The Email Flows Every DTC Store Needs Before Spending on Ads

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title: "The Email Flows Every DTC Store Needs Before Spending on Ads"
description: "The Email Flows Every DTC Store Needs Before Spending on Ads"
tags: ["dtc-email-flows", "klaviyo-welcome-flow", "abandoned-cart-email", "post-purchase-email-flow"]

canonical_url: https://dtcwise.com/blog/email-flows-before-your-first-100-sales

Most new DTC stores treat email as something to set up later, usually right after they've burned a few hundred dollars on ads and wondered why nobody came back. That order is backwards. Your dtc email flows are the only channel you actually own, and they keep working while you sleep.

Here's the flow setup I'd build before putting a dollar into paid traffic, in priority order.

1. Welcome flow (3 emails, not 1)

Catch people at the moment they're most interested in you.

• Email 1 within an hour of signup: deliver the discount code you promised. Nothing else.
• Email 2 at day 2: why the product exists. This is the one founders skip, and it's the one that builds a reason to buy beyond price.
• Email 3 at day 4: handle the objection you hear most often. Shipping time, sizing, whether it works on their skin type.

2. Abandoned cart (timing beats discounting)

Send the first one an hour after the cart goes quiet, not a day. By then the tab is closed.

Make it a reminder, not a discount. If you lead with 10% off, you're training every visitor to abandon on purpose. Save the discount for message two or three, and only for carts above your average order value. Otherwise you're paying to convert people who were going to buy anyway.

3. Post-purchase (the one that's usually missing)

Three separate jobs, three separate timings:

1. Confirm and set expectations while the parcel is in transit
2. Ask for a review a few days after delivery
3. Suggest a refill or companion product once they've used the thing

Timing depends on your shipping. If delivery takes two weeks, a review request on day three is just noise.

4. Browse abandonment + back-in-stock

Add these once the first three are running. One or two emails each, no more. Back-in-stock alerts are the cheapest revenue you'll ever make, assuming you let people subscribe to them.

The mistake that isn't a tooling problem

The most common failure isn't picking the wrong platform. It's buying a tool built for flows and then only sending newsletters.

A campaign is a one-off blast you write on a Sunday night. A flow is a set of rules that fires on behavior, and it keeps earning long after you've forgotten it exists. If you only have time for one, build the flows and skip the newsletter for the first few months.

Picking a platform by stage, not by feature list

• Under ~500 contacts: Klaviyo, Omnisend and Brevo free tiers are close enough. Pick whichever installs fastest on your store platform.
• Past a few thousand contacts: segmentation starts to matter, ActiveCampaign and Klaviyo pull ahead.
• SMS is core to the plan: Postscript and Attentive are built for it specifically.
• Shopify-only and want popups plus email: Privy and Seguno stay cheaper.

I keep the full shortlist with pricing and ratings in the DTCwise email and SMS category, which beats reading ten pricing pages yourself.

Read the full article at dtcwise.com.