Abandoned Cart Email Flow: The 3-Email Setup That Recovers Sales

Every e-commerce store has people who get all the way to checkout and leave. They picked a product, typed in their email, and walked away. They are the warmest people your store will see all day, and an abandoned cart email flow is the cheapest way to win some of them back.

Most stores already have one. Very few have one that works. In this guide we walk through the setup we build for clients: which trigger to use, when to send, what each email should say, and the mistakes that make a flow look live while it earns nothing.

What an abandoned cart flow is (and what it isn’t)

An abandoned cart flow is a short series of automated emails sent to someone who started buying and didn’t finish. It runs on its own, every day, without anyone pressing send.

It’s easy to mix it up with two neighbouring flows, so here is the difference:

• Browse abandonment: someone looked at a product page but never added it to the cart. Lower intent, softer message.
• Abandoned cart: someone added a product to the cart, and in most setups also started checkout. This is the one this guide is about.
• Post-purchase: someone bought. They should never get a cart reminder for an order they already placed.

Good flows pass people cleanly between these three. Bad ones send all three messages to the same person on the same day.

Pick the right trigger

In Klaviyo with Shopify, you have two options:

1. Started Checkout. Fires when the shopper reaches checkout and enters their email. It works out of the box with the Shopify integration, and it reaches the people with the highest intent.
2. Added to Cart. Fires earlier, as soon as a product goes into the cart. It reaches more people, but it needs Klaviyo’s onsite tracking installed, and it only works for shoppers Klaviyo can already identify (subscribers who clicked an email, or people who filled in a form).

If you can only run one, run Started Checkout. If you have the tracking in place, run both: an Added to Cart flow for the early drop-offs and a Started Checkout flow for the people who got further. Then add a filter so nobody is in both at once.

The filters that keep the flow clean

The trigger decides who enters the flow. Filters decide who stays in it. These are the ones we set on every account:

• Placed Order zero times since starting this flow. The most important one. Without it, people who come back and buy still get “you forgot something” emails, which looks careless and costs you trust.
• Not in this flow in the last 7 days. Stops repeat browsers from getting the same reminder every time they open their cart.
• Smart Sending on. Skips people who just got another email from you, so a campaign and a cart reminder don’t land in the same hour.
• Can receive email marketing. Keeps the flow inside what each person agreed to, which matters even more if you sell into Europe.

Timing: when to send each email

Shoppers abandon carts for ordinary reasons: they got distracted, wanted to compare prices, or were waiting for payday. The timing should match that. A good starting point:

Start here, then let your own numbers move it. Stores with impulse products often do better with a faster first email. Stores with considered purchases, like furniture or high-end skincare, can afford a longer gap.

What each email should say

Email 1: the reminder

Keep it short. Show the exact product they left, with the image, name and price pulled straight from their cart, and one button back to checkout. No discount. Most of the people who come back from this email were going to buy anyway, and they only needed a nudge.

Subject lines that work here are plain and personal: “Still thinking it over?” or “Your cart is waiting”.

Email 2: the objection handler

Something stopped them. This email answers it. Pick the questions your customer service team hears most often and answer them here:

• Shipping cost and delivery time
• Returns and exchanges
• Reviews from customers who bought the same product
• Sizing, ingredients or materials

This is the email where brand voice matters most. A founder note, a short customer story or a straight “here’s how our returns work” often beats another product grid.

Email 3: the last call

Make it clear this is the final reminder. If you use an incentive, this is the place for it, and only here. Putting a discount in the first email teaches your customers to leave their carts on purpose and wait for the code.

You don’t have to discount at all. Free shipping, a free sample or a gift with purchase protect your margin and still give people a reason to finish today.

Add SMS, carefully

If you collect phone numbers with SMS consent, one text between email 1 and email 2 can recover sales that email alone misses. Keep it to one message, keep it short, and always include the link straight back to the cart. SMS is personal; three cart texts in two days is how you get unsubscribes.

The mistakes that quietly break the flow

These are the problems we find most often when we audit an account:

1. The flow isn’t actually live. In Klaviyo, each email in a flow has its own status: Live, Manual or Draft. A flow can look switched on while its emails sit in Manual and never send. When we started working with Steadfast Golf, their abandonment flows were live on paper and generating nothing.
2. No exit filter. Customers who already bought keep getting reminders.
3. Broken product blocks. The dynamic block shows a placeholder image, the wrong variant or no price, usually after a theme or product change.
4. The discount comes first. Covered above, and expensive over time.
5. Nobody looks at it. A flow is set up once and left alone for years while the store, the products and the customers change.

How to measure it

Look at the flow as a whole, not just open rates. Open rates have been unreliable since Apple Mail Privacy Protection, because opens get counted for emails nobody read. The numbers that matter:

• Placed order rate: the share of people in the flow who went on to buy.
• Revenue per recipient: what each person who entered the flow was worth.
• Revenue per email: which of the three emails is doing the work, and which one you should rewrite first.

Change one thing at a time, like the timing of email 1 or the subject line of email 3, and give each test enough traffic before you call it.

Checklist

• Started Checkout flow live, and every email in it set to Live
• Added to Cart flow, if onsite tracking is installed, with no overlap between the two
• Exit filter: placed order since starting the flow
• Re-entry limit and Smart Sending on
• Dynamic product block tested with a real cart
• Email 1 reminds, email 2 reassures, email 3 closes
• Incentive, if any, only in the last email
• One SMS at most, only to people with SMS consent
• Placed order rate and revenue per recipient checked every month

Want this built for you?

An abandoned cart flow is one piece of the email system we build and run for e-commerce brands, next to welcome, browse abandonment, post-purchase and win-back flows, campaigns and pop-ups. If you’d rather have it done for you, book a free audit call and we’ll show you where your flows are leaking revenue.