Best Practices for Multi-Email Flows for High-Value Ecommerce Products

Hi James, good question. What has worked really well for us is being pretty deliberate about what we can send out and what can wait. Anything that is transactional or critical to the customer experience (e.g. order confirmations, shipping, etc.) should always send no matter what. Outside of that, most educational, follow up, behavioral, and reward-style emails can be sent or skipped if timing isn’t right, based on different rules.

We lean more towards flows when timing and individual behavior matter. Flows just handle this better since they trigger off specific actions and naturally pause or exit depending on what the subscriber does. Think action history (e.g. abandonment) and post purchase flows.

That said, campaigns still have their place for broader education and more general content.

For campaigns, I’d strongly recommend you send based on engagement. For example if you have segments such as, engaged last 30, 60, 90 days etc. you would send most emails to the highly engaged subscribers, send fewer to moderately engaged subscribers, and only essentials or none to the lowest engaged subscribers. It keeps volume under control, subscribers only receive emails based on how engaged they are with your brand and it helps maintain a healthy deliverability.

Smart sending is a good baseline, but we typically add extra flow filters and engagement rules on top. Things like making sure someone isn’t already in another key flow or requiring recent activity before they get a send.

On the content mix, especially for higher-ticket products, we’ve consistently seen better results when the majority of messaging focuses on education, reassurance, social proof, and objection handling. The more direct sales emails are usually sent to people showing clear intent or during relevant store promotions. As a loose rule of thumb, a 80/20 split for education/sales campaigns works well.

Overall, letting behavior and engagement dictate timing and frequency has been the best way to stay relevant without overwhelming people.

Can you point me towards a resource to learn how to make sure someone isn’t in another key flow? 

You’d usually use flow filters for this. There’s multiple ways you could make sure someone isn’t in another flow, but a simple flow filter you can use is the “What someone has done (or not done)” with the options: Person has “received email” (filtering) where “flow” equals (the flow you want to make sure someone is not in) “zero times” “over all time / since starting flow”.

This checks if the subscriber has received any emails from the flow you want to make sure they’re not in, and excludes them from the flow if that’s the case.

Here's a Klaviyo resource on flow filters: https://help.klaviyo.com/hc/en-us/articles/115002779051