Shopify Email Marketing Setup: The Free Stack Most Stores Never Turn On

TL;DR: Shopify has real email marketing built in. Shopify Email sends 10,000 free emails a month on every plan, and the marketing automations cover abandoned checkout, welcome, back-in-stock, and win-back flows. Every one of them ships switched off. Setup takes about twenty minutes in Settings > Marketing > Automations, and the abandoned checkout email alone typically recovers a meaningful slice of lost carts.

“Does Shopify have email marketing, or do I need Klaviyo?” I get this question from founders more than almost any other, usually right after they see Klaviyo’s pricing page. The honest answer surprises most of them: the free tools already sitting in their admin cover the four automations that drive most email revenue, and in every store audit I run, at least half of those automations are switched off.

Baymard Institute puts average cart abandonment at 70.19%. Seven out of ten shoppers who add to cart leave without paying. Email is still the cheapest way to bring them back, and Shopify gives you the machinery for free.

Does Shopify have email marketing built in?

Yes, and it comes in three connected pieces. Shopify Email is the sending engine: campaigns, branded templates, and the editor. Marketing automations are the pre-built triggers: abandoned checkout, welcome, and win-back. Shopify Flow is the free workflow app underneath, for anything custom like tagging big spenders or building back-in-stock alerts.

Shopify Email is free for 10,000 emails per calendar month on every plan, then $1 per 1,000 emails after that. Abandoned checkout emails do not even count toward the allowance. For a store with a list under roughly 10,000 subscribers sending weekly, the bill is zero.

Shopify has recently folded these tools under the “Shopify Messaging” name in its documentation, so do not be confused if help pages use that label. The admin paths below are unchanged.

The catch, and the reason this post exists: every automation ships switched off. Shopify will not flip them for you. A store can run for years leaking carts that a twenty-minute setup would have recovered.

How do I set up email marketing on Shopify?

Here is the exact order I use on client stores. You need admin access and nothing else.

1. Open Settings > Marketing > Automations (some plans label it Email automations).
2. Turn ON Recover abandoned checkout. Change the default delay to 3 to 6 hours. The default sends almost instantly, which lands while the shopper is still comparison-shopping; a few hours later catches them once the moment has cooled.
3. Turn ON Welcome new subscribers with a 1 to 2 hour delay. This is the first touch for every popup signup.
4. Open Settings > Apps and install Shopify Flow if it is not already there. Browse templates, search “back in stock,” and activate the ready-made flow.
5. Build one win-back: trigger when a customer has not ordered in 90 days, send one email with a clear offer.

For the email content itself, three dynamic tags do the heavy lifting: customer.first_name, shop.name, and abandoned_checkout.recovery_url. That last one drops the shopper straight back into their exact cart. Without it the email is decoration.

Keep subject lines under about 45 characters. Most phone inboxes truncate anything longer, and mobile is where most Shopify traffic lives.

Which automations pay first?

Abandoned checkout wins, and it is not close. These are shoppers who entered checkout and stopped. On the stores I work with, recovery emails to this group outperform every campaign send, because the intent is already there. If you want to layer SMS on top later, I compared the two channels in SMS vs email for abandoned cart recovery.

The welcome email comes second. A new subscriber is at peak attention in the first hours after signup. One warm email with your best-seller and your returns promise beats a discount blast.

Win-back is the quiet third. Most stores obsess over acquisition while 90-day-lapsed customers sit in the database, already convinced once. One honest come-back email with a concrete reason to return costs nothing and reactivates a slice of them every month.

Back-in-stock closes the loop. A shopper who asks to be notified is the highest-intent visitor you have who could not buy. The Flow template handles the mechanics.

One warning while you are in there: the welcome automation triggers on list signup, not purchase. A shopper who buys and subscribes in the same visit can get a welcome email and an order confirmation minutes apart. The 1 to 2 hour delay smooths most of this out.

What about the 10,000 email cap?

The cap is monthly, not weekly, and this is where stores get surprised. A 5,000-subscriber list sent weekly is 20,000 emails a month, which means paying for 10,000 of them. Check your send volume under Marketing > Campaigns before you commit to a weekly rhythm.

The math still favors starting native. At $1 per 1,000 overage emails, that 5,000-subscriber weekly store pays about $10 a month. The equivalent Klaviyo tier runs around $100. Klaviyo earns that difference once you genuinely need predictive segments, multi-branch flows, and deep reporting, which is usually well past the first few thousand subscribers. Until then, the native stack does the job, and your deliverability depends far more on list quality than on the sending tool.

On list quality: authenticate your sending domain when Shopify prompts you, and never buy addresses. Gmail and Yahoo now enforce SPF, DKIM, and DMARC on bulk senders, and unauthenticated mail increasingly lands in spam regardless of which platform sends it.

How to verify your setup works

Three checks, five minutes:

1. Open your store in a private browser window, add a product to cart, enter checkout with a real email you control, then close the tab. Confirm the recovery email arrives after your set delay and its link restores your cart.
2. Sign up to your own newsletter popup. Confirm the welcome email lands in the inbox, not the spam folder.
3. Open Marketing > Automations and confirm each automation shows as Active with sends counting up over the following week.

If the recovery email never arrives, the automation is off, the delay has not elapsed, or the checkout email was already associated with a completed order. Check those in that order. Deliverability problems usually show up in step 2, and the fix is domain authentication, not a new app. Deeper checkout leaks are a separate hunt; I keep a checkout abandonment guide and a list of hidden cart abandonment causes for exactly that.

Audit your own store this week: if Settings > Marketing > Automations shows grey toggles, you are paying for traffic and letting the follow-up rot.

The takeaway

• Turn on abandoned checkout recovery today with a 3 to 6 hour delay.
• Enable the welcome automation before you spend another dollar on popups.
• Build the 90-day win-back in Flow; one email, one clear offer.
• Check your monthly send volume before committing to weekly campaigns.
• Authenticate your sending domain so Gmail and Yahoo actually deliver your mail.

Book a free 30-minute audit.