Most email marketing advice for Shopify starts and ends with Klaviyo. Klaviyo is excellent - deep Shopify integration, powerful segmentation, industry-leading flow logic. It's also $45/month minimum once you have a few hundred subscribers, and $200+/month for a growing list. When you're just starting, that's a meaningful cost for a tool you don't yet know how to use well.
Here's a pragmatic path: start with free or low-cost tools, set up the essentials, and migrate to Klaviyo when the economics justify it.
Shopify Email: the built-in option
Shopify Email is Shopify's native email marketing tool, included at no additional cost with all plans (10,000 emails/month free, then £0.65 per 1,000 after that). It's not as powerful as Klaviyo, but it covers the basics surprisingly well.
What Shopify Email does:
- Campaign emails - broadcast emails to your subscriber list
- Basic automation - abandoned checkout email, welcome email, product review requests, win-back sequences
- Product insertion - drag product blocks directly from your Shopify catalogue into emails
- Basic segmentation - filter by purchase history, subscriber status, location
- A/B testing on subject lines
What it doesn't do: advanced flow logic, granular behavioural segmentation (product viewed, collection browsed), predictive analytics, or SMS. For a store under 1,000 subscribers doing under £10k/month, these limitations don't matter much.
To get started: Shopify admin → Marketing → Email campaigns. Your automations live in Shopify admin → Marketing → Automations.
Mailchimp: the free alternative
Mailchimp's free plan allows 500 contacts and 1,000 emails/month - sufficient for a genuinely early-stage store. Its Shopify integration syncs customers and purchase data, enabling basic post-purchase and abandoned cart automations.
Mailchimp's limitation is that its Shopify integration has become less deep than it was before the companies had a commercial dispute. It works, but it's not as tight as Klaviyo's integration. Use it as a starting point; plan to migrate as you grow.
Omnisend: the Klaviyo alternative
Omnisend positions itself specifically against Klaviyo for Shopify merchants. Its free plan covers 250 contacts and 500 emails/month. Paid plans start at £14/month - significantly cheaper than Klaviyo at comparable subscriber counts.
Its Shopify integration is solid, its automation builder is capable, and it includes SMS marketing alongside email. For budget-conscious stores that need more than Shopify Email's basic segmentation but aren't ready for Klaviyo's price point, Omnisend is a credible middle option.
The three things to set up regardless of which tool you use
Whatever email tool you start with, these three automations should be set up before you drive any significant traffic to your store. They recover lost revenue and build customer relationships with zero ongoing effort once configured.
Abandoned checkout email. Sent 1–6 hours after a customer starts checkout but doesn't complete it. This single automation typically generates the highest ROI of any email marketing effort - the customer was interested enough to start buying, and often just needs a reminder. Set it up in your first week.
Welcome email for new subscribers. A single email sent when someone subscribes to your list (but hasn't purchased yet). Introduce your brand, your story, and your best products. Don't lead with a discount - save that for the end of a welcome sequence if you run one. A well-written welcome email converts a portion of new subscribers into first-time buyers.
Post-purchase review request. Sent 7–14 days after an order is delivered. Asks the customer to leave a review. Product reviews are your strongest conversion tool, and they only accumulate if you ask for them. Set this up before you have any product reviews - you'll have your first reviews within weeks.
When to upgrade to Klaviyo
Migrate to Klaviyo when:
- You have 500+ subscribers and your basic tool's segmentation is limiting what you can send
- You're doing more than £5,000/month and want to implement multi-step abandoned cart sequences, win-back flows, and VIP customer segmentation
- You're running paid advertising and need tight integration between your email list and your Meta/Google ad audiences
- The Klaviyo monthly cost is less than 5% of your email-attributed revenue (at that point, the ROI is clear)
Don't migrate prematurely. Learning a new tool takes time, migration can cause temporary email performance disruption, and Klaviyo's advanced features only pay off when you have enough subscribers and purchase data to use them meaningfully.
