The 5 Best Klaviyo Flow That Make Premium Brands The Most Money

“Cath…I don’t know what to put in our email campaigns.”

I’ve been doing this for more than 20 years, and that’s still the sentence I hear most about marketing emails. Founders sometimes ask which is the best email platform to use or how often or when to send them. A fair few tell me they hate receiving marketing emails therefore they don’t want to send any. But mostly, they tell me, a little sheepishly, that they’ve got a list of people who asked to hear from them – and no idea what to say.

So what happens instead? Usually one of four things. The emails get handed to a VA with a loose brief and a Canva login. Or AI writes the whole lot, top to bottom. Or an email only goes out when there’s a sale on, because a discount at least feels like something worth saying. Or nothing goes out at all, and the list just sits there, like a gym membership you’re still paying for.

Then there’s the other founder. The one on version eleven of Thursday’s newsletter, wondering whether the green three quarters of the way down is quite the right green. I admire the care. I do. But an email campaign has a life of two or three days, at most. After that it’s buried under a pharmacy receipt and a school newsletter. That’s a lot of polish for something with the shelf life of a bunch of coriander.

Whichever founder you are, notice where the attention goes. All the worry, or all the guilt, goes to the campaign. The email that’s gone by the weekend.

Meanwhile, another set of emails runs every single day, for years. They were set up once, in launch week, and most haven’t been looked at since. Those are your flows.

If you’re newer to this, a flow is an email that sends automatically when someone does something. They sign up, so they get a welcome. They leave something in their cart, so they get a reminder. They buy, so they get a thank you. You build it once and it keeps sending, whether you’re watching or not.

And flows are where the money is. Klaviyo’s latest benchmark data covers more than 183,000 brands. Campaigns make up nearly 95% of everything those brands send. Flows are just over 5% of the sends, and they bring in around 41% of the email revenue. Per person who receives one, a flow earns roughly 18 times what a campaign does.

So most of us have it exactly backwards. The email that lasts three days gets the agonising. The email that lasts three years gets none.

Before anyone emails me in a panic, I’m not saying stop sending campaigns. Campaigns matter. In that same data, they still bring in the majority of email revenue. Your launches, your stories and your news all belong in campaigns, and a good one can make a very nice week.

But campaigns aren’t the spine of your email strategy. Flows are.

My test for where effort goes is pretty simple. I want anything I do to either pay me back well, or make life easier down the track. Ideally both.

Think about Saturday meal planning. You sit down once, plan the week and do one shop. Then you don’t have to solve “what’s for dinner?” at six o’clock every night when you’re tired and the fridge is staring back at you. One bit of effort saves you five decisions.

Or think about the founder line we’ve all said: “It’s quicker if I just do it myself.” And it is quicker – today. Then it’s quicker again tomorrow, and the next day, for years. Training someone properly feels slower for a week, and then you’ve bought back every Tuesday afternoon for good.

Flows pass both tests. They earn more per email than anything else you send, and once they’re built well, they keep working without you. Campaigns are the nightly “what’s for dinner”. Necessary, sometimes delicious, and you have to solve them from scratch every single time.

One of our clients runs a customisable gifting brand. Over the three years we’ve worked together, the business has grown around 50% every year. And she cheerfully describes herself as a lazy marketer.

She’s anything but lazy. She wears a lot of hats, at work and at home, and she has a lot to fit into every day. What she doesn’t have is hours each week to agonise over marketing. So she doesn’t.

Her email brings in about a quarter of total revenue, which is fairly typical. What’s not typical is where it comes from. Three quarters of that email revenue comes from flows. Most of her email income arrives without her writing anything that week.

That’s not laziness. That’s the founder who trained the team member properly, then got her Tuesday afternoons back.

Today I’m going through the five flows that make premium brands the most money. I’ll cover why each one earns, and what I see most brands getting wrong. What I won’t give you is a template, because the right build depends on your customer – and I’ll explain why at the end.

First, the two faults I see over and over again when we audit email accounts.

The first is set and forget. Imagine hiring your best salesperson, training them once in 2022, and never checking whether they still turn up to work. That’s how most founders treat their flows.

The trouble is, platforms change underneath you. In one audit, the abandoned cart flow had quietly stopped sending. It was most likely built on an older trigger, the way the store tracked carts had changed, and nobody updated it. Sales felt a bit flat. Nobody connected the two.

In another account, there was a lovely welcome series. Well written, nicely designed. But there was no sign-up form published anywhere on the site. The welcome series was there to welcome people, and nobody could get in. It’s like setting a beautiful table and never unlocking the front door.

And one finding comes up more often than you’d believe: the best-performing flow in the account, sitting switched off in drafts, while a weaker version runs in its place. In one account, the version in drafts had converted nearly six times better than the one that was live. In another, the shiny new welcome series hadn’t sent a single email. The old one, parked in drafts, was the highest-earning flow that account had ever had.

Nobody does this on purpose. Someone rebuilds a flow to a fresh template, or tidies up the account, and nobody goes back to compare the numbers. Set and forget sounds efficient. In practice it’s more like set and lose track.

The second fault is that most flows are boring. Really, properly boring.

This is where “I don’t know what to put in them” comes home to roost. When nobody knows what to say, the flow says whatever the template says. “Welcome to the family.” “Did you forget something?” “Your cart misses you.”

Your customer has seen every one of those more times than they can count. Their cart does not miss them. It’s a cart.

Think about what the flow has already pulled off. It caught someone at the exact moment they were most interested in you. They’d just signed up, or just put something in their cart. That’s the hardest part of marketing, done for you, automatically. Then the email that arrives is the inbox equivalent of a shop assistant asking, “Can I help you with anything?” Everyone gives the same answer: “Just looking.” And off they go.

Set and forget, and boring. Together, they cost far more than most founders realise.

Start with the fact that you’ve already paid for these people. Every person who triggers a flow arrived at your site somehow. A lot of the time, you paid Meta or Google to bring them there. They gave you their email address, or browsed, or added to cart. A broken flow, or a forgettable one, lets that paid traffic walk out the door after you’ve bought it.

Most founders also think of email as a retention channel. Something for people who’ve already bought. But Klaviyo’s data shows that close to half of flow revenue comes from new buyers – nearly 48%, compared with just 16% for campaigns. Flows are one of the main ways strangers become customers. So if your ads feel marginal and you can’t work out why, part of the answer may be sitting in your email account, not your ad account.

Another of our clients sells a consumable product in a category where the margins are tighter than most eCommerce brands enjoy. That changes the maths on advertising completely. They simply can’t let ad spend eat the share of revenue most brands can, because it would put them out of business.

For their numbers to work, they need a MER of 10. MER is your marketing efficiency ratio – your total revenue divided by your total ad spend. A MER of 10 means every dollar spent on ads has to sit alongside ten dollars of revenue. That’s a high bar. Most brands would find it a stretch.

They now clear it, predictably, month after month. A big part of the reason is email. Around 40% of their revenue comes from Klaviyo, and close to half of that comes from flows. Email revenue doesn’t cost them a cent in ad spend. So every dollar email brings in lifts their MER, and it gives the ads room to breathe.

The part I love most isn’t the ratio. It’s what the ratio gives them: control. When you know your revenue base is steady, you can make decisions from a position of confidence. Order more stock. Develop a new product. Increase ad spend because you want to, not because you’re desperate. That’s what a well-built email engine buys you. Not just revenue, but the freedom to decide what happens next.

Boring is expensive, precisely because email works. In one audit, people arriving from email converted at three times the rate of the rest of the site. Email was the warmest traffic the brand had. And yet, across everything sent, the account produced roughly one order for every 9,000 emails. The channel wasn’t the problem. The emails were.

Sometimes your best customers tell you outright. In one account, the post-purchase flow had an unsubscribe rate that Klaviyo flagged as poor. These were people who had just bought from the brand. They’d just handed over money. Within a few emails, a noticeable share of them were asking to hear less. They weren’t rejecting the brand. They were opting out of being bored by it.

Then there are the templates. Most default flows are built for a bargain hunter. There’s a discount code in the welcome email, and another one in the second cart email. A premium buyer works out the pattern pretty quickly. Signing up gets you money off. Leaving things in your cart gets you more money off. You’ve taught your most valuable customers to wait. 

I’ll go deeper on what that does to your email list in an episode later this year. For now, it’s enough to say a discount is a very expensive way to fill a gap where a better message should be.

When the spine is weak, campaigns get drafted in to prop it up. The flows aren’t bringing in enough, so the founder fills the gap the only way they can see. Another email. Another sale. Another “last chance”. The revenue line holds up for a week, so it looks like it’s working. But the list gets more tired and more people unsubscribe. Every week starts from zero again, solving “what’s for dinner?” at six o’clock, forever.

Meanwhile the flows, which could have been carrying that load every day without you, sit exactly where they were left.

So let’s talk about the five that matter most for a premium brand, in the order they earn.

Number one is the welcome series. In my experience, this is the flow that makes the most money in almost every account. It’s not the highest earner per email, but it’s the biggest earner overall, because every single new subscriber goes through it, at the moment they’re most curious about you. In one audit, the welcome series was the highest-earning flow in the account’s history, earning nearly double the category benchmark per person who received it.

The welcome series is where a new subscriber decides whether you’re just another brand in their inbox or one they’ll actually open. For a premium brand, its job is to explain why you’re worth full price. Why you made this, who it’s for, what makes it different, and why they can trust you.

The most common miss is a single email. A “Welcome to the family” subject line, a discount code, and nothing else. That’s not a welcome. That’s a receipt for an email address.

Number two is the abandoned cart or checkout flow. This one usually earns the most per email, because these people are closer to buying than anyone else on your list. They picked something, put it in the cart and got right to the edge.

What a lot of founders miss is why people leave. A premium buyer often isn’t leaving to find a cheaper price. They’re leaving to check you out. They’re reading reviews, asking a friend, or looking you up to see whether you’re legitimate. A considered purchase comes with a pause, and the pause is normal.

The common miss is answering that pause with “Did you forget something?” and a discount. They didn’t forget. They hesitated. A discount answers a question they didn’t ask, when what they needed was reassurance.

Number three is browse abandonment. This flow goes to people who looked at a product but didn’t add anything to their cart. It reaches a much bigger group than cart abandonment, because far more people browse than add to cart, and it catches interest earlier.

That matters most for premium, considered purchases. People often visit several times before they buy. A good browse abandonment flow is how you stay in the conversation between those visits.

The most common miss is simply not having one. The next most common is a weaker, duller copy of the cart email, as if browsing were just a lesser kind of abandoning. It isn’t. Someone browsing is still deciding, and they need a different conversation.

Number four is post-purchase, and it’s the flow I’d argue about longest.

This is where lifetime value is made, or lost. It also decides how soon a customer comes back, which matters almost as much as whether they come back at all.

In one account, only one in eight new customers ever bought again. Seven out of eight people who liked the brand enough to buy once never came back. That’s not a product problem. That’s a relationship that was never built.

The second purchase is the one that changes everything. Different studies put the numbers in different places, but they all point the same way. Once someone has bought from you twice, their odds of buying again roughly double. The second order is the moment a buyer starts becoming a customer.

Timing matters too. In my experience, if you can bring someone back for a second order within 60 to 90 days, you’ve given yourself the best chance of keeping them for years. Leave it much longer and the odds drop away. They haven’t decided they don’t like you. Life has simply moved on, and so has their attention.

There’s a cash flow reason as well, and founders feel it. You pay for your ads up front. You pay for your stock up front, often months before it sells. For a lot of brands, the first order only just covers what it cost to win that customer. A second order within a couple of months brings cash back into the business while you still need it – to fund the next production run, or the next month of ads – instead of a year down the track.

So what makes someone come back quickly? Two things. The first purchase has to be a genuinely great experience. And the brand has to know what that customer is likely to want next.

Kantar has looked at this using real shopping data, not just surveys. People who felt a strong connection to a brand were twice as likely to buy from it again within nine months as people who didn’t. The product might be identical. The relationship isn’t.

I’ll tell you about the best post-purchase experience I’ve ever had, because I’m still paying for it.

I’ve loved coffee since I was a kid. I’m told it’s genetic. Then at university I worked in hospitality, and I fell properly in love with good coffee. So as soon as I could afford it, I bought myself a really good home espresso machine.

I bought it from Toby’s Estate in Sydney. They sold machines, but they also roasted their own beans, ran a wonderful cafe and taught barista courses. And with the machine, they gave me a barista course for free.

That course turned me into a coffee snob. Or an addict, depending on who you ask. Within months, I’d bought the right grinder, then a proper tamper, then some beautiful cups – because once you can pull a good shot, you’re not drinking it out of a mug from the servo. And fresh beans, every fortnight, for years.

Think about what that business did. The first purchase wasn’t just a transaction. It was the start of me getting better at something I loved, and they were the ones who made me better at it. They’ve since been named the best coffee shop in the world. I’d like to think my fortnightly bean habit helped.

They also knew exactly what I’d want next, because they knew where the journey went. Grinder, tamper, cups, beans. Every one of those purchases felt like my idea.

That’s what a great post-purchase flow does. It doesn’t shove the next product at someone the day after they buy. It helps them get the most out of what they just bought, makes them feel they made a brilliant choice, and has the next step ready at the moment they’re ready for it.

The common miss is the opposite. A shipping notification, followed straight away by a cross-sell. “Thanks for your order – here’s something else to buy.” There’s nothing that helps them use what they bought, and no sense that they’ve joined something. And no idea, really, of what that customer is likely to want next.

Which brings me neatly to the beans.

Number five is replenishment, for brands that sell something people use up. Skincare, pantry staples, supplements, candles – or coffee beans, every fortnight. This flow reaches people right around when they’re getting low.

It earns because it’s useful rather than pushy. It feels less like marketing and more like a helpful nudge, and it’s the flow that turns a product into a habit.

The common miss is timing that ignores how long the product actually lasts. A face oil that lasts eight weeks and a pantry staple that lasts three need very different timing. Or there’s no replenishment flow at all, which leaves the reorder to chance – or to a competitor’s ad that happens to turn up at the right moment.

That’s the five, and the order matters. It follows your customer from the day they sign up to the day buying from you becomes a habit. The brands that build only the first two, welcome and cart, tend to hit a ceiling. They’re good at getting a first order and have nothing in place for the second.

A quick word if you sell something people buy once. If you make furniture, art or a coat that lasts a decade, replenishment doesn’t apply to you. That fifth slot goes elsewhere – a considered winback, or a cross-sell into something that genuinely belongs with what they bought. That’s your call to make. And it’s the point: the right five depend on your product and your customer.

I suspect most founders listening will see themselves in one of the two client stories from earlier.

Maybe you’re the first founder. Your margins are tight, ad spend chews up too much of every sale, and you need your revenue to work harder before you can afford to grow.

Or maybe you’re the second. The business is doing well, but you’re stretched. You and your team don’t have the capacity to hustle for every dollar, every week.

Two different brands, in different categories, with different email strategies. One leans more on campaigns and one leans heavily on flows. Yet both earn roughly a fifth of their total revenue from emails that send themselves. Built once, built well, and working every day whether anyone’s watching or not.

Which brings me back to where we started: “I don’t know what to put in them.”

The answer isn’t a better template. It isn’t more AI, or a VA working harder, or one more round of perfecting the colour three quarters of the way down. Every one of those is a way of filling the space without solving the problem.

The answer is knowing your customer well enough to say something they actually care about, in words they’d use themselves. What they were hoping for when they signed up. What almost stopped them from buying. What they’d tell a friend about you. Get that right and boring takes care of itself, because you’re not writing what every other brand writes anymore. You’re writing what only you could write, to the people who chose you.

Fixing your flows is the Saturday meal plan. You do the thinking once, properly, and it pays you back every day after.

The how is different for every brand. The timing, the number of emails, what each one says and whether an incentive ever belongs all depend on your customer, your product and your margins. A welcome series for a face oil and a welcome series for a hand-built dining table share a name and almost nothing else.

That’s exactly what we work through in a Brand Growth Strategy Session. We’ll look at what your flows are doing, what they’re missing and what your customers need to hear from them, and you’ll walk away knowing where your email is quietly leaking money. You’ll find the link to book in the show notes.

And before you go, here’s something to do this week. Log in to your email platform and open your flows. Check which ones are live, which are in drafts, and when each was last touched. Then read your own subject lines as if you were a stranger. If you wouldn’t open them, neither will anyone else.