15:19Siv Rao · Tutorial
How to Build a $1M Email Welcome Flow (Full Guide)
A step-by-step breakdown of the six-email welcome sequence one email agency says has generated over $100 million across 150+ ecommerce brands.
July 15thThe argument in one line.
News events, not subject lines or open rates, drive email revenue, and click rate rather than open rate is the real indicator of whether a campaign will sell.
Read if. Skip if.
READ IF YOU ARE…
- You run email marketing for an ecommerce brand and want to know which metrics actually predict revenue.
- You've been told to protect your open rate at all costs and want evidence on whether that still matters.
- You send sporadic 'sale' blasts and want a cadence that doesn't burn out your list.
SKIP IF…
- You're not selling physical products through email, most of the advice assumes a product catalog with stock, launches, and restocks.
- You already send to your full list every day and track revenue per send instead of opens.
The full version, fast.
An email marketing agency that designed over 10,000 campaigns for 150 ecommerce brands found that genuine news, sales, product launches, and back-in-stock alerts, consistently outperforms every other email type, so the real lever is creating more of those events and sending a full sequence around each one. Open rate is a deliverability gauge, not a revenue signal: the real control is which engagement window (30 to 120 days) a campaign gets sent to, aiming for a 35 to 50 percent open rate. Click rate, not open rate, correlates with sales, so every email should be built mobile-first with a headline and button above the fold. And list fatigue is mostly a myth, inconsistent sending damages list health more than frequent, steady sending does.
Free for members
Chat with this breakdown — free.
Sign in and you get 23 free chat messages on us — ask for the hook, quote a framework, find the exact transcript moment, generate a markdown action plan. Bring your own key when you want unlimited.
Create a free account →Where the time goes.
00:00 – 00:16
01 · Cold open: 10,000 campaigns, four patterns
States the premise: four patterns found across 10,000 campaigns for 150 brands that break common email marketing rules.
00:16 – 02:53
02 · Pattern 1: news events outperform everything
Sale, launch, and back-in-stock emails always win because they're genuine news; the fix is creating more real events and rinsing each one with pre-hype, early access, and follow-up emails.
02:53 – 05:25
03 · Pattern 2: open rates don't matter
Open rate has no correlation with revenue; it's a deliverability dial kept in a 35-50% band by choosing the right engaged-segment window.
05:25 – 07:32
04 · Pattern 3: click rate predicts sales
Click rate correlates strongly with sales, so design for the click: mobile-first, headline and CTA button above the fold, no logo or nav bar, repeated CTA throughout.
07:32 – 09:28
05 · Pattern 4: list fatigue isn't real
Inconsistent sending hurts list health more than frequent sending; pick a sustainable volume, around 3-4 emails a week, and hold it steady for months, mostly to engaged segments.
09:28 – 09:54
06 · CTA: free Klaviyo audit
Offers a free audit with five takeaways to 7-8 figure ecommerce brands, then points to a video on core email flows.
Lines worth screenshotting.
- Across 150 ecommerce brands, the highest-converting email is always one of three things: a sale, a product launch, or a back-in-stock alert.
- The best email marketing lever isn't a better template, it's creating more genuine news events to email about.
- Open rate has no correlation with revenue, since you can inflate it just by sending to fewer people.
- The safe open rate zone is 35 to 50 percent, high enough to protect deliverability, low enough to prove you're reaching most of your list.
- If an engaged 90-day segment opens above 60 percent, widen it to 120 days, you're leaving reach on the table.
- Subject line A/B test winners rarely replicate months later, so pick a winner by sales, not opens.
- Click rate has a strong, direct relationship with sales, making it a usable leading indicator for low-volume or high-ticket stores.
- A visible headline and call-to-action button above the fold outperforms a logo or navigation bar at the top of an email.
- On mobile, people tap a button without reading it, an autopilot response, so button placement matters more than button copy.
- List fatigue is mostly a myth: inconsistent sending damages list health more than sending five or six emails a week does.
- Genuine news events, sales, launches, restocks, should go to the full list, not just the engaged segment, because they're the highest-converting message you can send.
- Three to four consistent emails a week beats a bursty cadence of heavy sending followed by weeks of silence.
Four data-backed rules that break common email advice
THE REAL METRICS
Open rate is a vanity number, the data says news events, click rate, and sending cadence are what actually drive email revenue.
02Pattern 1: news events outperform everything
- The best-performing email you can send is always genuine news: a sale, a new product launch, or a back-in-stock alert, not a cleverer subject line.
- Campaign performance declines over time if you never have real news to announce, so the actual lever to pull is creating more launches and restocks, not writing better copy.
- Treat every launch or restock as a full event: pre-hype it, give early access to your best subscribers, then send multiple follow-up emails instead of a single announcement.
03Pattern 2: open rates don't matter
- Open rate can be inflated or deflated just by changing how many people you send to, which is why it has no real correlation with revenue.
- Aim to keep open rate in a 35-50% band: high enough that inbox providers trust you, low enough that you're actually reaching most of your list.
- If your engaged segment opens above 60%, you can widen the window, say from 90 to 120 days, and reach more people without hurting deliverability.
- Subject line A/B test winners rarely hold up if you rerun the same test months later, so judge a subject line by sales, not opens.
04Pattern 3: click rate predicts sales
- Click rate has a strong, direct relationship with revenue, making it a reliable leading indicator even for low-volume or high-ticket stores.
- Design every email for mobile first: a visible headline and a call-to-action button above the fold matter more than anything below it.
- Drop the logo and navigation bar from the top of the email, that space is more valuable for the headline and the button.
- Repeat the same call-to-action throughout the body so a skimming reader can click no matter where they stop reading.
05Pattern 4: list fatigue isn't real
- List fatigue from sending too much is largely a myth, sending too little or inconsistently causes more unsubscribes and disengagement.
- Pick a cadence you can sustain, 3-4 emails a week is a reasonable target, and hold it steady for months rather than bursting and going quiet.
- Most regular campaigns should go to an engaged segment of recent openers or clickers, which limits fatigue even as total send frequency goes up.
Terms worth knowing.
- Engaged segment
- An audience filter that only includes subscribers who opened or clicked within a set window, like 30, 60, 90, or 120 days, used to keep open rates in a safe range.
- Deliverability
- Whether inbox providers like Gmail, Yahoo, and Hotmail treat a sending domain as trustworthy enough to land in the inbox instead of spam.
- List fatigue
- The theory that subscribers get tired of frequent emails and disengage or unsubscribe, which this video argues is mostly false compared to inconsistent sending.
Things they pointed at.
Lines you could clip.
00:43
“Nothing converts people better than news.”
02:54
“There is no correlation between open rates and revenue.”
05:25
“There is a very strong relationship between click rate and the sales that you make from each campaign.”
07:32
“List fatigue is not really a thing.”
Word for word.
Read-along
Don't just watch it. Burn it in.
See every word as it's spoken — crank it to 2× and still catch all of it. The same dual-channel trick behind Amazon's Kindle + Audible.
metaphoranalogy
We ran the numbers across 10 ,000 email campaigns sent across 150 brands around the world and four patterns show up which break almost every rule that you know about email marketing. So in this video, I'm going to break down what the four patterns are based on what the data says and how we apply it to our clients. Let's get into it.
So first up, across 150 clients, when you look at what the best performing email campaigns are, it's always, always, always one of three things. It's always a sale email, it's always a product launch email, or it's a back in stock email. Without fail for every single business.
Now, what these three things have in common is that they're all real world news. These are genuinely novel things which are happening in the real world that the brand is just telling their customers. And here's the reality.
nothing converts people better than news people love sales if an item they love comes back in stock they're really happy to hear that new products are always fresh and brand new people love new iphones now don't get me wrong you can consistently find ways to repackage what you're selling and find new angles to tell it to your audience but if you never have any genuine news to send to your list you're going to notice your campaign performance just slowly gets worse and worse over time so what's the solution here is it to just run more sales no It's not what I'm saying.
That's just one other type of news event that you can send. The solution is to make more events happen. Focus a lot of attention on getting new products and new colorways and new variants of products that people already love.
If things go out of stock, Get it back as soon as possible. What really helps to make this happen, limited drops really help because it adds the urgency element and trains your list to actually really take action as soon as you make something go live.
And when you do these kind of events, when new products come out or you're doing the restocks, make sure you rinse it. Don't just send one email to your list and say, hey, we got a new product. Make it a whole event.
pre -hype it leading up to the event give vips early access and then during the launch send a bunch of emails to let people know that this is here and this is going to go out of stock soon and don't just do that for launches do that for back in stock emails as well sales all kind of events that you run now what you will notice is that these events will get the most amount of sales a lot of people won't even buy the products that you just launched they'll just use that as an excuse to browse and buy from you but they'll actually and buy other products so it's really important to rinse these events now for sales i don't actually recommend that you run more events but i do recommend that you leverage actual events which are happening in the real world like mother's day or father's day people are out with their wallets out ready to spend money so make sure you capitalize on these events and you don't even have to give a discount you could just say hey like here's some gift ideas for your dad here's some gift ideas for christmas this is national earth day we want to make sure we capitalize on these events so that we
We don't even have to give a discount to take advantage of it. So to summarize, news events always end up being the best performing emails that we send. So number one, try to run as many events as you can, and then send as many emails as you can related to those events.
I hope that's clear. And the second pattern is that open rates don't matter. There is no correlation between open rates and revenue, and I can prove this to you because you can just send an email to people who've opened an email from you in the last two days, and your open rate's gonna be 80 % or 90%, but you're only gonna send it to 100 people, so it's not gonna make any money, which is exactly the point.
You can artificially increase or decrease your open rate depending on how many people you send it to. If we actually wanna maximize revenue, we wanna send emails to as many people on the database as we can. Ideally, we send to the full list all the time.
every single day, but we don't do that. Why? Because that's gonna ruin our deliverability.
And that is the reason why open rates are important. We wanna keep our open rates high enough so that we don't run into deliverability issues and Gmail and Yahoo and Hotmail think that we're high quality senders. They know we're not annoying people, but also we wanna keep it low enough so that we actually maximize how many people we send to.
Now the safe threshold for your open rate is probably 35 to 50%. We wanna keep our open rates there. If it's Higher than that, it's probably a sign that we can send to more people.
And if it's lower than that, well, then we might run into some deliverability issues. So how do we actually control our open rate? It's by sending to our engaged segment.
Generally, best practice is you send to an engaged 90 -day audience, and that should get you a 40 or 50 % open rate. If you have an open rate higher, let's say you have a 60 % open rate, well, that's a sign that actually instead of sending to an engaged 90 -day audience, you should send to an engaged 120 -day audience. And if that's still 60%, maybe you can increase it further and further out.
Now, if you send to an engaged 90 day and you have a 30 % open rate, that's probably a sign that you should make your segments more tight. So you should send to an engaged 60 day or an engaged 30 day until you get to the band where it's about 35 to 50%. Now, most of your campaigns should go to this engaged segment.
but if you run a genuine news event like a sale or back in stock or product launch you want to send that to your full list that goes to everyone why because like i said this is the genuine novel thing that people are interested in and so you want to tell that to as many people as possible because that's the highest converting message that you can send now people think subject lines influence the open rate but that's just not true whatever finding that you get from an a b test you can replicate that exact a b test a few months later and it's a 50 50 chance whether that still holds up which means basically meaningless.
The only rules that we have for subject lines is make it sound like a human, try not to sound like a corporation. And if you do run A -B tests based on subject lines, pick a winner based on sales rather than opens. So now that brings us to pattern number three, and that's that click rates are actually pretty important.
There is a very strong relationship between click rate and the sales that you make from each campaign, which gives us two takeaways. Number one, if you sell a product which is particularly expensive or you don't just in general get that many sales from your emails, you can use click rate as kind of a proxy or leading indicator for what sort of campaigns will lead to sales down the line as your business grows or as you get more traffic onto your list.
And number two, our entire strategy for what we put in the email should be optimized for getting the click rather than selling. Because there is a very strong correlation between click to sell.
And we find that if we just optimize to get the click, that also increases sales. So how do we do that? Number one, optimize everything on your email for mobile devices.
Most people open emails on their phone. So if your email is just not readable on a phone, you've lost a click. Now, easiest way for that is to have a headline and call to action immediately visible above the fold at the top of the email.
This means someone opens their email, they can see what the point of the email is and they can see the call to action which is associated the button at the top is extremely important because when people are on their phones and they see a button they just click it's like an autopilot response when you're on the phone you see a button you click that button you don't even read what it says and what's going to happen to your customers is they're going to get taken to your website and they're going to start browsing their website without even realizing how they got there and that's kind of the effect we want to create with our customers because when people are browsing our website they see things that we sell and they want to buy where a lot of brands mess up the above the fold section is they have this huge logo at the top or they have this navigation bar which is just a complete waste of space people know who sending the email when they see the sender name of the email.
You don't have to put your logo there to take up that space. This is a general rule in all marketing. You give people four options or you give people one option.
People are more likely to pick the one option than any one of the four. If you want to add additional links, I would add them to the footer bar, but not the top of the email. That's prime space for a headline and call to action.
One more rule, make your email skimmable and add big call to actions throughout the email, which are the exact same as what you have at the top. Just repeat that same call to action. That's it.
Okay. So the final pattern that we notice is that list fatigue is not really a thing now this fatigue is this idea that if you send too many emails to your list when people get bored of hearing from you and they'll stop opening your emails or even unsubscribe which is just not true when actually it's almost the opposite which is true if you send too little to your list if you send inconsistently that's actually a lot worse for your list health and engagement metrics and unsubs than sending too much what we find is that if you're the type of brand that sends a bunch of emails one week and then stops for a couple weeks and then and you start sending emails again for sale, that does a lot more damage to your email list health than sending five or six emails every single week.
I don't recommend you send five or six emails every week. I recommend you send maybe three to four emails a week. But the key is that your cadence has to be consistent.
You have to send one or two or three emails every single week for months or years on end. Find the volume that you're comfortable with and keep that consistent. Now, more is always better.
We find that if you increase from two emails a week to four emails a week, week your performance will be better and that won't increase unsubscribes the reason I say this is because you should be sending most of your campaigns to engage segments for one so people that are receiving emails or people that have opened or clicked an email from you in the last three months let's say and if they haven't opened in three months they won't get that frequency of emails but that's really important because if they have opened an email from you recently well then they're probably in the market for your product They're probably interested.
People in general don't open marketing emails for fun. They just don't. They don't go to the promotions tab.
They don't click unless they're genuinely interested in something that you're selling. And that could be they're experiencing the pains that you talk about, or they're looking for the outcomes that your brand gives. On some level, if they are clicking your emails, there is buying intent.
And in this world where we're fighting for any kind of attention, where it's getting more and more expensive to get in front of people, we don't want to when it's so much more expensive to get that attention through ads for example so that's the four patterns that we've learned from sending over 10 000 email campaigns for over 150 brands around the world if you're on a seven or eight figure ecommerce brand and you want a free audit of your klaviyo account i will look inside and i'll give you five takeaways that you can run with and implement yourself to increase your klaviyo revenue you can click the link in the description to organize that otherwise if you want to know what the core email flows are and how to set them up you should click this video over here
The Hook
The bait, then the rug-pull.
An email agency ran the numbers on 10,000 campaigns across 150 ecommerce brands and found four patterns that break almost every common rule about email marketing, starting with the metric most marketers are taught to protect above all else.
Named ideas worth stealing.
00:17list
The Three News-Event Email Types
- Sale email
- Product launch email
- Back-in-stock email
Across every client studied, the top-performing campaign is always one of these three because each is genuine, novel news rather than another pitch.
Steal forany ecommerce or product-launch email calendar
04:14model
Open Rate Safe Zone
- 35-50% = healthy band
- Above 60% = widen the engaged-segment window
- Below 35% = tighten the engaged-segment window
Keep open rate between 35 and 50 percent by narrowing or widening the engaged-segment window (30/60/90/120-day); too high means you can reach more people, too low means you should tighten the segment.
Steal forany list segmented in an ESP with engagement-based audiences
06:25concept
Above-the-Fold Email Layout
- Headline visible without scrolling
- CTA button immediately below the headline
- No logo or nav bar at the top
- Repeat the same CTA throughout the body
- Extra links go in the footer, not the header
Because mobile readers tap a button on reflex without reading, the button's position above the fold matters more than the persuasive copy around it.
Steal forany ecommerce or sales email template
08:04concept
Consistent Cadence Rule
Pick a sustainable send volume, around 3-4 emails a week, and hold it for months; a burst-then-silence pattern damages list health more than steady, frequent sending.
Steal forany newsletter or promotional sending calendar
How they asked for the click.
VERBAL ASK
09:28link
“if you're on a seven or eight figure ecommerce brand and you want a free audit of your klaviyo account I will look inside and I'll give you five takeaways that you can run with and implement yourself to increase your klaviyo revenue, you can click the link in the description”
Clear, qualified pitch (7-8 figure ecommerce only) with a specific, concrete deliverable (five takeaways) rather than a vague 'book a call' ask, landing right after the value is fully delivered.
MENTIONED ON CAMERA
FROM THE DESCRIPTION
PRIMARY CTAWhere the creator wants you to go next.
Visual structure at a glance.
