Open Klaviyo, connect Shopify, and the platform offers to switch on a handful of prebuilt flows in a few clicks. Most print shops do exactly that, then never touch the automation again.
The problem is those default templates were written for generic ecommerce - supplements, phone cases, fast fashion. Selling prints is a different kind of purchase. It's considered, emotional, often expensive, and the repeat cycle runs in months or years rather than weeks. A buyer who loved your work two years ago still loves it today. A supplement customer who lapsed two years ago has moved on.
That difference changes how every flow should be built: the timing, the offers, what each email says, and which flows matter most. This guide covers the seven flows an art store actually needs, in the order to build them, with the print-specific tuning the defaults miss.
If you haven't set Klaviyo up yet, start with the complete email marketing guide for artists - it covers platform choice and the fundamentals. This piece goes a level deeper into the automations themselves.
Three rules before you build a single flow
Every flow below follows the same three principles. They come from one fact: people buy art because of how it makes them feel and who made it, not because of a discount code.
1. Story beats discount. The default ecommerce playbook leans on urgency and price cuts. Art buyers respond to the maker, the process, and the meaning of the piece. Lead with that. Save discounts for the last email of a flow, if you use them at all. Your print margins (often around 80% on a print-on-demand operation) give you room, but a store known for constant discounts trains buyers to wait for the next one.
2. Slow the timing down. Generic flows fire fast because the purchase is impulsive. A £120 framed print is not an impulse. Give people room to think. Longer gaps between emails, and longer flows overall, fit how art actually gets bought.
3. Separate collectors from first-timers. Someone buying their third print from you is a different person than a cold subscriber. Klaviyo can branch and filter on purchase history. The single biggest upgrade over the defaults is treating repeat buyers differently from people who've never bought.
Flow 1: The welcome series
This is your front door and the highest-converting flow you'll build. It fires when someone joins your list through a popup, a waitlist, or a sign-up form, before they've bought anything.
Trigger: subscribed to your main list or submitted your sign-up popup.
Exclusion: existing customers. If someone already bought, branch them out, they don't need an introduction to your work.
The sequence:
- Email 1, immediate. Deliver whatever you promised at sign-up (early access, or the 10% code if you offered one) and introduce yourself in one or two lines. Keep it short.
- Email 2, day 2 to 3. Your story. Why you make what you make. This is almost always the most-opened email in the sequence, because it's the reason they followed you in the first place.
- Email 3, day 5 to 7. The work itself. Show two or three signature pieces and explain how they're made: the paper, the inks, the edition size. For prints this is the sell, not a throwaway detail.
- Email 4, day 10 to 14. A soft ask. Pick your two best-selling pieces, add a line of real social proof, and make it easy to buy.
Print-specific tuning: spend a whole email on materials and process. Collectors care about paper weight, archival inks, and how limited the run is. Generic stores skip this. For an art store it's what justifies the price. The welcome flow only works if people are landing on your list in the first place, so pair it with steady list growth from your popup, social bio, and Meta lead campaigns.
Flow 2: Abandoned checkout
Someone started checkout, entered their email, then left without paying. They're the highest-intent visitor you have outside of a buyer, and this flow brings a meaningful share of them back.
First, a distinction the defaults blur. Abandoned cart triggers when someone adds a product to their cart. Abandoned checkout triggers when they actually begin the checkout and give you an email. Checkout abandonment is higher intent and the one to build first. Add cart abandonment later if you want fuller coverage.
Trigger: started checkout, did not complete the order.
Exclusion: suppress anyone who then purchases, so they don't get chased for something they've bought.
The sequence:
- Email 1, 1 to 4 hours after. A simple reminder. Show the exact piece they were buying, large, with a direct link back to checkout.
- Email 2, 24 hours after. Handle the real hesitations. For art that means: will it fit my wall, how is it packed and shipped, what framing options exist, what's the return policy. Reassurance closes more art sales than urgency does.
- Email 3, 48 to 72 hours after. Optional. If the piece is a limited edition, honest scarcity works here ("edition of 50, a handful left"). A small discount is your last resort, not your opener.
Print-specific tuning: surface the artwork itself at full size in every email, and answer the wall-and-shipping questions directly. This flow works hardest when it's paired with paid retargeting - the same near-buyer sees the email and the ad, which lifts recovery on both.
Flow 3: Browse abandonment (the one most art stores skip)
Most print shops never switch this on. For an art store it's one of the highest-return flows you can run.
Here's why. Buying art is emotional window-shopping. Someone falls for a piece, gets pulled away by life, and forgets it existed. They never added it to a cart, so the checkout flow never fires. A single, well-timed nudge brings them back to a piece they already wanted. The consideration window for art is long, which is exactly what makes a gentle reminder work.
Trigger: a known subscriber viewed a product page and didn't add to cart.
Requirement: Klaviyo's onsite tracking has to be active on your Shopify store, and the visitor has to be identifiable (they've subscribed or clicked through from an email). It won't fire for anonymous traffic, which is another reason list growth matters.
The sequence:
- Email 1, 4 to 8 hours after. "Still thinking about [piece]?" Show the exact work plus two similar pieces in case it wasn't quite the one.
- Email 2, 2 days after. Optional. Show the collection or series the piece belongs to, framed as "in case you missed these."
Keep it light. This is a reminder, not a sales pitch. The logic is close to retargeting store visitors with ads, only it runs over email at zero media cost.
Flow 4: The post-purchase collector sequence
A first sale is the start of the relationship, not the end of it. This flow is where repeat revenue is made, and it's the one generic templates treat as a single "thanks for your order" email.
Trigger: placed an order.
The sequence:
- Email 1, immediately. Thank them in your own voice and set expectations. Many prints are made to order, so be clear about production time plus shipping, not just shipping.
- Email 2, after delivery. Branch the timing on your fulfilment window. Ask how it looks on the wall, request a photo or a review, and include a line on caring for or framing the print.
- Email 3, 3 to 4 weeks later. The next piece. Show the companion print, the rest of the series, or the next size up. Collectors buy in sets, and this is where that happens.
- Email 4, optional. A VIP invite that moves buyers into an early-access segment for future drops.
Print-specific tuning: the photo-and-review ask in email 2 does double duty. Those customer photos become the user-generated content that powers your ads. And the "complete the set" angle in email 3 is specific to art in a way the generic "you might also like" block never captures. The broader logic of turning one buyer into repeat revenue is covered in the post-purchase upsell guide.
Flow 5: Win-back the lapsed collector
This is where selling art has a structural advantage over most ecommerce. A lapsed supplement buyer has switched brands. A lapsed art buyer still has your print on their wall and still likes your eye. Taste is sticky.
Trigger: a past customer with no purchase and no email engagement in a set window. Use a longer window than generic ecommerce does, 120 to 180 days rather than 60 to 90. Someone who bought a print a year ago is still a warm lead, not a dead one.
The sequence:
- Email 1. "We've been making new work." Lead with your best recent pieces.
- Email 2. The story behind a recent release, the same way your welcome flow's story email worked the first time.
- Email 3. A genuine reason to come back: first look at the next drop, or a real returning-collector offer.
Print-specific tuning: resist the urge to copy the aggressive 30-day win-backs you'll see in Klaviyo's template library. They'll annoy the exact people most likely to buy from you again. Let the relationship breathe.
Flow 6: Back-in-stock and the new-drop waitlist
Prints sell out. Editions cap, popular sizes go, framed stock runs down. Two related automations turn that scarcity into demand instead of lost sales.
Back-in-stock notifies someone the moment a sold-out piece returns. The waitlist captures interest before a drop goes live and tells those people first.
Trigger: clicked a "notify me" button on a sold-out product, or joined a drop waitlist.
The sequence:
- Email 1, instant. "It's back" or "it's live," with a direct link.
- Email 2, around 24 hours later. A reminder with honest scarcity ("edition of 50, going fast").
Why it earns its place: waitlist subscribers are the most engaged buyers you have. They wanted the piece badly enough to raise their hand based on anticipation alone, before they could even buy. They convert at a higher rate than anyone else on your list. This flow is the email backbone of any limited drop campaign.
Flow 7: The sunset flow
The unglamorous one that keeps the other six working. Sending email to addresses that never open quietly drags down your sender reputation, and a damaged reputation lands all your email in spam, which kills the revenue from every flow above.
Trigger: subscribers with no opens or clicks in roughly 90 to 180 days.
The sequence: one or two final re-engagement emails ("are you still interested?"), then suppress anyone who still doesn't engage from your regular sends.
It feels counterintuitive to stop emailing people, but list quality beats list size every time. A smaller list that actually opens is worth far more than a big one that flags you as spam.
The order to build them
Don't switch all seven on at once. Build in revenue order and write each one properly before moving to the next:
- Welcome
- Abandoned checkout
- Post-purchase
- Browse abandonment
- Back-in-stock and waitlist
- Win-back
- Sunset (set it up early for hygiene, but it's the last to demand your attention)
Get the first three live and written in your own voice before you add the rest. As the email marketing guide explains, a strong welcome, checkout, and post-purchase trio does the bulk of the heavy lifting on flow revenue.
| Flow | Triggers when | Build priority |
|---|---|---|
| Welcome | Someone joins your list | 1 |
| Abandoned checkout | Checkout started, not finished | 2 |
| Post-purchase | An order is placed | 3 |
| Browse abandonment | Known subscriber views a product | 4 |
| Back-in-stock / waitlist | "Notify me" or waitlist sign-up | 5 |
| Win-back | No purchase or opens in 120 to 180 days | 6 |
| Sunset | No engagement in 90 to 180 days | 7 |
Three mistakes print shops make with flows
1. Leaving the default copy in place. The templates ship with lines like "Hey there, you left something behind." Generic, discount-led, and instantly forgettable. Rewrite every email in your voice. Your list signed up for you, so sound like you.
2. Discounting too early and too often. A code in the first email of every flow trains buyers to wait for the next one. Your margins give you room to discount, but the perception of value is part of what you're selling. Protect it.
3. Setting and forgetting the quality, not just the execution. Flows run on their own, which is the point, but that doesn't mean the writing is done. Review open, click, and revenue per flow quarterly. Kill or rewrite the emails that aren't pulling their weight.
What good performance looks like
Automated flows reliably out-earn one-off campaigns on a per-send basis, because they reach people at the exact moment of intent. Across ecommerce, automations drive an outsized share of total email revenue from a small share of total sends. You can sanity-check your own numbers against Klaviyo's published benchmarks, and the metrics table in the complete email guide covers the open, click, and revenue-per-recipient ranges that well-run artist stores tend to hit.
The pattern to expect: welcome and back-in-stock flows should be among your highest revenue-per-recipient, because intent is high. Browse abandonment is lower volume but very efficient. Win-back is your lowest converter but still worth running, because re-engaging a past buyer costs you nothing.
Frequently asked questions
Do I need all seven flows from day one? No. Build the first three (welcome, abandoned checkout, post-purchase) and get them written in your voice. Those cover most of your flow revenue. Add the rest as you have time.
Klaviyo or Shopify Email for flows? Klaviyo, if you're serious about automation. The branching, segmentation, and purchase-history filters these flows depend on are far stronger than Shopify's built-in email tool. The Shopify setup guide covers connecting the two.
How many subscribers do I need before flows are worth building? Flows fire per person, so they pay off immediately. Even a small list benefits from a welcome and a post-purchase sequence the moment they're live.
Should my flows include discounts? Sparingly. Keep them out of the first emails, and reserve them for the final message of a flow if you use them at all. Constant discounting erodes the value of work that should feel collectible.
How often should I review my flows? Quarterly. Check performance per flow, rewrite weak emails, and update the featured pieces so a subscriber from six months ago isn't being shown a sold-out edition.
Flows are the closest thing email has to passive income. Built once and written well, they run in the background and turn browsers into buyers and buyers into collectors while you make the next piece.
Artvertise builds and manages Klaviyo for the artist stores we run paid social for, because email and ads work far better together than either does alone. If you'd like a second set of eyes on your current setup, our free audit includes a review of your flows alongside your Meta and Pinterest ads.
We can run this whole system for your store.
Free audit. We open your account, tell you what's broken, and quote it like a real adult.
Book the audit →