Learn how to set up, automate, and optimise email marketing for your Shopify store. Covers tools, flows, segmentation, and the tactics that drive the highest revenue per subscriber.
TL;DR
- Email marketing generates an average ROI of £36 for every £1 spent, making it the highest-return channel in ecommerce.
- Shopify Email is a solid starting point, but most scaling brands migrate to Klaviyo or Omnisend for deeper segmentation and automation.
- The five flows every Shopify store needs: welcome series, abandoned cart, post-purchase, browse abandonment, and win-back.
- List segmentation is the single biggest lever for improving email performance - segmented campaigns earn 76% more revenue per recipient than broadcast sends.
- AI tools (including Athenic) can now automate the research, writing, and scheduling of email campaigns at scale.
Email isn't glamorous. It doesn't trend on LinkedIn. It doesn't inspire conference talks about "authentic brand storytelling." But for Shopify merchants who understand it, email is consistently the highest-revenue, highest-ROI marketing channel available to them.
According to Litmus's 2025 Email Marketing ROI Report, email marketing delivers an average return of £36 for every £1 invested - outperforming paid social, display advertising, and content marketing by a significant margin. For ecommerce specifically, the number is even higher: Klaviyo's 2025 ecommerce benchmark data shows email and SMS together accounting for an average of 31% of total online store revenue.
If you're running a Shopify store and not treating email as a priority, this guide is your starting point.
The first decision is which email tool to use. Shopify Email is included in every Shopify plan - but it's not always the right choice.
| Platform | Best For | Starting Price | Shopify Integration |
|---|---|---|---|
| Shopify Email | Small stores, beginners | Included (10k emails/mo free) | Native |
| Klaviyo | Scaling stores, data-driven teams | Free up to 500 contacts | Best-in-class |
| Omnisend | Omnichannel (email + SMS + push) | Free up to 500 emails/day | Strong |
| Drip | Visual automation builders | From £29/month | Good |
| Mailchimp | General use, lower complexity | Free up to 500 contacts | Moderate |
| ActiveCampaign | CRM + email combined | From £23/month | Good |
Shopify Email is the simplest option. It lives inside your Shopify admin, uses your store data natively, and offers a limited but functional set of automations. It's ideal if you're just starting out, have a list under 5,000 subscribers, and don't need advanced segmentation.
Its limitations become apparent quickly: no predictive analytics, limited conditional logic in flows, and restricted A/B testing. Most merchants outgrow it within 12-18 months.
Klaviyo is the industry standard for serious Shopify merchants. Its deep Shopify integration pulls in order history, browse behaviour, product affinity, and predicted lifetime value - all of which can be used to build highly targeted segments and triggered flows.
The learning curve is steeper than Shopify Email, and pricing scales with list size (which can become expensive for large lists). But for merchants doing £500k+ in annual revenue, the additional revenue Klaviyo enables almost always justifies the cost.
Omnisend sits between Shopify Email and Klaviyo in complexity. It's particularly strong if you want to combine email with SMS and push notifications in unified workflows - the omnichannel automations are more intuitive than Klaviyo's equivalent setup.
Flows (also called automations or triggered sequences) are the backbone of ecommerce email marketing. They run automatically based on customer behaviour, which means they generate revenue without ongoing manual effort.
Your welcome series is triggered when someone joins your email list - typically via a sign-up pop-up or embedded form. It's your highest open-rate flow. Average open rates for welcome emails run at 63%, according to Omnisend's 2025 Email Benchmarks.
A strong welcome series structure:
The welcome series is also where you set expectations - how often you email, what kind of content to expect. Subscribers who know what they've opted into stay subscribed longer.
Abandoned cart emails are sent when a customer adds items to their cart but doesn't complete checkout. Cart abandonment rates average 70-75% across ecommerce, which means recovering even a fraction of these carts has a significant revenue impact.
A high-performing abandoned cart flow:
Klaviyo data suggests a three-email abandoned cart sequence recovers 5-10% of abandoned carts on average. For a store with significant cart abandonment volume, this is meaningful revenue from emails that essentially write themselves. For a deeper breakdown of every element of a high-performing sequence, see our complete guide to abandoned cart email recovery.
Your post-purchase sequence starts the moment a customer completes an order. Most brands treat this as purely transactional (order confirmation, shipping update, delivery confirmation) and miss a significant opportunity.
The post-purchase moment is when a customer is most positively disposed towards your brand. It's the ideal time to reinforce the purchase decision, cross-sell complementary products, and begin building the relationship that drives a second order.
For a detailed guide on building a revenue-generating post-purchase sequence, see our post-purchase email sequences guide.
Browse abandonment emails target visitors who viewed a product page but didn't add anything to their cart. They're less urgent than cart abandonment emails, but they represent a warm audience with demonstrated product interest.
A simple two-email browse abandonment sequence:
Browse abandonment flows generate an average of £0.38 per recipient, according to Klaviyo's 2025 benchmark data - lower than cart abandonment, but the audience is typically larger.
A win-back flow targets subscribers who haven't opened an email or purchased in a defined period - typically 90-180 days. The goal is to re-engage active customers before they become permanent disengageers.
A clean win-back structure:
The counterintuitive truth about win-back: it's almost as important to remove non-responders as it is to recover the people who do reengage. A list full of unresponsive addresses damages your deliverability metrics and costs you money every month.
Campaign Monitor's 2025 Email Benchmarks report found that segmented email campaigns generate 76% more revenue per recipient than unsegmented broadcasts. Yet most Shopify merchants still send the same promotional email to their entire list.
Segmentation means dividing your list into groups based on shared characteristics, then sending each group content tailored to them.
The highest-impact Shopify email segments:
Purchase history segments
Engagement segments
Browse behaviour segments
Building these segments doesn't require manual effort if you're on Klaviyo - they can be built once and update automatically from your Shopify data.
"Most ecommerce brands treat email as a broadcast medium. The best brands treat it as a conversation. Segmentation is what makes the difference between talking at your customers and talking with them."
- Chase Dimond, email marketing strategist and co-founder of Boundless Labs
Automated flows handle behaviour-triggered emails. But you also need a regular campaign calendar - promotional and editorial emails that keep your brand front of mind.
A balanced monthly email calendar for a Shopify store:
| Week | Email Type | Goal |
|---|---|---|
| Week 1 | New arrivals or editorial | Engagement, introduce product |
| Week 2 | Promotional (sale, bundle, offer) | Revenue |
| Week 3 | Educational or story-driven | Brand building, unsubscribe reduction |
| Week 4 | Review request or community spotlight | Social proof, trust |
| Additional sends | Sale events, product launches | Revenue |
Frequency depends on your audience. Most ecommerce brands email 2-4 times per month. Highly engaged audiences can handle more. If you're seeing unsubscribe rates above 0.5% per send, you're either emailing too often, with insufficient segmentation, or with content that's not relevant enough.
Track these metrics for every campaign and flow:
Subject lines account for roughly 50% of your open rate variance. Test two subject lines against each other on every significant send. Over time, you'll develop an understanding of what works for your specific audience.
Should I use Shopify Email or Klaviyo?
If you're just starting out and have under 1,000 subscribers, Shopify Email is fine. Once you're ready to invest in serious automation, segmentation, and analytics, Klaviyo is the stronger choice. Most growing Shopify brands transition to Klaviyo between £100k-£500k in annual revenue.
How do I grow my Shopify email list?
The most effective list-building tactics: exit-intent pop-ups with a compelling offer (10% off, free shipping, exclusive content), post-purchase opt-in prompts, and checkout opt-in (Shopify makes this easy to enable). Focus on offer quality - a compelling reason to subscribe beats aggressive pop-up timing.
What's a good email open rate for Shopify?
Industry benchmarks for ecommerce email sit between 20-30% for welcome flows and 15-25% for regular campaigns. Abandoned cart and win-back flows can reach 40-50% open rates. If your rates are significantly below these, focus on subject lines, sender name, and list cleanliness.
How often should I email my Shopify customers?
Most successful ecommerce stores email 2-4 times per month, plus behaviour-triggered flows. Frequency should be driven by your content quality and audience tolerance. Watch your unsubscribe rate closely when increasing frequency.
Is email marketing compliant with GDPR and UK data laws?
Yes, provided you get explicit consent before adding anyone to your list (opt-in, not pre-ticked boxes), include an unsubscribe link in every email, and maintain records of consent. Shopify's built-in marketing consent tools make compliance manageable.
Writing, scheduling, and optimising email campaigns takes consistent time and effort. Athenic is an AI-powered platform that can plan your email calendar, draft campaigns, and coordinate your email strategy alongside your wider marketing activity - so your store keeps communicating with customers even when your team is focused elsewhere.