Most Shopify stores need somewhere between four and six core flows, not the fifteen or twenty a template pack might suggest: welcome, abandoned cart, browse abandonment, post-purchase, and winback cover the overwhelming majority of the revenue any automated flow will ever generate. Everything past that set has real, but much smaller, marginal value.
Why More Flows Isn't Automatically More Revenue
A flow only generates revenue when it triggers on behavior that actually happens often enough to matter, and says something a customer at that exact moment actually needs to hear. A store with thin traffic building a "browsed 3+ times but never purchased and also opened 2 emails but didn't click" flow is spending build time on an edge case instead of getting the core five flows genuinely right.
The Real Priority Order
Build in this order, not alphabetically and not based on which flow sounds most sophisticated:
- 1. Welcome. Every new subscriber passes through this. Highest volume, and it sets the tone for every email that follows.
- 2. Abandoned cart. The single highest-intent moment in the whole customer journey, someone who added to cart and left.
- 3. Post-purchase. Sets expectations after the sale and opens the door to a second purchase, cheaper to earn than a first.
- 4. Browse abandonment. Lower intent than cart abandonment, but real volume on any store with meaningful traffic.
- 5. Winback. Brings lapsed customers back before they're gone for good, matters more as your list ages.
For the full build detail on each of these, timing, email count, what each one should actually say, see the flows that drive 30-50% of store revenue.
A store with these five flows built well will almost always out-earn a store with fifteen flows built shallow. Depth on the core set beats breadth across everything Klaviyo's template library offers.
When You've Actually Outgrown the Basics
Once the core five are running and converting well, a few more flows start earning their build time: a sunset flow to formally stop emailing genuinely dead profiles (which also helps the billing problem covered in how Klaviyo pricing actually works), a replenishment flow for consumable products, or a VIP/loyalty flow once you have a real repeat-customer segment worth treating differently.
Not sure which flows you're actually missing?
I'll look at your account and tell you what to build next, and what genuinely isn't worth it yet.
The Actual Test
Before building any new flow, ask whether it will trigger often enough to matter and whether it says something genuinely different from what's already running. If a flow would fire for a handful of people a month, or largely repeats a message another flow already sends, it's not the next thing worth building, no matter how good it sounds in a template gallery.