The vast majority of customers who interact with your products are unlikely to make an immediate purchase. In many cases, this is due to an information gap.
Which means the customer has questions about your product that haven’t been answered and that lack of information is preventing them from completing the purchase.
One tool brands use to close information gaps is email nurture flows. Which are essentially sequenced emails that provide detailed information on different aspects of your product or service.
In the marketing world, they’re most associated with B2B service providers. But that doesn’t mean they can’t be a powerful sales tool for online stores.
We are Email Kong, a specialist email marketing agency that has built hundreds of nurture flows for our client base of over 150 DTC brands. In this guide we reveal our agency’s approach to building nurture flows for ecommerce brands.
Let’s get started.
How Ecommerce Nurture Flows Differ From B2B
Form Submissions Don’t Trigger The Flow
Your trigger is store behavior, as form submissions on DTC stores are mostly reserved for customer complaints.
A sales pipeline nurtures a lead who downloaded an eBook for example; your Shopify store has no equivalent event. What it does have is a running feed of store behavior which can be used to trigger flows:
- Viewed product
- Added to cart
- Started checkout
- Placed order.
Klaviyo's documentation on flow triggers and filters is blunt about the order of work. Once you have set a trigger you cannot change it, because trigger filters, profile filters and dynamic content all depend on it. If you change your mind later, you have to clone the flow and rebuild it.
Your Nurture Window Is Days, Not Quarters
You are working in days here, not the quarters a sales pipeline plans around. Ecommerce never has that long. Opensend's compiled data on time to first purchase is direct about it: "Average time to first purchase in eCommerce is 2-3 days." The same dataset records that "90% of buyers convert by day 12 of engagement."
That sets your nurture window, and it sets it in days. Four emails across roughly two weeks covers the stretch where the decision is live. Stretch the same four across a quarter and you are writing to people who made their minds up in week one.
A second reason to keep the nurture window tight: your contact already sits inside a dozen other automations firing on a weekly cadence. A nurture flow stretched over a quarter competes with all of them.
It Ends At A Product Page, Not A Sales Call
A pipeline nurture ends when someone books a meeting. Yours ends when they place an order, and that difference decides how you build the exit.
An order is an event your ESP records against the profile, so you can filter on it. Klaviyo documents the canonical version against cart recovery: "This means you have to add a profile filter to target this specific behavior: Has placed order zero times since starting this flow." Your nurture sequence wants the same filter. Set it once and your sequence stops selling to people who bought.
How To Build A Nurture Flow, Email By Email
In a perfect world you will have dedicated nurturing flows for almost every product. That takes time to build, so the best place to start is with your high-ticket items as these are the ones which take the most convincing to sell.
Depending on the nature of your business (i.e. a complex industry) you may need a generic nurture flow to introduce your product range and guide customers to what they actually need (assuming they don’t already know).
The following steps is how our agency would build an email nurture flow for one specific product.
Email One Answers The Objection That Stopped The Order
Your first email lands two or three days after the customer was last on your site, while they’re still hesitant about making the purchase.
The triggers here will be either viewing a product URL, adding to cart, or abandoning checkout.
This email needs to inspire consumer confidence to get the sale over the line. It does this by addressing the biggest buying concern people have about the product and resolving it beyond all doubt.
If you’re not sure what concerns your customers have about specific products, head straight to your customer service inbox.
Whatever your support inbox answers most often is the same thing stopping the order, so make sure your email speaks directly about this complaint and provides a fix.
Email Two Teaches Before It Discounts
Email two carries education and no offer. Discounting this early teaches your subscriber that waiting produces one, and you will pay for that on every order they place afterward.
Teaching emails perform better as automations than as campaigns, and the reason is structural. Mariel Bacci-Kilroy, co-founder of the retention agency Sticky Digital, wrote on Klaviyo's blog that only about a quarter of what enterprise brands send is true campaign material. Educational and evergreen content, in her experience, performs better as automated flows triggered by a customer action.
Email Three Puts A Real Customer In Front Of Them
A conditional split is worth adding here if your email nurture flow serves more than one kind of buyer, because the proof that convinces a first-time shopper is rarely the proof that convinces a returning one.
Education leaves something it cannot close on its own. Your reader now understands the product and still has no idea whether it worked for anyone like them, which is a different kind of doubt and needs a different kind of evidence.
Email three is therefore a named customer and what happened to them. A review with a name attached, a photo, a specific result. Brand claims will not do this job, because your reader has already discounted them.
Email Four Makes One Ask
You’ve provided all of the information they need to know. Now you need to directly as for the sale in this email without any other distractions.
Omnisend recorded that "Click-to-conversion jumped 53% YoY, rising from 5.9% to 9%". Fewer people are clicking, and the ones who do buy far more often. A reader who has stayed with you through three emails and still clicks on the fourth is about as high-intent as your list gets, so give them exactly one place to go.
Email Spacing Follows The Buying Decision, Not A Calendar
Default delays are the fastest way to get this wrong. Consideration length moves with price. On Opensend's numbers, impulse buys close inside a week. Considered purchases run thirty to ninety days, and high-ticket items stretch past that.
Pull your own time-to-first-order data before you set a single delay. A supplement brand whose customers reorder monthly and a furniture brand whose customers buy once a decade need completely different spacing, and neither of them needs the three-day default the template arrived with.
Where The Flow Ends And Your Other Flows Begin
Smart Sending Skips The Email And Never Sends It Later
Klaviyo's Smart Sending setting checks whether a contact received another marketing email inside a window before it lets the next one through. Their documentation sets it out: "Remember that each channel has a separate default Smart Sending window: 16 hours for email, 24 hours for SMS, 24 hours for push notifications, and these windows operate independently from one another."
Two consequences follow from that, and the second one catches people out. Klaviyo's own documentation states that "Skipped messages are not automatically rescheduled, so you must resend them manually if needed." Send a campaign on Tuesday morning and Tuesday's nurture email can vanish.
Order and shipping confirmations are safe from it. Klaviyo exempts transactional messages in both directions, so a receipt neither gets suppressed itself nor blocks the next marketing send.
Check your campaign cadence against that window before you launch. We covered the wider version of this problem in our guide to how often you should email once you count your flows.
A Failed Flow Filter Skips The Email And Keeps The Profile
This one surprises people who have built flows for years. Klaviyo's documentation says it plainly: the platform does not remove anyone from a flow when they fail its filters at a single step, and contacts carry on being scheduled for the next step. Your message is skipped, the profile stays in the sequence, and it gets re-evaluated at each email.
That has a consequence worth knowing about. A common workaround for suppressing in-flow contacts from campaigns is to write a profile property at the start of the sequence and clear it at the end.
In r/Klaviyo, u/Optat1vely put the trap plainly: "Just be careful, if the participant fails the flow filter, the profile property won't be set to no." The clearing step gets skipped exactly like a message, so your contact stays flagged as active indefinitely. The suppression you built then inverts: the people it was meant to protect become the ones it excludes from every campaign you send.
A Segment That Mirrors The Flow Suppresses Campaigns Cleanly
Build your suppression outside the flow instead. A segment defined on the same conditions updates itself as people enter and leave, and no skipped step can desynchronise it.
Exclude that segment from your campaign sends. Apply the same thinking across your other automations, because someone inside an active cart sequence should not also be receiving browse abandonment emails. Our abandoned cart flow guide deals with that collision. Which flows you suppress against which is a decision worth writing down, and our browse abandonment guide covers the other side of it.
Moving Buyers Out Of Nurture And Into Retention
Placing an order changes what your customer needs from you, and a nurture flow has nothing useful left to say to them. Your profile filter on order count handles the stop. Where they go next is a separate decision.
In Klaviyo that hand-off is not automatic. Your order-count filter stops the nurture sends, but nothing moves the profile anywhere. The post-purchase flow has to be triggered by the same Placed Order event, and replenishment by its own timer. Where neither is built, the buyer sits between flows and hears nothing through the window a repeat purchase is most likely. Our post-purchase email guide covers what that sequence should carry.
The cost of getting this wrong will not show up in your reports. A buyer who receives a discount code an hour after paying full price has learned something about your brand that no campaign will unteach.
You will see it in your numbers before you see it in your revenue. Unsubscribes are the early warning here, well ahead of any change in open rate.
Jaina Mistry spent close to a decade at Litmus and nearly two decades in email, and she puts numbers on it: "Generally, anything under 1% is healthy. Under 0.5% is even better. At Litmus, we averaged around 0.3%."
She is blunt about how the damage accumulates: "It’s not usually one big mistake that teams make; it’s a series of ignored warning signs." And she names lifecycle work specifically: "This is especially critical in lifecycle, where frequency tends to be higher than in one-off campaigns. You need to watch unsubscribes as a leading indicator of fatigue."
Decide where genuinely unengaged contacts go, too. A sunset flow ends the relationship cleanly and keeps your engaged segment intact, which protects inbox placement for everyone still listening. Suppression and segmentation are one job here. Both of them are list hygiene, and list hygiene is deliverability work.
How To Find What Your Flow Set Is Missing
The standard five flows are the ones that get built first, and an account can run all of them while nothing is addressed to the subscriber who never converted. It is hard to spot from the inside, because every flow you inspect is working exactly as designed.
That blind spot is the specific thing our free Klaviyo audit is built to find. It is the same reading we walk through in our guide to finding where your email marketing is losing money. Per-flow reporting shows healthy numbers on the five automations you have and stays silent about the sixth you never built, because something that does not exist generates no bad metric to notice.
Book your free Klaviyo audit and find out which population your flow set is missing.
Questions We Get About Nurture Flows
Two questions come up most often once the build above is on the table.
Can A Nurture Flow Run Alongside Browse Abandonment
It can, though you should decide which one takes priority when both trigger. A contact who is browsing and also sitting in your nurture sequence can receive two emails on the same day, and Smart Sending may then skip one without telling you which. Watch conversion rate and click rate on both flows for a fortnight after you turn the second one on.
Setting Delays When You Have No Purchase History
Use your welcome series as the baseline. Look at how long after opt-in your existing customers placed their first order, then set your delays from that. A rough number from real data beats an accurate-looking default.