How To Get Started With Email Marketing: What To Build First
Most “getting started with email marketing” advice starts in the wrong place: which platform to pick, how to grow a list, what the first campaign should say. All of that matters eventually. None of it is the actual first decision.
Why Picking A Platform First Is The Wrong Opening Move
A platform is infrastructure. It doesn’t generate revenue by existing, and comparing feature lists before deciding what to build on top of it is solving a problem that hasn’t been defined yet.
The real first decision is which automated flows to build, because those are what actually produce revenue. A platform choice made without that plan just delays the part that matters.
The Three Flows To Build Before A Single Campaign
Welcome, abandoned cart, and browse abandonment cover the three moments almost every new subscriber or visitor passes through, and none of them require an existing list or a reason to send a campaign.
A welcome flow captures a new signup while their interest is highest. An abandoned cart flow catches someone who added a product but didn’t finish checkout. A browse abandonment flow catches someone who looked at products but never added anything at all. Each one fires automatically off behavior that’s already happening on the site, not off a calendar someone has to remember to fill.
These three flows generating revenue in the background is what makes a first campaign strategy make sense later. Without them, a campaign is the only thing driving email revenue, and it stops the moment sending stops.
Why Campaigns Can Wait
A campaign needs two things flows don’t: an actual list to send to, and a specific reason to send that week. Early on, neither of those exists yet in any meaningful way.
Flows don’t have that problem. They run continuously off behavior, not off someone deciding what to say this Tuesday. Building the flows first means email revenue starts accumulating before there’s any campaign calendar to maintain at all.
What “Done” Actually Looks Like For A First Setup
Done means each of the three flows is live and firing, not that the copy is perfect or the design matches a finished brand guide. A three-email welcome series that’s actually running outperforms a ten-email version that’s still in draft.
Klaviyo’s flow-building tools make it straightforward to get a simple version of each flow live quickly. The refinement, more emails, better segmentation, sharper copy, can happen once the basic version is already generating revenue, not before.
The Mistake That Stalls Most First Setups
Over-designing the welcome series is the most common way a first setup stalls before it ever goes live. A five-email sequence with custom photography and a full brand voice guide sounds better in planning than a plain three-email version, but the plain version that’s actually live beats the polished version that’s still being built.
Ship the simple version first. How many flows a brand actually needs matters less early on than making sure the few that exist are live, not still in progress.
If you’re starting from zero and want a second opinion on what to build first, book a free audit and we’ll help you map out the setup that actually gets email revenue moving.