Straight answer: Yes, you can run email marketing directly through Shopify using its built-in Shopify Email app, and for a lot of small stores it’s enough to start with. It handles broadcasts, basic segmentation, abandoned cart nudges and simple automations without another monthly bill, but it has real ceilings on personalisation, deliverability control and advanced automation that will eventually push serious stores toward a dedicated platform.
What Shopify Email includes
Shopify Email is built into every Shopify plan, from the $5 Starter tier right up to the $399 Advanced plan. There’s nothing to install. You open it from your Shopify admin under “Marketing,” pick a template, drag in your products, and send. Shopify pulls your product images, prices and descriptions straight from your store, which saves the fiddly copy-paste work you’d do in a separate tool.
The free allowance is 10,000 emails per month per store. Go over that and it costs $1 for every extra 1,000 emails sent. For a store with a list of 3,000 people sending two campaigns a month, that’s 6,000 sends and you’ll never see a bill. For a store with 15,000 subscribers sending weekly, you’ll blow past the free tier by mid-month and start paying, though the cost is still modest compared to most third-party platforms.
You get:
- Drag-and-drop campaign builder with Shopify-native product blocks
- Basic automations: welcome emails, abandoned checkout reminders, and post-purchase follow-ups
- Segmentation by order history, total spend, location and tags
- Open rate, click rate and “converted” tracking tied directly to Shopify orders
- A/B subject line testing on paid plans
That’s a real toolset, not a toy. I’ve seen a small skincare brand run their entire launch calendar through it for the first eighteen months of trading and never miss having something more expensive.
Where it starts to creak
Here’s the part most guides skip past too quickly: Shopify Email is a broadcast tool with some automation bolted on, not a marketing automation platform. The difference matters once your list grows past a few thousand engaged subscribers.
You can’t build multi-step branching flows based on behaviour like “clicked this link, didn’t buy in 5 days, send a different message than someone who clicked a different link.” You can’t do proper win-back sequences with conditional logic. You can’t sync email behaviour with SMS in one workflow. You can’t run lifecycle campaigns based on predicted customer lifetime value. If you want any of that, you’re looking at platforms like Klaviyo, Omnisend or ActiveCampaign, and the jump in complexity (and cost) is real. This is exactly the kind of decision covered in more depth in how to decide which email marketing platform is best for you, and it’s worth reading before you commit either way.
Deliverability is the other quiet problem. Shopify Email sends from a shared infrastructure with reasonably good reputation, but you have very little control over sending domains, warm-up, or granular suppression rules. If your open rates start sliding and you can’t work out why, you often can’t dig deep enough inside Shopify’s reporting to diagnose it. A dedicated ESP gives you that visibility. Shopify doesn’t, because it was never built to be your primary CRM, it was built to sell more of what’s already in your store.
Setting up your first campaign, step by step
If you’re starting from nothing, here’s the actual process:
- In your Shopify admin, go to Marketing, then click “Create campaign” and choose Email
- Pick a template (product launch, sale announcement, newsletter, or blank)
- Drag in a product block and it auto-fills the image, price and a “Buy now” button linked to your store
- Set your segment: all subscribers, customers who bought in the last 90 days, or a custom filter you build from order tags
- Write a subject line under 50 characters (Shopify’s own reporting shows shorter subject lines consistently pull higher opens for ecommerce sends)
- Send a test to yourself, check it on mobile, then schedule for a weekday morning between 9am and 11am in your customers’ time zone
For automations, go to Marketing then Automations, and turn on the pre-built ones: welcome series, abandoned checkout, and back-in-stock. These take about ten minutes each to set up and typically outperform manual broadcasts on conversion, because they’re triggered by actual customer behaviour rather than a calendar date.
A story from a real client
A candle brand I worked with had been on Shopify Email for two years, doing around £45 average order value and a list of roughly 8,000 people. They’d never touched a paid ESP because “it worked fine.” And it did, until we ran the numbers. Their abandoned checkout email was recovering about 9% of lost carts, which sounds fine until you realise industry benchmarks for a well-built three-email abandoned cart sequence sit closer to 15-20% recovery. Shopify’s native automation only allowed one email in that sequence at the time. One email, one shot, no follow-up nudge two days later, no different angle for people who’d viewed the product versus people who’d added a discount code and abandoned anyway.
We moved them to Klaviyo. Setup took about three weeks including list migration and flow building. Within the first full month, the multi-step abandoned cart flow alone recovered an extra £2,100 they hadn’t been capturing. The Klaviyo bill for their list size was around £140 a month. That’s not a hard decision once you see the number next to it, but you only see the number once you go looking, and most stores never go looking.
That’s the uncomfortable bit nobody likes to say out loud: staying on the free native tool past the point it serves you isn’t really about cost, it’s about avoiding the hassle of migrating. The tool isn’t the expensive part. The inertia is.
How this fits with the rest of your store
Email doesn’t work in isolation, and treating it as separate from the rest of your Shopify setup is where a lot of stores lose ground. If your product pages and landing pages aren’t converting, no amount of clever subject lines fixes that. It’s worth reading whether you can build landing pages using Shopify alongside your email plan, because the two should be built to work together, with campaigns pointing to pages designed for that specific offer rather than your generic homepage.
It’s also worth checking your baseline numbers before you spend money on any new tool. If you don’t know what a good conversion rate looks like for a store your size, you can’t judge whether your email programme is pulling its weight or just adding noise. A lot of stores chase a bigger list when the real gap is a weak product page converting at half the rate it should.
And if email is just one piece of a bigger automation puzzle, meaning you’re also trying to connect SMS, loyalty, or ad retargeting, it’s worth stepping back and asking which marketing automation tool fits your business rather than bolting extra apps onto Shopify Email one at a time until it buckles under the weight of workarounds.
When to stay, and when to move
Stay on Shopify Email if:
- Your list is under roughly 5,000 engaged subscribers
- You send fewer than four campaigns a month
- Your automation needs are simple: welcome, abandoned cart, back in stock
- You don’t need SMS, quizzes, or predictive segments
Move to a dedicated platform if:
- You’re losing carts you know you could recover with a longer sequence
- You want to segment by predicted spend, not just past spend
- You’re running email and SMS and want one dashboard, not two
- Your list has grown past 10,000 and the free-tier maths no longer makes sense
If you’re not sure which camp you’re in, an outside look at your setup often pays for itself fast. I’ve done this exact review for clients and it usually takes a couple of hours to spot where the money is leaking; you can see what that process typically covers in what an AI marketing audit costs and what it includes, which walks through the same kind of diagnostic I ran for the candle brand above.
Frequently asked questions
Is Shopify Email free?
Yes, up to 10,000 emails per month per store, included on every Shopify plan including the $5 Starter tier. Beyond that it’s $1 per extra 1,000 emails, which is still cheap compared to most standalone email platforms at similar list sizes.
Can Shopify Email do abandoned cart emails?
Yes, there’s a built-in abandoned checkout automation, but historically it’s limited to a single follow-up email rather than a multi-step sequence, which is one of the main reasons growing stores move to a dedicated tool like Klaviyo or Omnisend once recovery rates plateau.
Do I need a separate email platform if I already use Shopify Email?
Not immediately. If your list is small and your needs are simple broadcasts plus basic automation, Shopify Email covers it fine. You typically need to move once you want branching automation, SMS integration, or list sizes past 10,000 make the free tier irrelevant anyway.
Can I import an existing email list into Shopify Email?
Yes, though Shopify requires confirmation that contacts have opted in to marketing, and it will ask you to segment or tag imported contacts so you’re not sending to people who never subscribed through your store, which protects your sender reputation.
