Klaviyo flows that actually make money (in order)
Lots of Shopify brands use Klaviyo or Mailchimp for their email marketing and automation. Most have four or five flows running. The flows they're missing are usually the ones earning the most.
We audited a Rainbird account recently and found A$8,000/month (Australian dollars) of unrealised revenue across the existing flow library. Welcome series ending after one email when it should have been five. Browse abandonment configured as a survey rather than a product recovery. Post-purchase upsell sitting in draft. None of it broken. All of it underbuilt.
Here's the priority order we'd build Klaviyo flows in for an ecommerce brand starting from zero, and the revenue benchmark to expect from each one.
The order
Welcome series (with customer/non-customer split)
Abandoned checkout
Browse abandonment
Post-purchase
Win-back / sunset
Replenishment (for consumables)
Birthday / anniversary
Cross-sell (the one most people skip and shouldn't)
Build them in this order. Don't try to do all eight at once. Each one pays for itself on its own. Together they add up.
1. Welcome series
The single highest-value flow in any Klaviyo account, measured by total revenue. Triggers when someone subscribes to the email list (popup, footer signup, checkout opt-in).
The structure:
Conditional split at the top. Has this person bought before? Yes → existing customer path. No → new customer path. Both paths matter.
New customer path (5 emails):
Welcome + offer (15% off works in most categories)
Brand story / why we exist (sent 24 hours later)
Bestsellers or hero product (sent 48 hours after #2)
Social proof / reviews (sent 48 hours after #3)
Last-chance reminder of the welcome offer (sent 72 hours after #4)
Existing customer path (3 emails): Don't waste an offer on someone who's already bought. Instead:
Thanks for joining the list, here's what to expect
New arrivals or hero categories
Refer-a-friend incentive
Common mistake: existing customer path ending after one email, treating subscribers like first-time visitors. Rainbird's account had this exact issue. Major missed opportunity.
Expected revenue: Welcome series typically drives 15–30% of all Klaviyo-attributed revenue. For a £500k brand, that's £6,000–£15,000/year just from this flow. We've seen Rainbird's welcome series running at A$8,000/30 days on the non-customer path alone, with a 13.2% placed-order conversion rate.
2. Abandoned checkout
Triggers when someone reaches the checkout page and doesn't complete. The highest-intent flow in the account: these people picked products, entered an email, and then didn't go through with it.
The structure:
Email 1: sent 1 hour after abandonment. Subject line referencing the product or a "did you forget something?" hook. Email 2: sent 24 hours after abandonment. Adds a soft incentive (free shipping if you don't have it as standard, or a small discount). Email 3: sent 48 hours after abandonment. Last call, urgency, one final reason to complete.
Three emails maximum. People who don't convert by email three usually weren't going to convert.
Critical configuration: trigger filter must exclude completed orders. Looks obvious, gets missed, sends "you forgot to checkout" emails to people who did checkout. Embarrassing.
Expected revenue: abandoned checkout drives 8–15% of Klaviyo-attributed revenue. Strong Rainbird benchmark: Email 1 at 51.1% open rate, 22.2% click rate, 8.9% placed-order rate.
3. Browse abandonment
Triggers when someone views a product page but doesn't add to cart. Lower intent than abandoned checkout, higher volume.
The structure:
Email 1: sent 4–24 hours after the browse session. Shows the product viewed, gives a reason to come back (review snippet, complementary product, shipping info). Email 2: sent 3 days later. Soft incentive or alternative product if the original is out of stock.
Critical configuration: cap the trigger to one fire per customer per 30 days. Without that cap, you'll send three browse abandonment emails for every category page visit. Fast way to get unsubscribed.
Common mistake: running browse abandonment as a survey ("we noticed you didn't buy, why not?"). It's a missed-revenue flow, not a research flow. Send product. Recover the sale.
Expected revenue: 3–6% of Klaviyo-attributed revenue.
4. Post-purchase
Triggers immediately after order confirmation. Most brands stop at the order confirmation email itself. The post-purchase flow is everything that happens after.
The structure:
Email 1: order confirmation (Klaviyo or Shopify, doesn't matter, but make sure only one fires). Email 2: dispatch confirmation (Shopify usually handles this). Email 3: sent 2 days after delivery. "How was it?" review request via Okendo, Trustpilot, or native. Email 4: sent 7 days after delivery. Cross-sell to a complementary product (not the same product unless it's consumable). Email 5: sent 14 days after delivery. A subscription invitation, or an intro to your loyalty or very important person (VIP) programme.
For consumables, add a replenishment email at 80% of the average reorder cycle (e.g. for a 30ml face serum, send at day 24).
Expected revenue: post-purchase drives 5–10% of Klaviyo-attributed revenue and lifts repeat purchase rate by 15–25%. Often undervalued.
5. Win-back
Triggers when a customer hasn't purchased in X days (typically 90–180, depending on category).
The structure:
Email 1: sent at trigger threshold. "We've missed you" tone. New arrivals or curated picks. Email 2: sent 7 days after #1. Soft incentive (10–15% off). Email 3: sent 14 days after #2. Final reminder, last-chance framing.
After three emails, drop the customer into the sunset flow.
Sunset flow: runs 3–6 months after the last open or click. Removes inactive subscribers from the active list (they still receive transactional emails, just not marketing). Keeps deliverability healthy.
Expected revenue: win-back drives 3–5% of Klaviyo-attributed revenue. Sunset doesn't directly drive revenue, but it protects the rest of the account by keeping engagement scores high.
6. Replenishment (consumables only)
Triggers based on average reorder cycle for a specific product. Skincare, supplements, candles, food, pet food.
The structure:
Email 1: sent at 80% of the typical reorder cycle. "Running low?" with a one-click reorder button. Email 2: sent at 120% of the typical reorder cycle (i.e. they're already past their average reorder date). Add subscription invitation if they're not already on one.
Configuration tip: Replenishment timing varies by stock keeping unit (SKU). Skin Salvation 120ml might have a 60-day reorder cycle. A 30ml serum might be 45 days. Set per-product thresholds, don't use a single account-wide trigger.
Expected revenue: for consumable brands, replenishment drives 5–10% of Klaviyo-attributed revenue and is the single biggest driver of repeat purchase rate.
7. Birthday / anniversary
Triggers on customer's birthday (or anniversary of first purchase if you don't capture birthday).
The structure:
Email 1: sent on the day. A gift: small discount, free product with order, or free shipping. Email 2: sent 7 days after #1 if no purchase. Reminder before the offer expires.
Expected revenue: small (1–2% of Klaviyo-attributed) but customers love it. The flow's value is in retention, not revenue.
8. Cross-sell (the one most people skip)
Triggers based on what a customer just bought, sending a related product 30 days later.
The structure:
Conditional logic: if customer bought Product A, send recommendation for Product B 30 days later. If they bought Product C, send Product D. The cross-sell pairs come from your category logic.
For Rainbird, the cross-sell approach we found in our audit: customers rarely repurchase the same product (3-year warranty, durable outerwear). Cross-sell instead. STOWaway packable → fleece. Fleece → STOWaway. Coat → STOWaway as an emergency/car/bag jacket. Built around how the products are used together, not around individual SKU upsells.
Expected revenue: cross-sell can drive 3–8% of Klaviyo-attributed revenue depending on category. Higher for fashion/outdoor (where customers genuinely need complementary products) than for skincare (where consumable repurchase dominates).
Why most people skip it: it requires thinking about your product catalogue strategically. The pay-off justifies the work.
The cumulative picture
A fully-built flow library does most of the work. Klaviyo's data puts automated flows at around 41% of email revenue on average, and 58–65% for top performers, from a small share of total sends. The rest comes from campaigns (newsletters, promotions, launches). And flows earn far more per email than one-off campaigns, which is why they are worth building first.
If your Klaviyo account is producing 25% of total revenue (the high end), and 70% of that is from flows, you've got a 17.5% revenue contribution running mostly on its own. That's what you get for building this properly.
Common audit findings
The most frequent things we find when auditing Klaviyo accounts:
Welcome series ends after one email for existing customers. Major missed opportunity. Fix: build the existing-customer path properly.
Browse abandonment configured as survey. Should be product recovery. Fix: rewrite the email content.
Post-purchase flow stops at order confirmation. Everything after the confirmation is missed revenue. Fix: build out the four-email post-purchase sequence.
No win-back, no sunset. You lose revenue and your deliverability slips. Fix: build both.
Replenishment running on a single account-wide trigger. Misses the per-product nature of consumable cycles. Fix: per-SKU triggers.
No segmentation in flows. New vs returning customers should see different content. Fix: conditional splits.
Cross-sell logic missing entirely. Often the biggest single opportunity, especially for non-consumable categories.
If three or more of these describe your Klaviyo account, an audit will pay for itself inside the first 90 days.
How Sector 106 does it
Klaviyo audits and flow builds are part of our Paid Media & Performance service. The audit is paid (one to two weeks of senior time), produces a written report with prioritised recommendations and revenue impact estimates, and the deliverable is independently useful whether you continue with us afterwards or hand the report to your in-house team.
For Rainbird, our 13-flow audit found A$8,000/month of unrealised revenue and produced seven specific recommendations covering post-purchase cross-sell, welcome series expansion, browse abandonment conversion, cart and checkout cross-sell additions, a "Keep One in the Car" campaign flow, back-in-stock enhancement, and sunset flow activation. Implementation phased across two quarters.
We also build flows from scratch for clients who don't have them yet. Standard scope: welcome series, abandoned checkout, browse abandonment, post-purchase, win-back, sunset. Six flows, three to four weeks build time, branded templates ready for ongoing campaign use.
The honest test
Two questions:
Could you list every flow currently active in your Klaviyo account?
Do you know what percentage of your total revenue Klaviyo is producing?
If no to either, an audit is the right next step. The flow library is usually the biggest single revenue opportunity in any Shopify ecommerce brand's marketing stack, and most accounts are running well below their potential.
Want a Klaviyo audit?
We run paid Klaviyo audits for ecommerce brands. One to two weeks. Written report with prioritised recommendations and revenue impact estimates. Senior people, 28 years in.
Or read more: Paid Media & Performance →
