How to plan and build a Klaviyo welcome series

What is a welcome series for?

A welcome series is the set of automatic emails someone receives after joining your list. They have just asked to hear from you, so it's your best chance to explain who you are before you ask them for anything.

The series we built was for a business selling high-value jewellery online, with no showroom. Its customers are asked to spend real money, sight unseen, with a business they have only just found. So the goal written at the top of the plan was trust, not conversion; sales are meant to follow from it. The early emails show rather than sell, and the most direct ask is saved for the last one.

One exception: if your sign-up form promises a discount, the first email has to deliver it. Breaking the first promise you make to a subscriber is a poor way to start.

A seven-email welcome series structure

Each email has one job. This is the order the finished series used, described in terms that suit most small product businesses.

• 1. The origin story: who you are and why you started. Real people and a real decision, with a photo of the people rather than the product.
• 2. Behind the scenes: where the work actually happens, unpolished. Ours was built around a short video. Most email apps won't play embedded video (caniemail's tables show Gmail removes the video tags and Outlook.com blocks playback), so the email showed a still frame with a play button that linked out to the video.
• 3. How it's made: the path from raw material to finished product and what that means for the customer. Specific beats vague: what you do yourselves, and where things come from.
• 4. Proof: genuine media coverage and genuine customer reviews, quoted accurately.
• 5. Removing the risk: what happens if the customer isn't happy, how they see what they're getting before they commit, warranty and shipping. Every word checked against the published policies.
• 6. The range: the main product categories, each with a real photo and one line, so readers can go straight to what interests them.
• 7. The invitation: the one email that asks directly, with a clear next step and a plain list of what's included.

How far apart should welcome emails be?

Our plan front-loads the series while subscribers still remember signing up, then spaces it out: email 1 immediately, then day 2, day 4, day 7, day 10, day 14 and day 18. Each send is held to daytime hours, between 8am and 7pm, so nobody gets a marketing email at 3am.

The bigger risk to pacing is your regular newsletter. Someone in the welcome series who also gets your campaigns can receive several emails a week from a business they have only just met. We recommended a segment of people currently in the series, excluded from campaign sends until they finish it.

Why every welcome email ends with a P.S.

Every email in the series ends with a short P.S. telling the reader what the next email is about. It's the connective tissue. It turns seven separate emails into one story and gives people a reason to open the next one.

It also creates a dependency you have to manage. Partway through the build, one email was replaced with a different topic, and the P.S. in the email before it had to be rewritten or the two would no longer join up. Whenever you change an email, re-read the P.S. above it.

The final email's P.S. is different. There is no next email to tease, so it tells subscribers what to expect from here on: the business will only email when it has something worth showing them.

Check every claim before the flow goes live

Welcome emails are often written from a design mockup, and mockups are written for effect. Check every factual statement against the business's own published policies and website before it goes in. These are the ones worth checking every time.

• Refunds and returns. Match the email to the published returns policy: the window, who pays return postage, and what is excluded. If the policy undercuts the email's message, the fix is the policy, not cleverer wording.
• Certificates, guarantees and inclusions. List only what the business actually provides and can show. If you are not sure, ask the owner before the email goes out, not after.
• Reviews. Use genuine reviews the business can point to, credited the way the business shows them. The ACCC is clear that it is against the law for a business to create fake or misleading reviews.
• Preheaders. The hidden preheader (the preview line shown beside the subject in the inbox) is some of the most visible text in the whole email, and it is easy to miss when the body changes. Check it every time a claim changes.
• Links. Open every link in the finished email, not the mockup. An obvious-looking address, such as a reviews page, may not exist on the store.

Setting up the welcome flow in Klaviyo

Klaviyo calls an automated series a flow. These are the settings we specified and the pieces that mattered.

• Trigger: start the flow when someone is added to your main sign-up list, and let each person enter only once.
• Flow filter: Placed Order zero times since starting this flow. Klaviyo re-checks filters before every message, so a subscriber who buys partway through stops getting sales emails and can be picked up by your post-purchase emails instead.
• Footer details: {{ organization.name }} and {{ organization.full_address }} pull the business name and address from Settings > Organization. If nobody fills those in, the footer prints blank, so complete them before the first send.
• Unsubscribe: {% unsubscribe_link %} and {% manage_preferences_link %} give you the web addresses to link from your own footer design. Klaviyo requires an unsubscribe link in every email and adds a basic one if it can't find yours.
• Images: host them in Klaviyo's own image library, not on a free code-hosting site or a test server. If an image address breaks later, every email already sent breaks with it. Klaviyo gives each upload its own unique address, so keep a record of which file went where.
• Tracking: turn on UTM tracking and name each email consistently, so your analytics shows which email did the work.

Before you switch it on

Read the series the way a subscriber will, and measure what you can. We also ran an automated check across all seven emails at desktop and phone widths, looking for sideways overflow, broken images, missing alt text and images stretched past their real size. It found a signature image being stretched about 1.4 times on phones, which weeks of looking at screenshots had missed.

• Send all seven emails to a test profile and read them in order, as a subscriber would.
• Compare each preheader with its subject line and the claims in the body.
• Test on a phone and a desktop, in light and dark mode.
• Open every link and play every video link. One of ours only worked with the full unlisted video address; the short version returned a not-found page.
• Confirm the business name and address appear in the footer, and that unsubscribe works.
• Get the business owner to confirm every factual claim in writing: refunds, warranties, timeframes, what's included.
• Check the HTML size of each email against Gmail's clipping limit.

Common questions

How many emails should a welcome series have?

There's no fixed number. We used seven because the business had seven distinct things to show, each worth an email. If you can't name the job an email is doing, cut it.

Should a welcome series include a discount?

If your sign-up form promised one, yes, in the first email. Otherwise it's a judgement call. We wrote this series without one, because for a considered, high-value purchase a discount can undercut the price and teach subscribers to wait for a sale.

Why is my Klaviyo email footer blank?

The organisation tags pull from Settings > Organization in your Klaviyo account. If the business name and address haven't been entered there, the tags print nothing. Fill them in and send yourself a test.

Do welcome emails need an unsubscribe link in Australia?

Yes. The ACMA says welcome journeys are not exempt from the spam rules, because they often contain commercial content. Each email needs consent behind it, has to identify the sender, and must include a working unsubscribe.