The Klaviyo Flow to Set Up Before Your Next Big Sale
You've got a sale coming up. You're planning the promo, getting the word out, lining up a few emails to your list. Almost all the energy goes into getting people to the sale.
Here's the part that quietly gets skipped. What happens to the people who show up, add to cart, and then don't finish? During a sale, that group is bigger than any other time of year.
For a lot of the Shopify brands I look at, there's nothing set up to follow up with them. No abandoned cart flow at all, or one that got switched on once a couple years ago and never touched since. Either way, the people closest to buying just leave.
If you set up or fix one Klaviyo flow before your next sale, make it the abandoned cart flow.
Why a sale makes this flow matter more
An abandoned cart flow is useful any week of the year. During a sale, it goes from useful to essential.
Think about what a sale does. You push people to the store, often just by emailing your list and posting on social. More people land, more people add to cart, and more people stall at checkout than any other time. That's just what high volume does. Some get pulled away. Some are price-comparing. Some want to think about it.
Without a Klaviyo flow to follow up, every one of those carts is a sale you worked to create, walking out the door. The abandoned cart flow catches the people closest to buying. They picked the product. They started checkout. They were a click away. A simple, well-timed nudge recovers a meaningful chunk of them, automatically.
What the abandoned cart flow actually does
It triggers when someone starts checkout and doesn't finish within a set window. Then it follows up for them, so you don't have to.
A solid version is short. Two or three emails over a day or two:
The reminder, a few hours later. Simple. "You left something behind," the items in the cart, a button straight back to checkout.
The nudge, the next day. Handle the hesitation. A line of social proof, an answer to the common objection, and during a sale, the real deadline ("the sale ends Sunday").
The last call, optional. As the sale closes, one final reminder that the cart and the sale price are both about to disappear.
It runs 24/7. A cart abandoned at 2pm and one abandoned at 2am get the same follow-up. That's the point of a Klaviyo flow. You build it once and it works every cart from then on.
Get it live before the traffic hits
The whole reason to handle this now is timing. It has to be live and tested before the traffic arrives. Turn it on halfway through the sale and you've already missed the first wave, which is usually the biggest.
So before the sale starts, do a dry run. Trigger it yourself. Check that the timing feels right, the links go where they should, and it stops the moment someone buys, so you're never nagging a customer who already checked out. That last one matters more than people expect. Nothing sours a new buyer like a "you forgot something" email an hour after they ordered it.
Go easy on the extra discount
One caution. During a sale, the sale is already the incentive. You usually don't need to stack another discount inside those cart emails on top of it.
Remind people the sale is on and their cart is waiting. That's often enough. Pile a second discount on top and you teach people that abandoning a cart is how you get a better deal, which is a habit you'll be paying for long after this sale ends.
Why it's worth it long after the sale
Here's the part that makes this more than a sale-week task. Once the abandoned cart flow is live, it doesn't turn off when the sale does. It keeps catching carts every day after, on full-price orders, quietly recovering sales you'd otherwise lose.
You build it for the sale. It pays you back all year. That's the difference between sending more email and building a system. Email is a system, not a send, and the abandoned cart flow is one of the pieces that proves it. It's also one of the five core flows every Shopify store should have, which I mapped out in 5 Klaviyo Flows Every Shopify Store Needs (First 90 Days).
If you've got a sale coming and no abandoned cart flow, or one that hasn't been touched since you set it up, that's worth fixing before the traffic arrives. Book a free call and we'll figure out what your sale needs and whether building or tuning your abandoned cart flow is the right move. No pressure. Just a straight look at what'll catch the most carts when it counts.
Email is a system, not a send.
— Alex