Email marketing for small Shopify stores: a DIY plan for brands under $25K a month

Do small Shopify stores need email marketing?

Yes, and earlier than most founders think. Ads are rented. Your list is owned. Every subscriber you capture now is someone you can reach next month without paying for the click again.

What you don't need yet is a big program. You need the basics done right.

Which flows should a small Shopify store build first?

Flows are automated emails that go out when someone does something: signs up, leaves a cart, buys. They work while you sleep, and they earn far more per person than campaigns.

Here's the order I'd build them in:

1. Welcome series. Someone just signed up and is paying attention. In the Flow System I install, the welcome is 6 emails over 7 days, with the offer in email #1 expiring on day 7. Email #1 carries most of the money, which is why the offer goes in it: across 4 consumable brands in my data, it earned about $4.50 per person, and emails #2 to #5 about $0.10 each. The rest of the week builds trust before the offer expires. More in my welcome email series guide.
2. Abandoned checkout. Someone started checking out and didn't finish. They were close. I send the first email 35 minutes after they leave, while it's fresh, then 4 more over about a week. The first email has no offer. It comes in later in the sequence and expires with the last email. For first-timers, it's the same offer the welcome gave them, never a bigger one, so nobody learns that abandoning gets them a better deal.
3. Abandoned cart. Someone added to cart and left. I run 5 emails over about 8 days, with the gaps getting shorter toward the end. The later ones still earn: cart email #5 earned about $0.25 per person in my data, the same as email #3. Same offer logic as checkout. For existing customers, the offer is a slightly better deal, a buy-more offer, or a monthly subscription, so they save and you get more predictable revenue. Customers who order in large quantities usually stay out of both.
4. Post-purchase thank you. Make the first order feel good and set up the second one. In my system, a first order gets 6 emails within 30 days, and repeat buyers get fewer as they become regulars.
5. Reorder reminder, if your product runs out. If you sell something people use up, like coffee, supplements or skincare, build this early. Replenishment flows earned about $2.23 per person across those 4 brands, about 28x the best campaign.

Then add browse abandonment and a customer winback once those are running. My winback waits 45 days after an order and sends 5 emails through day 60, with the offer saved for email 4. If you can, split each flow by whether someone has ever ordered, so first-timers and customers get different emails and offers. In my system every flow carries an offer: the welcome offer for first-timers, and a slightly better, buy-more or subscription offer for customers. For the full list of what a mature setup looks like, see my guide to essential Klaviyo flows.

One rule for every flow: click every link before you turn it on. Clicks with no sales means something broke.

How many emails should a small store send?

For clients, my standard cadence is a campaign every other day, with consecutive sends during big promotions. If you're doing it all yourself, start with one or two a week to people who've opened or clicked recently, and build toward that as you find more worth saying.

Don't be scared of sending. Across 4 consumable brands in my data, 3 saw no rise in unsubscribes when they sent more. The bigger risk is sending to everyone. For a fitness tech brand, a send to an engaged segment earned $0.19 per person while a full-list blast earned $0.04. I go deeper in how many emails to send per week.

Every campaign needs a reason to buy. Content is fine, but somebody has to ask for the sale. For a wellness brand, a month of all-educational sends with no offer took campaign revenue from $3,146 to $110.

Good reasons to email that aren't just discounts:

• A restock. When something sells out, the restock email is your biggest send of the month.
• A new product or flavor.
• News about the brand, like a new store or a press mention. Across 7 brands in my subject line data, news beat brand voice.

For subject lines, my starting rules are under 50 characters, preview text of 80 to 100 characters, and no fake "Re:" or "Fwd:". Then judge by clicks, since the rules flip by audience.

What should a small store measure?

Keep it to a few numbers, checked once a week:

• Click rate. Did people care enough to tap? This is the best quick read on whether an email worked.
• Revenue per recipient. Revenue from an email divided by the people who got it. It lets you compare a big send and a small one fairly. See revenue per recipient.
• Flow revenue vs campaign revenue. If flows are a small slice, your automations need work.
• Email's share of total store revenue. Across the brands I work with, email averages about 32% of total revenue. That's a reference point, not a target for a store your size.

Ignore open rate. Apple Mail auto-opens make it unreliable. In my data across 4 brands, open rate tracked revenue at just 0.32, while click rate tracked it at 0.65.

Where these numbers come from

The pooled numbers come from 4 consumable brands I work with, 2,897 campaigns and $17.7M in email revenue, plus subject line data from 7 brands and 2,821 campaigns. They're small samples, so treat them as directional. Single-brand numbers come from individual client accounts and are labeled with a descriptor instead of a name.

What does Klaviyo cost for a small store?

Less than most founders expect. Klaviyo prices email plans by active profiles, meaning people you can actually reach. Unsubscribed and suppressed profiles don't count.

On Klaviyo's pricing page today, the free plan covers up to 250 profiles and 500 emails a month. Paid email plans start at $20 a month for 500 active profiles, $30 for 1,000, and $150 for 10,000. Each tier includes 10x your profile count in monthly email sends.

One thing to watch: if your active profiles go over your plan limit, Klaviyo automatically moves you up a tier at the start of the next billing cycle. Cleaning out people who never engage keeps that in check. My post on why your Klaviyo bill went up covers it.

When should a small Shopify store get help?

My honest take: under about $25K a month in revenue, hire a specialist, not an agency. A done-for-you agency is built for brands where email is already a big revenue line. At your size, you'd pay for a lot of process you don't need yet.

Good times to bring in help:

• You've built the basic flows but can't tell if they're working.
• Email revenue has been flat for a few months and you don't know why.
• You're about to launch something big, like a new product or a retail deal, and want it done right.
• You'd rather spend your hours on product and sales than on Klaviyo.

Strategy calls are the lighter option I offer for this stage. You keep doing the work, and we use the calls to decide what to build, fix and send. Pricing for that, and for everything else, is in how much a Klaviyo agency costs. And if you don't need any paid help yet, I'll tell you.

FAQ

WRITTEN BY Jack White

Founder of Bardown Digital, a Chicago-based Klaviyo email and retention agency for Shopify brands. He's worked with brands doing $500K to $100M a year, with $100M+ in email-attributed revenue across them.

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