Campaigns are the emails you send; flows are the emails that send themselves. For a small store, flows are where email earns its reputation — they run against behaviour (someone joined, browsed, abandoned, bought) and they keep running while you do other work. Industry benchmarks consistently put flow revenue-per-recipient far above campaigns, for the obvious reason: the timing is the customer's, not yours.
You don't need the forty-flow library the audit PDF recommends. You need four, built properly, in this order.
1. The welcome flow
Triggered by a signup form; the highest-open emails you'll ever send, because the person just asked to hear from you.
- Email 1, immediately: deliver the signup offer if there is one, say what you're about in two sentences, one product or category link. Nothing else.
- Email 2, day 2: the story — why the store exists, what's different, the bestseller with an honest sentence about who it's for.
- Email 3, day 4: proof. Reviews, customer photos, press. End with the offer reminder if it's expiring.
Settings people get wrong: the offer email must land immediately (a 15-minute delay loses people mid-shop), and the flow should exit anyone who purchases — Klaviyo's profile filters handle this.
2. Abandoned checkout (then abandoned cart)
Someone got as far as checkout and left. Some of that is rescueable — often the single highest-ROI automation in the account.
- Email 1, 1–2 hours after: "Still thinking it over?" Show the exact items, one button back to checkout. No discount — many buyers just got distracted, don't pay them to finish.
- Email 2, ~24 hours: answer the silent objections — shipping cost and time, returns policy, sizing help. This is the FAQ block of a landing page, delivered by email.
- Email 3, ~48 hours, optional: the incentive, if your margins allow one. Small and expiring beats big and permanent — and if you always discount at 48 hours, your regulars will learn the game, so consider excluding repeat buyers from this email.
Build checkout abandonment first (highest intent), then the browse/cart variants with gentler copy.
3. Post-purchase
The most neglected flow, and the one that builds the business you actually want — repeat customers, reviews, and fewer "where's my order?" emails.
- Email 1, right after purchase: what happens next — dispatch times, tracking, who to reply to with questions. Plain text reads best here; it should feel like a person.
- Email 2, on delivery or a few days after: how to get the most from the thing they bought. Care instructions, recipes, setup — genuinely useful, nothing for sale.
- Email 3, ~2–3 weeks after: the review ask, once they've actually lived with the product. One link, one sentence, gratitude without grovelling.
First-time buyers becoming second-time buyers is the multiplier hiding in every store's numbers; this flow is where that conversion happens. Your retention report will show you whether it's working.
4. The win-back
Triggered when a customer's usual buying rhythm goes quiet — for most stores, somewhere around 60–90 days since last order.
- Email 1: "It's been a while" plus what's new since they left. New arrivals do more work than discounts here.
- Email 2, a week later: the offer, if you use one — and make it the last word, not the opening bid.
Then let silence be silence. Emailing the permanently-gone hurts deliverability for everyone still listening, so after the win-back runs its course, suppress non-openers rather than shouting louder.
The settings that quietly matter
- Smart Sending off inside flows. It exists to stop campaign pile-ups; inside a triggered sequence it skips the emails you most want delivered.
- UTM tagging on, so flow revenue shows up attributed in analytics rather than as "direct".
- One store voice. Flows run for years; write them the way you'd talk across the counter, and re-read them twice a year — expired offers in a welcome flow are the "we'll be right back" sign of email.
Four flows, maybe eleven emails total. Write them once, properly, and they work every night after. That's the whole pitch for email — it's the channel you own, doing compounding work while the ad platforms re-bill you monthly.
Want the flows written, built, and switched on in your Klaviyo? That's a task — brief us in chat, approve each email before it goes live.