Klaviyo flows: which ones to build, and in what order

The short answer: five flows do most of the work

Flows are Klaviyo’s automated sequences, triggered by something a person does rather than by you pressing send. They run once, they run forever, and they typically produce a large share of email revenue from a small share of the sends. That combination is why they come before campaigns, not after.

You do not need fourteen of them. Five cover the ground for most stores:

1. 1Welcome series. Triggered when someone subscribes. The highest engagement you will ever have with that person.
2. 2Abandoned checkout. Triggered when someone starts checkout and does not finish. Usually the single highest revenue flow in the account.
3. 3Browse abandonment. Triggered when someone views a product and leaves. Lower intent, still worth having.
4. 4Post-purchase. Triggered by an order. Reduces support tickets, sets up the review request, and starts the second purchase.
5. 5Win-back. Triggered by a lapse in purchasing. Cheap revenue from people who already trust you.

This article is about building them in Klaviyo specifically. If you want the strategy behind what each one should say, we covered that in e-commerce email flows.

Build them in this order

Order matters, because each flow takes a few hours and the returns are wildly uneven. Do them in revenue order and you get paid while you build the rest.

1. Abandoned checkout, three emails. Start at one hour (a reminder, not a discount), then twenty-four hours (handle the objection: shipping cost, returns policy, sizing), then forty-eight to seventy-two hours (an incentive, if your margins allow). Baymard puts average cart abandonment near 70%, so this is the largest recoverable pool in the store.

2. Welcome series, three to five emails. Send the first one within minutes. Deliver whatever you promised at signup immediately, then use the following emails on the things that actually sell: what makes the product different, how people use it, what happens if it does not fit. A welcome email that arrives three days later is a bit like introducing yourself as the guest is leaving.

3. Post-purchase, two to four emails. Order confirmation is transactional and usually comes from your store platform. The flow starts after that: what happens next, how to use the product, then a review request timed to arrive after delivery rather than after purchase. Getting that timing right takes one filter and lifts review volume noticeably.

4. Browse abandonment, one or two emails. Lower intent than checkout abandonment, so keep it light and do not discount. Exclude anyone already in the checkout flow, or you will send two reminders about the same product.

5. Win-back, two or three emails. Trigger on days since last order, set to roughly one and a half times your average repurchase cycle. If people usually reorder at ninety days, start at around a hundred and thirty-five.

The Klaviyo settings people get wrong

Most underperforming Klaviyo accounts are not badly written. They are badly configured. These are the five that cause the most damage.

• Flow filters missing. Every flow needs an exit condition. "Has placed order zero times since starting this flow" on the abandoned checkout stops you chasing people who already bought. Without it, you are emailing customers about a purchase they completed, which is the fastest way to train people to ignore you.
• Smart sending switched off. Smart sending suppresses people who received an email in the last few days. Leaving it off across several flows is how someone ends up with four emails in a morning.
• Segments confused with lists. A list is a static group people join. A segment updates itself based on conditions. Flow triggers and suppression rules should almost always use segments. Klaviyo’s documentation explains the distinction, and it is worth ten minutes.
• Live mode never switched on. Flows are built in draft. It happens more often than you would think: three well-built flows, none of them sending, discovered a month later.
• No suppression of unengaged profiles. After about six months, send only to people who have opened or clicked recently. This is a deliverability decision, and it is covered below.

The boring part that decides whether any of it lands

A perfect flow that lands in spam produces nothing. Deliverability is unglamorous, and it is the difference between an email program and an email hobby.

Three things do most of the work. Authenticate your sending domain properly, so mail comes from your own domain rather than a shared one. Warm up gradually if the account is new, rather than sending to forty thousand people on day one. And stop sending to people who have not engaged in six months, because inbox providers read that as a signal about you, not about them.

On the legal side, Australian senders are covered by the Spam Act, enforced by ACMA. The requirements are straightforward: consent, accurate sender identification, and a working unsubscribe that is honored promptly. Pre-ticked boxes and buried opt-ins are not consent, and "we bought a list" is not either.

A shrinking list that opens is worth more than a growing list that does not. Cleaning out unengaged profiles feels like going backwards for about three weeks, and then everything else works better.

How to tell whether a flow is actually working

Klaviyo will happily show you revenue attributed to every flow, and those numbers are generous. Attribution windows credit the email for purchases that would have happened anyway, particularly on abandoned checkout, where the person had already reached the payment page.

Better questions to ask of each flow:

• Revenue per recipient. Fairer than total revenue, because it does not reward the flow that simply sends to the most people.
• Placed order rate against a holdout. If you want to know what a flow really adds, hold back a small percentage of recipients and compare. Klaviyo supports this, and almost nobody does it.
• Unsubscribe rate per flow. A flow producing revenue and burning your list is not free. It is borrowing from next quarter.
• Time to second purchase. For post-purchase flows, this matters more than the revenue attributed to any single email.

Automate the boring, repeatable work first, because that is where the fast wins are. Flows are exactly that: the same message, sent at the right moment, without anyone remembering to do it. Once the five above are running, the returns from a sixth flow drop off quickly.

When not to build another flow

The most common mistake in mature Klaviyo accounts is adding flows instead of improving the five that matter. A store with eleven flows and no segmentation is worse off than a store with five flows and a clean list.

Stop building and fix something else if:

• Your list is under about 500 people. A flow that triggers twice a week cannot be optimized, because you will never have enough data to know what changed. Spend the time on getting subscribers instead.
• Deliverability is poor. Adding volume to a domain with a reputation problem makes it worse. Clean, suppress, authenticate, then build.
• Your product pages do not convert. Email brings people back to the same page that failed to sell to them the first time. Fix the page, then send them to it.
• Nobody maintains them. Flows go stale. Discontinued products, expired codes, a delivery promise that is no longer true. One flow reviewed quarterly beats six nobody has opened since launch.

If you run a service business rather than a store, the same logic applies with different triggers, which we covered in email flows for service businesses. And if you would rather have someone build and maintain the set, that is what our email marketing service does, with more detail in what a Klaviyo agency actually does.

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