Welcome Email Series: What To Send A New Subscriber, And When

A welcome email series is the one flow that starts because someone asked to hear from you. A cart flow starts when a shopper leaves, and a win-back starts when a customer goes quiet. In our ranking of Klaviyo flows by revenue per recipient, the welcome flow and the abandoned cart flow are the two biggest earners.

If your welcome flow is one discount email set up at launch, it does one job once. It doesn’t know whether the subscriber confirmed their address, bought on day two, started a checkout, or joined through a form that promised a code. Each of those is a build choice in Klaviyo, and this guide takes them in order.

Our position is that a welcome email series should be built around the first purchase and not around the brand story. The brand story belongs in the series as the reason to buy. The trigger, the delays, the splits and the coupon are set by one question: has this person ordered yet?

Klaviyo defines a welcome series as the flow that introduces subscribers to your brand and converts them into first-time customers (opens in new tab). The second half of that definition decides the build. A series that introduces the brand has no reason to check for an order, and a series that exists to produce a first order has to check before every email.

That check changes what the series contains. Subscribers who already bought need a different path from subscribers who haven’t. A coupon needs a rule about who still gets it on day seven. A reminder needs to know whether the code was used.

A Klaviyo welcome series is a list-triggered flow. You connect it to one list (opens in new tab), and that list should be the one new subscribers join when they sign up. A contact reaches the list, and starts the series, in four ways: a sign-up form, a subscribe page, a manual add, or the Lists API or Subscribe API.

The flow starts when someone newly joins the list (opens in new tab). A list-triggered flow can’t carry a trigger filter, because trigger filters belong to metric-based, custom-object-based and price-drop flows (opens in new tab). A welcome email series is controlled by profile filters and splits, which the sections below cover.

On Shopify, the signup has to reach the list before anything can fire. The Shopify integration’s subscriber sync has to be on (opens in new tab) for a welcome series to trigger from Shopify forms or checkout. With it on, customers who subscribe through any Shopify sign-up form (opens in new tab), a footer form included, sync to the list you chose, and a customer who subscribes through the checkout checkbox is queued for the welcome series too. The sync takes a list and not a segment.

Flow status is the last thing to confirm. A flow or a single message in it is draft, manual or live. A draft flow doesn’t send and doesn’t queue anyone, and a manual flow queues people and sends nothing until someone releases the messages by hand.

Every list in Klaviyo is double opt-in by default (opens in new tab). A new subscriber gets a confirmation message immediately after signing up (opens in new tab), and only subscribers who confirm are added to the list and queued for the welcome series. The confirmation link is valid for 72 hours, which is three days.

On a default list, the first welcome email is the second message the subscriber receives, and it’s immediate after the confirmation click, not after the signup. A subscriber who never confirms isn’t on the list and isn’t in the flow. If your form promised a discount and the code lives only in email one, that person never sees it.

Klaviyo recommends leaving double opt-in on for your main list, and says the setting protects deliverability by making sure contacts have a valid email address. The setting is per list. New lists are created with your account’s default opt-in setting, and changing the default doesn’t update lists that already exist.

Importing profiles to a list triggers any list-triggered flow (opens in new tab) attached to it. Turn the welcome flow off before an import, or every imported contact is queued for a series written for someone who signed up a minute ago. List imports don’t trigger double opt-in, so nothing stands between the upload and the first email.

Adding a single profile from the list’s own page behaves the same way: it skips double opt-in and triggers the list’s flows (opens in new tab). Adding someone to the list from their profile page doesn’t start the flow, and neither do merged profiles, merged lists or integrations that add profiles with backdated consent.

By default a person goes through a list-triggered flow once. Re-entry is a setting with three options: no re-entry, re-entry whenever the profile newly qualifies, and re-entry after a time period you choose. No re-entry is the default for a new list-triggered flow, so someone who unsubscribes and signs up again a year later doesn’t get the welcome series a second time unless you change it.

The prebuilt welcome series Klaviyo features (opens in new tab) contains three emails. The first sends immediately, introduces the brand and collects email preferences. The second sends three days later and asks for a like or a follow on social media. The third sends four days after the second and shows best-selling products.

That’s seven days from the first email to the last. Klaviyo recommends three emails over the course of a week for a standard welcome series, and says each audience is different and the way to find what works is to test. Its flow library holds other variations of the welcome series, including ones built around discounting and around separating customers from non-customers.

In that default, one email is about the brand, one is about social channels, and one points at products, a week in. It’s set to send to every new subscriber on the list with no filters, and splits are something you add. None of the three emails checks for an order.

Klaviyo’s own build advice points the other way from its default. If your sign-up form offers an incentive, Klaviyo says to include it in the first email of the series. The sequence below is the one we’d build for a Shopify brand on Klaviyo: it keeps the three-emails-in-a-week cadence and changes what each email is for.

Email one sends immediately and delivers what the form promised. If that’s a code, the code is the first thing in the email, with the products most first orders start with underneath it. The brand introduction is the two or three sentences that explain why those products are the ones to start with.

Email two sends three days later, only to subscribers who haven’t ordered. It carries the best sellers and the evidence a first-time buyer wants, such as reviews, sizing, shipping times and the return policy. This is also where a preference question fits: one click that says what the subscriber is shopping for. That answer is zero-party data, and it’s most useful when the next email changes because of it.

Email three sends four days after that, again only to subscribers who haven’t ordered. It reminds them of the code and says when the code expires. A subscriber who ordered between emails one and three never sees a discount reminder for an order they’ve already placed.

Klaviyo documents the purchase logic as two splits. The first sits directly beneath the trigger (opens in new tab) and asks whether the profile has placed an order at least once over all time. People who’ve never ordered go down the NO path into the series above. Existing customers go down the YES path, which matters on Shopify because a shopper who ticks the checkout checkbox is usually completing an order.

The second split sits before the coupon email and asks whether the profile has placed an order at least once since starting the flow. The coupon email goes on the NO path. Klaviyo’s stated reason is that this helps you avoid giving out discounts unnecessarily.

Position matters because of when Klaviyo evaluates a split. A profile is checked against the split’s paths when it reaches the split (opens in new tab), and not again afterward. A split at the top of the flow can’t catch someone who buys on day two. Only a split placed before a later email does, which is why the sequence above checks for an order before email two and again before email three.

A profile filter is the other tool, and it behaves differently. Klaviyo checks profile filters when someone enters a flow and before each flow action (opens in new tab), such as an email or a text. Someone who fails the filter at entry doesn’t enter. Someone who fails it mid-flow has that action skipped and keeps moving to the next step, where they’re skipped again for as long as the filter stays failed.

A filter on zero orders since starting the flow therefore ends the series for a buyer without sending them anything else. A split can route the same buyer to a different email, such as an order follow-up or a second-purchase recommendation. Use the filter when buyers should simply stop, and splits when buyers should get something else.

The same splits handle audiences as well as orders. A series can branch on the form a subscriber used, the product category they named in a preference question, or whether they came in at checkout. Our guide to Klaviyo segmentation covers how segment conditions work inside flow filters, and a customer segmentation strategy decides which of those branches get their own emails.

A new subscriber who starts a checkout on day two is now in two flows: the welcome series and the abandoned cart flow. Klaviyo’s control for that overlap is Smart Sending, which limits how many messages someone can receive (opens in new tab) in a set window. It works by skipping the later message, whichever flow that message belongs to.

So the cart email can cancel welcome email two, or welcome email two can cancel the cart email, depending on which one sends first. A shopper with a started checkout is closer to an order than a subscriber three days into a series, so the cart email is usually the one to protect. Smart Sending can be turned off per message, and turning it off on the first cart email keeps that email sending. Our guide to the abandoned cart email flow covers its timing and its own discount rules.

Smart Sending has one window per channel. The email window is 16 hours by default and the text message window is 24 hours by default. It applies to marketing messages, and transactional messages are never skipped.

A flow message skipped by Smart Sending isn’t rescheduled (opens in new tab). In a welcome email series, that has two consequences. If email two is set to send less than 16 hours after email one with Smart Sending on, email two is skipped. If a subscriber received any other marketing email inside the window, the skipped message could be the one carrying the code.

Smart Sending is a per-message setting, and prebuilt flows don’t all ship with it in the same state. Klaviyo’s guidance is to check the setting on each flow email (opens in new tab) and not assume it’s off. Turn it off on welcome email one, because that email delivers something the subscriber was promised. Leave it on for the later emails, where a skip costs a reminder and not the offer.

The discount is three separate decisions: whether to offer one, where the subscriber first sees the code, and who still gets it later in the series.

Does a welcome series need a discount? It doesn’t. The three-email series Klaviyo features has no offer in it, and Shopify’s brand story welcome template (opens in new tab) holds its discount until the fourth email and sends it only if no order has been placed. If your form doesn’t promise a code, start without one and put the offer in the last email, on the NO path of a purchase split, so you pay for the discount only on orders the first two emails didn’t produce.

If the form does promise a code, the question is where it appears. Klaviyo calls it a best practice to add the coupon code to the form’s success message (opens in new tab), where the subscriber can copy it. On Shopify, a unique coupon delivered that way is applied to the customer’s cart at checkout automatically when they complete the form.

That choice interacts with double opt-in. A code in the success message reaches the subscriber before they’ve confirmed, so a shopper who signed up to buy today can buy today. It also hands a code to an address that may never confirm. A code that lives only in email one requires the confirmation click first, which protects the list and puts a second step between the shopper and the order.

Our recommendation is to show the code in the success message when the form promises one, repeat it in email one, and guard every later mention with a purchase split. The shopper who signed up mid-session gets what they were told they’d get. The list still fills with confirmed addresses, because the series itself only reaches people who clicked.

In a flow, each recipient gets their own single-use code (opens in new tab), made of your prefix and 10 random digits. Klaviyo creates the code at the moment the message sends, so a preview shows a placeholder. If the same coupon tag appears in several messages in the flow, the recipient receives the same unique code each time, which means the reminder in email three repeats the code from email one.

Flow coupons can expire after a year, after a set number of days or hours, or on a specific date. The real expiration always runs 24 hours beyond what you set. A code set to expire after 7 days works for 8, so write the reminder email’s deadline from the setting and let the extra day absorb late clicks. Dates are set in UTC, and the activation date you see in Shopify can differ from the one you expected.

Three limits affect the offer itself. Klaviyo coupon codes work for nonrecurring orders only, not subscription orders such as those run through Recharge, so a subscription brand’s welcome offer needs a different mechanism. A text message can carry one coupon code, where an email can carry more. And a form’s unique codes have a static fallback code that appears only if the unique codes run out, so set that fallback to a code you’re willing to see shared.

Before launch, complete the form with a test address and compare the code on the success step with the code that arrives in the first email.

Shopify ships its own welcome automations in the Shopify Messaging app, including two discount templates that are email only: a single discount email and a discount series (opens in new tab). The single email sends when a customer subscribes through a form on your online store. The series sends a discount email on signup, then two brand-building emails, then a discount reminder if no purchase has been made.

That’s a welcome series with four emails (opens in new tab): a welcome with a discount, an invitation to follow social channels, best-selling products, and a reminder to people who haven’t ordered. Customers who subscribed at checkout are excluded, which keeps a welcome discount from arriving right after a purchase. Shopify’s default leads with the discount and checks for an order before the last email. Klaviyo’s featured default does neither.

The two systems listen for the same event. Shopify’s automation starts when someone subscribes through an online store form, and Klaviyo’s sync sends people who subscribe through a Shopify form to your list and into the welcome series. A store with a Shopify welcome automation active and the Klaviyo sync on has two systems set to answer one footer signup, each able to send its own discount.

Check whether a Shopify welcome automation is active before you turn on a Klaviyo welcome email flow. Run one or the other. If Klaviyo holds your segments, your cart flow and your campaigns, the welcome series belongs there too, because the purchase splits depend on order data the rest of your flows already use.

Klaviyo’s advice is to keep the email welcome series separate from the SMS welcome flow (opens in new tab), because people opt in to each channel separately. The two flows also start differently. The email series is list-triggered, and the SMS welcome flow is metric-triggered (opens in new tab), starting from the SMS subscription metric.

Consent doesn’t carry across. Being on your email list doesn’t mean you have consent to text someone (opens in new tab), and on a form the SMS field has to be optional and can’t appear to be required (opens in new tab). Our guide to SMS marketing for ecommerce covers the consent rules and list building in full.

The decision specific to a welcome text is whether it carries a code. CTIA, the wireless industry’s trade association, publishes voluntary messaging best practices (opens in new tab). They list welcome texts as informational messages, because the first text a business sends fulfills the consumer’s request.

A code changes the category. CTIA’s wording is, “Adding a call-to-action (e.g., a coupon code to an informational text) may place the message in the promotional category.” Promotional messages call for the consumer’s express written consent, and CTIA is explicit that its examples aren’t legal advice.

CTIA’s practices also put a confirmation first. After an opt-in, the sender should send a confirmation message before any other messaging, with the program name, customer care contact information, how to opt out, a disclosure that messages are recurring and how often, and any associated fees.

Klaviyo’s quiet hours follow the same line. Quiet hours apply to text messages, and a flow text that lands inside them waits in a queue and sends when quiet hours end (opens in new tab). Klaviyo treats the first message as a subscription confirmation unless it contains marketing content. Klaviyo notes you may want to turn quiet hours off for the first welcome text, and that if you do, you may need to remove all marketing material from it, coupons included.

That leaves two clean builds. A first text with no code is a subscription confirmation, so quiet hours can be turned off on that message and it can send at any hour, with the offer following in a second text that respects quiet hours. A first text with a code is a marketing message that waits for morning when someone signs up at midnight. Klaviyo recommends rewarding anyone who subscribes to SMS, so most brands will want the offer in one of the two.

One interaction catches held texts. Klaviyo checks quiet hours and Smart Sending at send time, with quiet hours first. A text held overnight is checked against the 24-hour SMS Smart Sending window when it wakes, and if the window hasn’t cleared, Klaviyo skips the message.

The welcome series sends your first email to every new address, which makes the list’s opt-in setting a deliverability decision. Mailbox providers measure complaints as a rate. Google tells senders to keep spam rates reported in Postmaster Tools below 0.10% (opens in new tab) and to avoid ever reaching 0.30%, and Yahoo sets a spam rate below 0.3% (opens in new tab).

Both providers also tell senders to confirm addresses. Google’s guidelines say to confirm each recipient’s email address before subscribing them, and Yahoo’s say to send new subscribers an email asking them to click to confirm their opt-in. That’s the same mechanism as Klaviyo’s default double opt-in, recommended by Google and Yahoo for mail sent to their own inboxes.

For the build, that settles the opt-in question for most stores: keep double opt-in on the main list and recover the lost immediacy with the code in the form’s success message. Our guide to email deliverability covers the Gmail and Yahoo sender rules in full, including authentication and one-click unsubscribe.

Klaviyo publishes benchmarks for welcome series emails (opens in new tab) as revenue per recipient at the 25th and 75th percentile, grouped by the account’s annual revenue and average order value. These are Klaviyo’s figures for Klaviyo’s customers, aggregated across thousands of accounts. The table below is the middle of its range.

Klaviyo defines the metric as revenue attributed to flow emails divided by the number of delivered emails. The denominator is emails, not subscribers. Take a store in the $1M to $5M band with an average order value between $83 and $112, adding 10,000 subscribers a year to a three-email series. If every subscriber is sent all three emails and all of them are delivered, that’s 30,000 delivered emails, which comes to $15,300 a year at the 25th percentile figure of $0.51 and $117,900 at the 75th percentile figure of $3.93.

Because the denominator is delivered emails, the figure moves when the series changes shape. Splitting buyers out of emails two and three removes sends to people who’ve already ordered, which can raise revenue per recipient without adding any revenue. Judge a rebuilt welcome email series on total attributed revenue and first orders as well as on the per-email figure.

Work through the build in this order, because each step depends on the one before it:

BLKDG is a Klaviyo agency in Denver, and flows are part of what our Klaviyo work covers: welcome, cart, browse abandonment, post-purchase and win-back, each built on the right trigger. If your welcome email series is still the single email from launch day, or you’ve inherited an account and don’t know what it sends, talk to our Klaviyo email marketing agency team. The Growth Audit is free, and it’s not a sales call.