Shopify & Klaviyo Automated Emails: From Design to Optimization (Segmentation, Scenario Building, and Operational Improvement)

Many merchants use email newsletters to share information about new products and events. Email-based CRM is a highly effective strategy for driving growth on Shopify.

In this article, we'll show you how to set up automated emails that deliver the right message at the right time to your customers, helping you grow your business more effectively.

With a well-designed and well-executed CRM strategy, automated emails can account for 20–30% of your total revenue. We encourage you to dive in and give it a try.

This article covers the basics of using Klaviyo, but if you'd like a comprehensive guide to CRM and Klaviyo on Shopify — from fundamentals to advanced usage — please refer to the article below.

StoreHero leverages its proprietary growth platform to support businesses with highly detailed operations that manual workflows can't achieve, and to drive business growth through large-scale execution of marketing initiatives. If you're struggling to increase sales on Shopify, feel free to reach out. =>Download our free service overview here

Identifying Segments with Growth Potential

The first step is to segment your newsletter subscribers based on specific conditions.

The key to effective segmentation is identifying groups where an additional offer could move them closer to a purchase. For example, if you're seeing a high drop-off rate between cart additions and completed purchases, or if high-purchase-rate customers are plateauing, those are prime targets.

Map out the buyer journey on your site — the steps customers take before completing a purchase — and assess how many newsletter subscribers fall into each segment. Start with the segments that have the most potential, and work through the following steps in order of priority.

Creating Segments

Let's actually create segments in Klaviyo. Since you can create as many customer segments as you want in Klaviyo and edit them later, go ahead and create any segments that come to mind.

Here are some commonly used segments and how to set them up in Klaviyo.

Customers Who Purchased a Popular First-Order Product

Identify the products most commonly purchased as a first order, then create a customer segment for those who bought them. (You can find "most commonly purchased first-order products" in Shopify's Reports section.)

Under "What someone has done," select Placed Order or Fulfilled Order, and use "Where" to specify the product or collection.

Customers Approaching Coupon Expiration

Klaviyo allows you to generate and distribute unique, time-limited coupons to individual newsletter subscribers at any time. Since this feature is only available via Klaviyo Flows, the logic is based on the number of days since the customer received the Flow email.

Under "What someone has done," select "Received Email at least once in the last ● days," and use "Where" to set "Flow equals {name of the Flow distributing the coupon}."

Customers Approaching Their Predicted Next Purchase Date

Create a segment condition based on a specific number of days after the previous purchase. Since the repurchase interval varies by product, make sure to calculate this in advance.

In Klaviyo, go to "What someone has done" and select "Fulfilled Order at least once before ● days." Use "Placed Order" for purchase date or "Fulfilled Order" for shipping date, depending on your preference.

Customers Who Added Items to a Wishlist

Klaviyo doesn't have a built-in wishlist feature, so you'll need to integrate it with a separate Shopify app.

For example, integrating the Wishlist Plus app with Klaviyo allows customers who add items to their wishlist in Wishlist Plus to be imported into Klaviyo as customer data.

When integrated with Wishlist Plus, create the segment by selecting "Swym-AddToWishlist at least once over all time" under "What someone has done."

For detailed instructions on integrating Wishlist Plus with Klaviyo, check out this article: How to Integrate and Use Wishlist Plus with Klaviyo.

Klaviyo also comes with several preset segments that are commonly used. Feel free to refer to those as well.

Deepening Your Understanding of Each Segment

To determine what emails to send to each segment, you need to deepen your understanding of those customers. Many merchants have a general sense from day-to-day customer interactions, but you can also take a more quantitative approach by analyzing purchase behavior from order data or by aggregating customer surveys and reviews.

For example, for the "customers who purchased a popular first-order product" segment, reviewing the following data from Shopify order records, surveys, and reviews can help you understand your customers and decide what to offer in your automated emails.

• What products do customers buy after their first popular purchase?
• How many days until their next purchase? (by product)
• What motivated customers to purchase the popular first-order product?

Running SQL queries that combine order and customer data can yield a wealth of insights, but Shopify's built-in Reports section (available on the Standard plan and above) also offers quite detailed aggregation. This is useful not just for automated emails but for customer understanding overall — we highly recommend checking it out.

Designing Scenarios for Each Segment

Once you have a clear picture of your target customers and the most effective offers, it's time to design the email scenario for each segment.

Scenario design involves deciding "when," "which products," and "what kind of offer" to send to each segment.

For example, for the "customers who purchased a popular first-order product" segment, you would design a scenario that sends an email shortly before their predicted next purchase date, featuring the products they're most likely to buy next, with messaging informed by the reasons they bought the first product.

Klaviyo Flows include a feature called Conditional Split, which lets you branch the scenario within a target segment to create more granular, personalized messaging.

For example, after sending the first email to the "customers who purchased a popular first-order product" segment, you could use a Conditional Split to separate those who made a purchase from those who didn't, and then send different follow-up messages to each group.

Resolving Conflicts Between Scenarios and Adjusting Frequency

As you set up more effective automated emails, you'll end up running multiple scenarios simultaneously. It's not uncommon to have 10 or more automated emails cycling through at the same time.

If left unchecked, customers may receive far more emails than intended, which can lead to unsubscribes. Prioritize your scenarios, ensure consistency across automated emails, and design for maximum growth impact.

For example, if you're running the following three email scenarios simultaneously, what should you be careful about?

• Automated email after first purchase
• Automated email after wishlist addition
• Regularly scheduled broadcast newsletter

For instance, mid-way through the wishlist follow-up email scenario, you should use a Conditional Split to check whether the customer has completed their first purchase. If they have, end the wishlist scenario for those customers.

Additionally, Klaviyo offers a feature called Smart Sending for each email, which lets you set a condition like "don't send this email if the customer has received any other email within the past ● hours."

Designing and Operating a Growth Workflow

Continuous improvement is essential to refining your growth initiatives over time.

To implement improvements quickly in the field, it helps to define your criteria for success and your action plan in advance. At StoreHero, we call this process "workflowization" — clarifying which KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) to track and which tactics to apply before you begin operations.

Here are some examples of KPIs and improvement tactics.

Open Rate / Open Count

• Primary influencing factors: Subject line and send timing
• How to measure: Viewable in Klaviyo Flow Analytics
• How to monitor:
  
  
  
  • Is it higher or lower compared to other scenario emails?
  • Is it trending up or down over time?
• Improvement ideas:
  
  
  
  • Is the subject line compelling enough for the target segment to open?
  • Is the preview text appropriate?
  • Is the send timing optimal?

Click Rate / Click Count

• Primary influencing factors: Email body content, offer, and CTA (Call to Action)
• How to measure: Viewable in per-email Analytics within Klaviyo Flows
• How to monitor:
  
  
  
  • Is the CTA receiving the most clicks?
  • Is the click rate higher or lower compared to other scenario emails?
  • Is it trending up or down over time?
• Improvement ideas:
  
  
  
  • Is the offer compelling to the target segment?
  • Is the CTA clear and easy to understand?
  • Is the link visually easy to identify?

Purchase Rate / Purchase Count

• Primary influencing factors: Offer content and the landing page
• How to measure:
  
  
  
  • Revenue and CVR (Conversion Rate) for the landing page in Google Analytics
  • Revenue and CVR for the specific scenario email in Google Analytics
  • Review the landing page using a heatmap tool
• How to monitor:
  
  
  
  • Is revenue and CVR higher or lower compared to other emails?
  • Is it trending up or down over time?
• Improvement ideas:
  
  
  
  • Is there alignment between the email's CTA and offer and the landing page content?
  • Is the landing page clear and easy to navigate? Is the path to purchase smooth?

Once you've defined these criteria in advance, launch your automated emails, and as data accumulates, use your workflow to drive ongoing improvements.

Executing CRM Operations with StoreHero

StoreHero supports merchants who want to grow their Shopify sales with thorough execution of growth initiatives.

For CRM in particular, we leverage our growth platform StoreHero to enable highly targeted operations — including email, LINE, and my-page product recommendations and offer messaging based on customer purchase history, attribute data, and per-product/SKU performance and inventory data — delivering continuous growth through a level of operational detail and initiative volume that manual workflows simply cannot achieve.

We currently offer a free store diagnosis. If you have challenges with CRM or growth initiatives in general, please don't hesitate to reach out. Learn more about our free store diagnosis

Summary

In this article, we covered how to design automated emails to drive growth using Shopify and Klaviyo. By designing high-probability scenarios based on analysis and hypotheses, and by clarifying your improvement approach before you start, you can iterate quickly once you're in the operational phase.

While we used Klaviyo as the example, much of this guidance applies to other CRM tools with similar features. Make the most of your email marketing!

StoreHero can support you across all aspects of Shopify growth, including Klaviyo strategy. Feel free to reach out. =>View StoreHero's Service Overview (Free)