Setting up email marketing on Shopify

Email is the one marketing channel you own. The list doesn't disappear when an algorithm changes or an ad account gets suspended. For most stores it's the highest-return channel, and most stores run none of the automations that produce that return.

Shopify Email or a dedicated platform

Shopify Email is built in, sends from your store, uses your product data directly, and is free up to a monthly send allowance. For a store sending a newsletter and running the basic automations, it's genuinely sufficient and there's no integration to maintain.

A dedicated platform gives you deeper segmentation, more sophisticated automation branching, better reporting and multi-channel messaging. Worth it when email is a serious revenue channel rather than an occasional newsletter.

Start with Shopify Email. Move when you can name the specific thing it won't do.

The four automations that matter

Set these up before writing a single newsletter. They run continuously and produce most of email's revenue.

1. Abandoned checkout. The highest-return email in ecommerce. Someone reached checkout and didn't finish. One email after an hour, a second after a day. Include what was in the cart and a direct link back.

2. Welcome series. Triggered by signup — usually a popup. Deliver whatever you promised, introduce the brand, make one recommendation. Two or three emails.

3. Post-purchase. After delivery: how to use it, care instructions, a review request. This reduces returns and support email as much as it drives repeat orders.

4. Winback. Someone who bought and hasn't returned in 90 or 180 days, depending on your category.

Add browse abandonment and back-in-stock later. Those four cover most of the value.

Segments, not blasts

Sending everything to everyone trains people to ignore you and damages deliverability. Shopify's customer segments let you target on real behaviour:

• Bought once versus repeat customers.
• Bought in a specific category.
• High lifetime value.
• Subscribed but never purchased.
• Lapsed.

A smaller, relevant send outperforms a large irrelevant one on revenue and protects your sender reputation. If segments need to reflect data from another system, that's a CRM integration.

Consent and list hygiene

Not optional, and not just compliance — it's what keeps email working.

• Collect consent explicitly. An unticked box the customer ticks, with clear wording.
• Record where and when it was given.
• Sync consent both ways between Shopify and your platform. Someone who unsubscribes in one and keeps receiving mail from the other is a compliance problem.
• Honour unsubscribes immediately, everywhere.
• Remove hard bounces and suppress people who haven't opened anything in a year. Sending to dead addresses is what damages deliverability.
• Name the platform in your privacy policy.

Deliverability

Your campaigns and your order confirmations share a domain reputation. Damage one and you damage the other, which is how a store ends up with confirmation emails in spam folders.

Three things:

1. Authenticate the sending domain — SPF, DKIM and DMARC, covered in business email.
2. Warm up gradually if you're sending from a new domain or platform.
3. Watch complaint and bounce rates, and act when they rise.

What to measure

Not open rates — they've become unreliable. Watch:

• Revenue per recipient, per campaign and per automation.
• Click-through rate.
• Unsubscribe rate, which tells you when you're sending too much.
• Automation revenue as a share of total. For a healthy store, automations should out-earn campaigns.

That last number is the one to fix first if it's low: it means you're doing manual work that four automations would do continuously.

The order of work

1. Set the four automations live.
2. Add an email capture form with a real offer.
3. Authenticate the domain.
4. Build three segments.
5. Only then start sending campaigns.

Most stores do this in reverse, start with newsletters, and never get to the automations that were going to do the work.

Email is the channel you own and the one most stores under-run. Four automations, set up once, out-earn a year of newsletters.