The Klaviyo flows every Shopify brand should have

The short answer

Seven flows earn a place in every Shopify brand's account, in this build order: welcome, abandoned cart, browse abandonment, post-purchase, win-back, VIP and sunset. Each has a specific trigger, a specific timing logic and a specific job, and together they form the automated layer that earns while the campaign calendar sleeps. Everything else in the flow library is situational, and several popular flows are better left unbuilt until these seven work.

The baseline, and whether it is working

A welcome series and an abandoned cart flow are the starting point, and almost every Shopify brand has them. The question is not whether they exist but whether they are doing commercial work.

A welcome series that sends three emails with the same promotional offer to everyone is really a discount delivery mechanism. A well-built one introduces the brand's values, product categories and purchasing logic before making any offer, and it adapts based on whether the subscriber engages: an opener who clicked the category email gets that category next, and a silent subscriber gets the strongest single message rather than the full sequence.

An abandoned cart flow that sends one email 30 minutes after abandonment and nothing else captures a fraction of the revenue it could. The structure we build is three touches, at 30 minutes, 4 hours and 24 hours, each with distinct messaging: the first a simple reminder with the basket contents, the second answering the objections that stall purchases in the category, the third closing with urgency that is true. Incentives are reserved for the baskets where the margin supports them, branched by cart value inside the flow, because a blanket discount in an abandonment flow trains the whole list to abandon.

The seven flows at a glance

Timings are starting points to test against the category's buying cycle rather than laws. A considered-purchase brand stretches every window, and a same-day-decision category compresses them.

The flows most brands are missing

Browse abandonment triggers when a subscriber views a product page but does not add to cart. The intent is lower than cart abandonment but the volume is substantially higher, and it suits any brand whose products get researched before they get bought. Keep it to one or two restrained touches that read as helpful rather than surveilled, and suppress anyone who entered the cart flow, so the two never compete.

The post-purchase sequence is the most underbuilt flow in most accounts. The window immediately after a first purchase is when customer lifetime value is determined, and a sequence that sets delivery expectations, teaches the product, invites the review after delivery and introduces the complementary category creates the conditions for the second order. Branch it by first purchase against repeat, because a loyal customer does not need the brand introduction again.

Win-back targets customers who purchased and have not returned, typically triggered 60 to 90 days after the last order depending on the category cycle. Most brands skip it and lean on campaigns to re-engage lapsed customers instead, which costs more deliverability for less return, since the campaign goes to everyone while the flow arrives at each customer's own lapse point.

VIP rewards the top 10 to 15 percent of customers by lifetime value with early access, exclusive offers or plain recognition. Once built, it is often the highest revenue-per-recipient flow in the account, and the segment definition is the whole build: lifetime value or order count thresholds that a merchandising team stands behind.

The sunset flow closes the system, retiring subscribers who have stopped engaging before they damage deliverability. Its build spec lives in our deliverability guide, and it belongs in the same account as the six above, because a flow programme that only ever adds audience eventually poisons its own delivery.

The upgrade that multiplies all of them: one useful question

The most valuable addition to a flow programme is a single preference question captured at sign-up and written to the profile: what someone shops for, who they buy for, which category brought them in. One question, answered in one tap, gives every flow a branch worth having.

We have built welcome flows where that answer switches the imagery, the featured category and the product feed for each subscriber from the first send, and the pattern generalises: the cart flow's objection email can speak to the category sitting in the basket, the post-purchase cross-sell can follow the stated interest, and the win-back can lead with the range the customer told you they cared about. Zero-party data beats inferred data because the customer said it, and asking one question is a courtesy where asking six is a form.

Flows not to build yet

Some flows in every best-practice list earn their place only after the core seven work, and some never do.

• Elaborate cross-sell trees before post-purchase basics exist. A four-branch product-recommendation flow on top of a missing review invitation is decoration on an unbuilt house.
• SMS branches before the email versions perform. SMS amplifies a working message and multiplies the cost of a weak one, in money and in unsubscribes.
• Back-in-stock and price-drop flows on catalogues whose inventory and pricing data is not reliable, because the flow faithfully broadcasts every data error to the exact customers who cared.
• Anniversary and birthday flows as a priority, since they flatter the calendar rather than the buying cycle. Build them last, when everything commercial already runs.

One structural guard belongs in every account regardless: exclusion of suspicious profiles from flow sending. We have seen a validation bot fill a retailer's account with hundreds of fake abandoned checkouts, each one cheerfully triggering the cart flow, and a simple segment filter on flow entry contains that damage before diagnosis.

Build order and measurement

1. Fix the two baseline flows to the specs above before building anything new.
2. Add post-purchase next, because it compounds lifetime value on every order the store is already winning.
3. Then browse abandonment, win-back and VIP, in that order, each live and measured before the next begins.
4. Add the sunset flow with the deliverability work, and revisit every flow's content quarterly, because flows go stale quietly, sending last season's products to this season's buyers.

Measure the programme on flow revenue share of total email revenue and revenue per recipient by flow, and read the trend over the snapshot. A healthy programme sees flows carrying a substantial share of email revenue from a fraction of the send volume.

Questions we hear about Klaviyo flows