How Do You Start Email Marketing When Using Shopify? A Step-by-Step Guide

The short version: Turn on the opt-in checkbox at checkout, pick a platform that's built for ecommerce rather than a generic newsletter tool, and build three automations (welcome, abandoned cart, post-purchase) before you ever write a "campaign." Most Shopify owners do this backwards, they obsess over which app to install and never build the flows that make money while they sleep.

Start with the list you already have (and probably haven't used)

Here's a thing nobody tells you when you open a Shopify store: you're already collecting emails. Every customer who checks out gives you theirs. Every browser who abandons a cart with an email field filled in gives you theirs. Most store owners let this sit in the Customers tab doing nothing for months.

I worked with a jewellery brand on Shopify last year, turnover around £38,000 a month, decent traffic from Instagram and paid ads, and 6,200 email addresses sitting in their customer list. Not a single email had ever been sent to them. Not one. When I asked why, the answer was "I didn't know where to start with Shopify email marketing," which is a version of a sentence I hear from at least one new client a month.

We set up two automations in an afternoon. Within 30 days, the abandoned cart flow alone recovered £2,140 in sales that would otherwise have vanished. The welcome sequence converted at 4.8% on first purchase. That's not a huge account, that's a small brand doing the basics for the first time. The list was never the problem. The silence was.

Step 1: Get the legal opt-in sorted before anything else

In your Shopify admin, go to Settings, then Customer privacy, and make sure the marketing consent checkbox is switched on at checkout. Without it you're collecting emails you legally can't email, which is a very common and very avoidable mess for UK and EU stores under GDPR and for anyone selling into California under CAN-SPAM style rules.

• Turn on the "Customers agree to receive marketing emails" checkbox in Checkout settings
• Add a signup incentive on your homepage or exit popup, 10% off is standard, some brands do free shipping on the first order instead
• Tag subscribers who opted in through checkout separately from anyone who only opted in through a popup, because their intent is different and your emails to them should be too

This step takes fifteen minutes and it's where roughly a third of new Shopify stores I've audited go wrong, either the box isn't on, or it's on but nobody checks the consent report before sending their first campaign.

Step 2: Decide whether Shopify Email is enough, or whether you need more

Shopify Email is built into every store, free for the first 10,000 sends a month and then $1 per additional 1,000. It's fine for a very early store, one that's doing under a hundred orders a month and just wants a basic newsletter and a simple abandoned cart nudge.

Where it runs out of road is automation depth and segmentation. You can't build a five-email welcome series with conditional branching in Shopify Email. You can't easily segment by predicted lifetime value or browsing behaviour beyond the basics. Once you're past that early stage, most stores move to Klaviyo, Omnisend, or a similar ecommerce-native platform that pulls in purchase history, product views, and cart data automatically through the Shopify integration.

I've written a longer breakdown of exactly what Shopify's own email tool can and can't do in this piece on running email marketing through Shopify, worth reading before you commit either way. And if you're stuck comparing Klaviyo against Omnisend against Mailchimp against half a dozen others, I've laid out how to make that decision in this guide to picking the right email platform rather than just going with whichever one your Facebook group is shouting about this month.

A cost note nobody puts in the headline

Klaviyo's free tier covers up to 250 contacts. Past that, pricing climbs with your list size, not your revenue. A store with 5,000 subscribers doing £3,000 a month in sales pays roughly the same monthly fee as one doing £30,000 a month with the same list size, somewhere in the £45 to £60 a month range at that tier. Nobody mentions that the cost scales with a number that has nothing to do with your profitability. Clean your list before you scale it. A subscriber who hasn't opened an email in six months is a cost, not an asset, and Shopify apps make it far too easy to just keep collecting names without ever pruning them.

Step 3: Build the three automations before you write a single newsletter

This is the part almost every "how to start email marketing" article skips, or buries under a list of twenty tips. If you only do three things, do these, because they run automatically once built and they typically account for 30 to 40% of total email revenue in ecommerce accounts I've looked at.

• Welcome series, three to five emails triggered the moment someone subscribes, introducing the brand, showing bestsellers, and delivering the discount code you promised at signup
• Abandoned cart flow, triggered within an hour of someone leaving items in their basket, usually two or three emails, the first a gentle reminder, the last with a small incentive if they still haven't bought
• Post-purchase flow, thanking the customer, setting delivery expectations, then following up a week or two later asking for a review and suggesting a related product

Build these once and they run for as long as your store exists. That jewellery brand I mentioned had a Shopify store for two years before either flow existed. Two years of abandoned carts leaking sales with nobody catching them.

Step 4: Segment before you blast everyone the same email

Once the automations are live, start splitting your list. At minimum, separate people who've bought from people who haven't, and separate your top 10% of spenders from everyone else. A VIP segment gets early access to sales and different language than a first-time browser who's never bought a thing.

This is also where it gets uncomfortable for a lot of Shopify owners: your list is probably smaller and less engaged than you think it is. Import numbers look impressive, "12,000 subscribers" sounds like an asset, but if only 800 of them open anything, you don't have a 12,000-person audience, you have an 800-person audience with 11,200 dead weight dragging your sender reputation down and inflating your Klaviyo bill. Sunset the inactive ones. Send them one last "still want to hear from us?" email and remove anyone who doesn't respond within two weeks. Deliverability improves fast once you do this, and I've watched open rates jump from the low teens to over 30% within a single billing cycle purely from cutting dead subscribers.

Step 5: Write your first actual campaign

Once the automations are running and the list is segmented, you're ready for a proper campaign, a one-off email announcing a new product, a sale, or restock. Keep the first few simple:

• One clear subject line, tested against a second version if your platform allows it, most ecommerce tools let you split test to 20% of the list automatically
• One product or offer per email, not five, decision fatigue kills click-through rates
• One clear call to action, repeated once near the top and once at the bottom

Send it midweek, late morning, and check opens after 24 hours and clicks after 48. Ecommerce benchmark open rates sit around 35 to 45% for a healthy, clean list, click rates typically land between 1.5 and 3%. If you're miles below that, it's usually the list hygiene problem from Step 4, not your writing.

Where a landing page fits into all this

Your email drives someone somewhere, and where it drives them matters more than most people admit. Sending traffic straight to your homepage from a campaign email is one of the quietest ways to waste a click, because homepages are built for browsing, not converting. If you're running a promotion, build a dedicated page for it rather than relying on your product page or homepage to do that job. I go into the difference in this piece on landing pages versus funnels, and if you want to know whether Shopify itself can build the kind of focused page a campaign needs, this one covers exactly what Shopify can and can't do for landing pages.

The uncomfortable bit about timing

Here's the part that annoys people when I say it out loud: you don't need a bigger list before you start. You need to start. I meet store owners with 200 subscribers who are "waiting until the list grows" before they bother with email, while their abandoned cart flow sits switched off, quietly losing sales every single day it's not turned on. Waiting for a bigger list to justify starting email marketing is like waiting until your shop is busier before you bother opening the till.

Two hundred engaged subscribers who receive a welcome email and an abandoned cart nudge will outperform two thousand ignored ones every time. Build the flows now, at whatever size your list is, and let them grow alongside your traffic rather than after it.

How this fits with the rest of your marketing

Email doesn't sit alone. If you're also running affiliates, referral partners, or paid ads, the same customer data feeding your Shopify email flows should be feeding those channels too. I've covered how affiliate partnerships work for ecommerce brands in this plain-English guide to affiliate programmes, worth a look once your email side is stable and you're ready to add another channel rather than juggling five half-built ones at once. And if you're running more than one tool, email, SMS, a loyalty app, a review app, it's worth stepping back and checking whether an automation platform could tie them together, which I break down in this comparison of marketing automation tools.

What I'd do in your first week

If you're starting from nothing today, here's the order I'd follow, in a single week:

• Day 1: turn on the opt-in checkbox, install your chosen platform, connect it to Shopify
• Day 2: build the welcome series, three emails is plenty to start
• Day 3: build the abandoned cart flow, two emails, one at an hour and one at 24 hours
• Day 4: build the post-purchase flow, thank you plus review request
• Day 5: segment your existing list into buyers and non-buyers
• Day 6: sunset anyone who hasn't opened an email in six months, if you're importing an old list
• Day 7: write and send your first campaign

That's a working email system in a week, not a perfect one, but a working one. Perfect can come later. Working can't wait.

See also Write for Us Digital Marketing Blog.

Related: writing for us on shopify.

Frequently asked questions

Do I need Klaviyo to start email marketing on Shopify?

No. Shopify Email is free up to 10,000 sends a month and covers basic newsletters and simple automations, which is enough for a very new store. Move to Klaviyo, Omnisend, or a similar platform once you need deeper automation branching, richer segmentation, or you outgrow the send limits.

How many subscribers do I need before email marketing is worth it?

There's no minimum. A welcome series and abandoned cart flow are worth setting up on day one, even with a handful of subscribers, because they run automatically and grow with your list. Waiting for a bigger list before you start just means more months of lost abandoned cart revenue.

What's the first automation I should build on Shopify?

An abandoned cart flow, because it targets people who already showed buying intent. A welcome series is a close second. Together these two typically drive the bulk of automated email revenue for a new Shopify store, often 30 to 40% of total email revenue combined.

How often should I email my Shopify list?

Once a week is a reasonable starting cadence for most small stores, rising to two or three times a week around sales or new launches. Watch your unsubscribe rate rather than a fixed rule, if it climbs sharply after a send, pull back and check whether the content or frequency is the issue.

Official documentation

• the UK Information Commissioner's guidance on direct marketing