how to plug it.
The short version
Five flows almost every Shopify store has, and almost none run properly.
- Welcome is your highest-converting message. Split it by the product they landed on, lead with proof, and make emails two and three objection handlers, not more brand history.
- Post-purchase is where loyalty starts. Build confidence first, then introduce the next product naturally. No discount required.
- Browse and cart abandonment need behaviour-based timing. A repeat buyer and a first-timer should not get the same message or the same delay.
- Winback is a value and lapse decision. Segment before you discount. A blanket “we miss you” trains good customers to wait for a coupon.
- Segmentation is the thread through all five. One-size-fits-all flows are where most retention revenue quietly leaks.
Welcome: your highest-converting message, wasted on brand history
The welcome flow is the best-performing email you will ever send. Someone just handed you their address, on purpose, while they were interested. Nothing else in your account will ever catch a person that warm again.
Most brands answer that moment with three emails of company history and a founder’s origin story nobody asked for. It is a waste of the highest-intent window you get.
Done properly, welcome does three things. It splits on a decision based on the product or collection the subscriber landed on, so a candle browser and a skincare browser do not get the same generic hello. It leads with social proof instead of your backstory, because a stranger trusts other customers before they trust you. And it treats emails two and three as objection handlers, the same way a good StoryBrand sequence answers the reasons someone hesitates, rather than piling on more brand.
Two small things multiply everything above. The subject line decides whether any of it gets read, and the page you send people to decides whether the click turns into a sale, so the landing experience has to hold up its end. Get the copy right across all three and welcome quietly becomes your most profitable automation.
Post-purchase: where loyalty actually starts
Most brands send a receipt, then a shipping update, then call it done. The customer has just spent money with you, they are paying the most attention they will ever pay, and the brand goes quiet. That silence is where repeat revenue leaks out.
The post-purchase window is for confidence, not selling. Use it to show the product in real use cases, to send the care guide that keeps them happy with the thing they bought, to give the founder context that makes the purchase feel like the right call. That is how brand loyalty actually forms, in the days right after the transaction, not in a loyalty program you bolt on later.
Then, and only then, you introduce the next product. Naturally, tied to what they already bought, framed as the obvious next step. Not with a discount. Discounting to a customer who just paid full price teaches them your prices are negotiable, and it trades a bit of margin for a habit you will regret. The emotional attachment you build here is worth far more than a one-off second order.
Browse abandonment: the flow most brands skip entirely
Browse abandonment is the one almost nobody runs, which is exactly why it is worth running. Someone looked at a product, did not add it to cart, and left. Lower intent than a cart, sure. Not zero.
The mistake is treating a browse the way you would treat a cart, or worse, ignoring it. A first-time visitor who glanced at one product needs a gentle, low-pressure nudge. A repeat buyer who lingered on three needs something closer to a recommendation. Same behaviour on the surface, completely different message and timing underneath.
It helps to think of browse abandonment as the email cousin of retargeting: a second chance to reach someone who showed interest and drifted off. And if people are browsing without buying at a rate that stings, the flow is only half the fix. The other half is whether the friction on your site is quietly sending them away in the first place.
Abandoned cart: everyone runs it, nobody segments it
This is the one flow every brand has switched on, and the one they leave most broken. The usual setup is a single generic reminder, sent to everyone, at the same delay, with the same “you left something behind” line.
A cart abandoner who has bought from you twice before is not the same person as a first-time visitor who got spooked at the shipping cost. The repeat buyer probably got distracted and needs a quick, confident nudge. The first-timer has an unanswered objection, and a well-timed reminder that handles it, delay and message keyed to their history, will out-earn a blanket reminder every time.
On the paid side, the same abandoner is worth chasing with remarketing, and the two channels should say the same thing. If the cart is abandoning because the checkout or product page is doing something odd, that is a conversion rate optimisation problem, and no email will paper over it.
Winback: the flow that decides your real retention
Winback is where most brands reach straight for a coupon. Everyone who has gone quiet gets the same “we miss you, here is 20% off”, regardless of who they are or how long they have been gone.
That blanket discount does two bad things at once. It hands margin to customers who would have come back anyway, and it trains your best people to stop buying and wait for the discount they now know is coming. A high-value customer who lapsed last month does not need money off. They need a reason, a new drop, a genuine “here is what you missed”. Money is the last lever, not the first.
So segment winback by value and by how long they have been gone, and lead with the message before you lead with the offer. If you want the short version of how to reopen a conversation with someone who tuned out, we wrote a whole piece on winning attention back, and the same logic applies here.
Default versus done properly, flow by flow
| Flow | The default most brands run | Done properly |
|---|---|---|
| Welcome | Three emails of brand history to everyone. | Split by the product they landed on, proof first, emails two and three handle objections. |
| Post-purchase | A receipt and a shipping update, then silence. | Confidence-building, then the next product introduced naturally, no discount. |
| Browse abandonment | Nothing at all, or the same as a cart. | Behaviour-based timing, tuned to intent and purchase history. |
| Abandoned cart | One generic reminder to every abandoner. | Delay and message keyed to whether they are a repeat buyer or a first-timer. |
| Winback | A blanket discount to everyone who lapsed. | Segmented by value and lapse window, message before money. |
Nearly every Shopify account I audit has a discount buried in at least three of these five flows. It feels like it is working, because discounted orders come through, so nobody questions it. What it is actually doing is quietly retraining the customers you most want to keep to hold off and wait for the next coupon. The brands that win pull the discount out of welcome, post-purchase and winback, and make the flow earn the order on the message instead. Slower to feel, much better business.
The thread through all five: behaviour-based timing
If you strip these five flows back, they fail the same way. Every one of them, in most stores, treats every subscriber as the same person. Same message, same delay, same offer, whether it is their first visit or their fifth order.
Behaviour-based timing is the whole difference. Purchase history, browse history, how recently they bought, how much they spend, whether they opened the last three emails: those signals should change what someone gets and when they get it. That is not advanced. It is the baseline, and it is the part almost everyone skips.
It is also the part that shows up in the numbers. Flows are the most efficient revenue in the account, so track them at the account level with MER (marketing efficiency ratio) rather than obsessing over the open rate of a single email, and use a simple break-even calculator to sanity-check any discount before you bake it into a flow.
Email and retention
Your flows should be doing more than sending.
We build and rebuild Shopify email flows that segment by behaviour, so welcome, post-purchase, abandonment and winback each pull their weight instead of quietly leaking revenue.
Get the inputs right before you rebuild a flow
A flow can only be as good as three things around it. The platform you build in, the traffic feeding your list, and the site the emails point back to.
On the platform, most Shopify brands land on Klaviyo, and for good reason, but the right answer depends on your size and your stack, so it is worth comparing the email platforms before you commit. On traffic, a flow with nobody in it is just a clever machine sending to no one, so keep the top of the funnel full with ecommerce SEO and paid. And every flow you have just read about ends with a click back to your store, which means the conversion rate optimisation of your product and checkout pages decides whether all this careful email work actually turns into orders.
The bottom line
The five flows are not a checklist you switch on and forget. Welcome, post-purchase, browse abandonment, abandoned cart and winback are five separate chances to behave like you know who you are talking to, and the brands that treat them that way build a customer base while everyone else sends receipts.
So the work is not “do we have the flows”. Almost everyone does. The work is whether each one splits, segments and times itself to the person on the other end, or whether it quietly sends the same thing to everybody and calls it retention. If you want a second set of eyes on yours, our email marketing service exists for exactly this, or you can just book a strategy call and we will pull your flows apart together.
Frequently asked questions
What are the five email flows every Shopify store needs?
Welcome, post-purchase, browse abandonment, abandoned cart and winback. Almost every Shopify brand already has some version of all five switched on. The difference between a store that grows on retention and one that does not is whether each flow is segmented and behaviour-based, or just sending the same message to everyone.
Which email flow should I build first?
Welcome, because it is the highest-converting message you will ever send. The subscriber has just raised their hand and is paying the most attention they ever will. Lead with social proof, split on the product they landed on, and use the follow-up emails to handle objections rather than tell your brand story.
Should post-purchase emails include a discount?
No. A customer who just paid full price does not need money off, and discounting to them teaches them your prices are soft. Use the post-purchase window to build confidence with use cases, care guides and founder context, then introduce the next product naturally. Save discounting for where it genuinely moves the needle.
What is the average cart abandonment rate?
The Baymard Institute puts the average documented online cart abandonment rate at 70.22%, across 50 studies. That is why the abandoned-cart flow is the highest-leverage automation most stores own, and why segmenting it by purchase history, rather than sending one generic reminder, matters so much.
How is a good abandoned cart flow different from a basic one?
A basic flow sends one generic reminder to every abandoner at the same delay. A good one changes the message and the timing based on who the person is: a repeat buyer who got distracted needs a quick nudge, while a first-timer usually has an unanswered objection to handle. Behaviour-based timing is the whole difference.
Do I need Klaviyo to run these flows?
Most Shopify brands use Klaviyo and it handles all five flows well, but the platform matters less than the segmentation behind it. A well-built flow in a simpler tool beats a lazy flow in Klaviyo. Pick the platform that fits your size and stack, then put the work into behaviour-based timing.