Email is the only marketing channel where you own the audience. Social platforms change their algorithms, ad costs rise, search rankings move — but a list of people who agreed to hear from you stays yours.
Despite that, most Australian Shopify stores are running one abandoned cart email and a monthly newsletter, and calling it email marketing.
The revenue sits in automated flows: sequences that trigger on customer behaviour and run without anyone touching them. Set up properly, they typically account for 20% to 30% of a store’s total revenue — and unlike advertising, they don’t stop working when you stop paying.
Campaigns Versus Flows
Worth separating these, because they behave completely differently.
Campaigns are one-off sends. A newsletter, a sale announcement, a new product launch. They go to a segment at a moment you choose, and their revenue arrives in a spike then stops.
Flows are automated sequences triggered by behaviour. Someone abandons a cart, makes a first purchase, or stops buying for 90 days, and the sequence fires for that individual.
Most stores over-invest in campaigns and under-invest in flows, which is backwards. Campaigns need constant work to produce revenue. Flows are built once and generate revenue continuously, from customers already showing intent — and because that revenue is attributable to a specific trigger, it’s some of the easiest to measure when every other channel is arguing over credit.
The Five Flows That Matter
| Flow | Trigger | Emails | Typical share of flow revenue |
|---|---|---|---|
| Abandoned cart | Cart created, no purchase | 3 | Highest |
| Browse abandonment | Product viewed, no cart | 1–2 | Moderate |
| Welcome series | Signed up, not yet purchased | 3–4 | High |
| Post-purchase | Order placed | 2–3 | Moderate, plus reviews |
| Win-back | No purchase in 60–120 days | 2–3 | Lower, but cheap to run |
Abandoned cart
The highest-earning flow in almost every store, because intent is unambiguous — they chose the product and got as far as the cart.
Three emails outperform one. The first goes within an hour while the decision is still live, and simply reminds them. The second at 24 hours should address the most likely objection: shipping cost, returns policy, sizing, delivery time. Those objections are worth knowing precisely, and the six common causes of checkout abandonment tell you which one applies to your store.
The third at 72 hours is where a discount belongs, if you use one at all. Putting a discount in the first email teaches customers to abandon deliberately, and once you’ve trained people to wait for the code you’ll see it in your margins within months.
Worth saying plainly: a recovery email treats the symptom. If mobile checkout is broken or shipping cost appears too late, fix that first — the flow is recovering people the store shouldn’t have lost.
Browse abandonment
Lower intent — they looked but didn’t add to cart — so keep it light. One email, framed as helpful rather than pushy, works better than a sequence.
Welcome series
This is where most stores leave money on the table. Someone signs up, receives a discount code, and hears nothing again until the next newsletter.
A welcome series has a job beyond the first sale: explaining who you are and why you’re different, which is the thing that turns a discount-hunter into a customer. Three or four emails over a week, each with one idea — your story, what makes the product different, social proof, then the offer.
Post-purchase
Often ignored because the sale is already made. But this is when your customer is most engaged with your brand, and it’s the cheapest moment to secure a review or a second purchase.
Order confirmation and shipping notifications have some of the highest open rates in email. Use that attention for something more than tracking numbers — a review request here feeds the star ratings that show in your search listings, so it pays twice.
Win-back
Customers who bought once and disappeared. Cheaper to reactivate than to acquire, though returns diminish quickly past about 180 days.
This is also the flow that makes owning your customer list worth something. If you sell through a marketplace as well, those customers aren’t yours to win back.
Segmentation Beats Frequency
The most common mistake we see is sending everything to everyone. Your best customers and people who bought once eighteen months ago should not receive identical emails.
Start with three segments: engaged buyers, engaged non-buyers, and lapsed. That alone usually improves open rates more than any subject line testing, because you’ve stopped sending irrelevant email to people who then stop opening.
One consequence worth understanding: unsubscribes aren’t the main cost of poor targeting. Silent disengagement is. People stop opening, your sender reputation drops, and eventually your email lands in promotions or spam for everyone — including the customers who did want to hear from you.
Australian Compliance
The Spam Act requires consent, clear identification of your business, and a functional unsubscribe honoured within five working days.
Pre-ticked consent boxes don’t constitute consent. Purchased lists are a bad idea regardless of legality — they damage the sender reputation your genuine subscribers depend on.
Where to Start
This week: Check whether you have an abandoned cart flow running at all, and how many emails are in it. If it’s one, that’s the fastest revenue improvement available to you.
This month: Build a three-email abandoned cart sequence and a welcome series that does more than deliver a discount code.
Next 90 days: Add post-purchase and win-back flows, and split your list into engaged, non-buyer and lapsed segments before your next campaign. If you’re paying for an email app already, it’s worth confirming it’s one of the few earning its subscription.
Frequently Asked Questions
For most Australian ecommerce stores, once a week to engaged subscribers works well, less often to unengaged ones. Frequency matters less than relevance — people tolerate frequent email they want and resent occasional email they don’t.
No, and the abandoned cart flow is the clearest case. Discounting early trains customers to abandon on purpose. Try addressing objections first and hold the discount for the last email, if at all.
Campaign open rates of 25% to 40% are healthy for a well-segmented ecommerce list. Flows run considerably higher because they’re triggered by behaviour — abandoned cart emails commonly reach 40% or more.
For time-sensitive flows like abandoned cart, it can lift recovery meaningfully. It’s also more intrusive and more expensive per message, so use it selectively rather than mirroring your entire email programme.
Almost immediately, since they trigger on existing traffic. The revenue then compounds as more customers pass through them, which is the opposite of a campaign.