It is the Monday before Black Friday, and the owner of a small online boot store opens her email report. The abandoned cart email looks great. It brought back a few hundred dollars last week, the way it does every week, and she closes the report feeling like the follow-up side of the business is handled.
Now picture that same week as a hundred visits instead of a report. About seven of those visitors put a pair of boots in the cart. The cart email is written for those seven, and it does a good job with them. The other ninety-three looked at a product page, maybe three or four, and left without adding anything. Nobody sends them a thing. They are not in the report because nothing was ever built to reach them.
That second group has a name, browse abandonment, and an email built for it. It is not a copy of the cart email with a different trigger. It reaches fewer people than you would hope, it has to be written in a different tone, and it can quietly cost you money if you put a discount in the wrong place. Here is how it works, and how to set it up before the busiest browsing week of the year.
Ninety-Three Visitors Out of a Hundred Never Touch Your Cart
Littledata, which sends Shopify data into Google Analytics for several hundred stores, publishes a benchmark from the stores it tracks. For the 90 days ending October 31, 2026, the median Shopify store saw a product added to the cart in 6.6 percent of sessions. On phones it was 5.3 percent. On desktop it was 10 percent. Even the top fifth of stores only cleared 12 percent.
Turn that around and it is the most important number in this article. At a typical store, more than nine visits out of ten end without a single item in the cart.
It helps to see where shoppers drop out, because each spot tells you something different about how close they were to buying:
- Browsing. They looked at one or more product pages and left. They were curious, comparing, or not sure yet.
- Cart. They added something and left before checkout. They picked a product, then something stopped them.
- Checkout. They started paying and stopped. They were nearly done, and usually a cost or a form got in the way.
Most stores have an email for the last one, because Shopify has sent an abandoned checkout email for years. Many have one for the cart. Almost nobody has one for the first stop, which is the biggest group by far. We covered the checkout email and four others in the five automated emails every store should be sending. This is the one that list did not include.
Klaviyo's 2026 benchmark report puts numbers on what each email earns. Across more than 110,000 of its customers, an abandoned cart email brought in an average of $6.77 per person who received it. A browse abandonment email brought in $2.08. That gap is exactly what you would expect: a person who added something to the cart was much closer to buying than a person who glanced at a page.
But revenue per person is only half the math. The browse email goes to a much bigger group, because the browsing group is the biggest group you have. A smaller amount per person, multiplied by a lot more people, is how a modest-looking email turns into real money.
A Browse Abandonment Email Only Reaches Shoppers Who Already Signed Up or Bought
Here is the part most guides skip, and it changes what you should expect from this email.
You cannot email someone you do not know. Most of those ninety-three visitors are anonymous. They came from an ad or a Google search, looked around, and left without ever typing in an email address. No email tool on earth can follow up with them, because there is nobody to send it to. (Reaching anonymous browsers again is a job for retargeting ads, which is a different tool with a different cost.)
Klaviyo's help center is plain about this. Its browse abandonment flow is triggered by a "Viewed Product" event, and it only records that event for what it calls identifiable browsers: people who have filled out a form on your site, or who have been recognized in some other way, most commonly by clicking a link in one of your emails. Shopify's version works the same way in practice. Its marketing automations send only to customers who are subscribed to your marketing, so a shopper has to be both recognized and subscribed.
There is one more filter. If you sell to Europe, the UK or Switzerland, Klaviyo notes that, depending on your Shopify privacy settings, it may not track those visitors at all unless they have agreed to it. They will not enter the flow.
So who is actually in the group?
- Past customers who come back to look around.
- Subscribers who clicked one of your emails and kept browsing from there.
- People who filled out a signup form at some point, on this visit or an earlier one.
That list tells you something useful. The size of your browse abandonment flow is set by the size and activity of your email list, not by your traffic. A store with 50,000 visits a month and a sleepy list of 2,000 people will trigger very few of these emails. A store with half that traffic and an engaged list of 15,000 will trigger many more. If you want this email to reach more people, the fix is upstream: ask a better question on your signup form so more visitors join, and stop paying to keep subscribers who never open anything, so the list you have is one that clicks.
You can check your own number in about ten minutes. In Klaviyo, go to Analytics, then Metrics, and search for "Viewed Product." Compare the count for the last 30 days with your Shopify sessions for the same period. If you see a few hundred tracked product views against tens of thousands of sessions, you have learned two things: your browse email will be small, and your list is the real project.
Browsing Is Not Buying. A Cart Reminder Email Scares Off a Shopper Who Was Only Looking.
The fastest way to get this email wrong is to copy your cart email and change the trigger.
Think about how it lands. A cart email says, in effect, "your boots are still waiting for you." That makes sense to someone who put boots in a cart. They chose them. Send the same message to someone who looked at one product page for twenty seconds and it reads differently. It says, "we watched you." Klaviyo's own guidance makes the same point in gentler words: viewing a product does not show the same interest as adding it to a cart, so the browse email should be a "lighter touchpoint" than the cart email.
The better way to write it is to start from why people look and leave. There are a handful of common reasons, and most of them have nothing to do with forgetting:
- The right size or color was not in stock.
- The price needed a second look, often against a competitor in another tab.
- Shipping cost or timing was unclear, or showed up too late.
- They were not sure it was the right one out of several similar products.
- They were just looking, with a plan to decide later.
Littledata adds a useful caution here. Someone who viewed a product did not necessarily want that product. They may have rejected it. So the email should not only push the exact item they saw. It should show it alongside a few related products from the same category, so a shopper who left because the brown boot was not right can find the black one.
A good browse email has four parts:
- The product they looked at, with its photo, name and price, so they recognize it instantly.
- Two or three related products from the same category, for the shopper who rejected the first one.
- An answer to the most common objection for that product. For boots, that is fit and returns: "Not sure about size? Exchanges are free, and here is how our sizing runs." For furniture, it might be delivery. You know your common question; your support inbox is full of it.
- One line of proof, such as a short review from a real customer who bought the same item.
What it leaves out matters just as much. No countdown timer. No "you forgot something." No "still thinking about it?" in a tone that suggests you were waiting by the door. A subject line that simply names the product, or the category, does the job.
A Discount in a Browse Abandonment Email Pays Your Regulars for a Visit They Made Anyway
Remember who is in this group. A big share of it is people who already buy from you. They are your past customers and your most engaged subscribers, coming back to look around. Many of them were going to buy anyway, on their own schedule.
Put a 15 percent code in their browse email and you have paid your best customers to do what they were already doing. That is the same trap we walked through in how a discount can lift your conversion rate while your profit falls: more orders, less money, and a dashboard that says everything went well.
Klaviyo's help center suggests splitting the flow into two groups, and it is the most valuable split you can make here:
- Shoppers who have never placed an order. These are subscribers who have not bought yet. If any group earns an incentive, it is this one, because a first order is the hard one to win.
- Shoppers who have bought before. Klaviyo's guidance is that you may not want a discount here at all, because these customers have already taken the leap. We would go further: no code, ever. Give them the product, the related picks and the review, and let the visit finish itself.
Even for first-time shoppers, think twice before leading with money off. Our suggestion is to send the first browse email with no code at all. If you want an incentive, save it for a second email a day or two later, only to people who still have not bought, and make the code single-use so it cannot end up somewhere you did not intend. Codes that go out in automated emails are exactly the ones that tend to leak, which we covered in how your discount code ends up on a coupon site.
One Browse Abandonment Email Is Enough. A Third One Feels Like Being Followed Around the Store.
Picture a salesperson who follows a shopper out of the store, down the sidewalk and into the parking lot. That is what a poorly fenced browse flow feels like. Because people browse often, a flow with no limits can email the same person every time they look at anything. The rules below keep it polite.
Wait at least an hour. Klaviyo recommends a delay of at least one hour after the product view before the first email or text. That gives shoppers time to finish deciding on their own, and it keeps the email from arriving while they are still on your site.
Take people out the moment they move forward. Klaviyo's setup filters anyone who placed an order, started checkout, or added to cart since entering the flow. The last one only matters if you also run a cart email, which you should. Without it, a shopper who adds to cart gets both emails, one telling them they left something behind and one telling them they browsed.
Limit how often one person can enter. Klaviyo's suggested filter lets a person into the flow only if they have not been in it in the last 30 days. Shopify's built-in template goes further and holds back anyone who received an abandoned checkout, cart or browse email in the last 14 days, so those three emails cannot stack up on the same person.
Give heavy browsers a different email. Klaviyo lets you set the flow so it only fires after someone has viewed a minimum number of products. A shopper who looked at one product for a few seconds and a shopper who compared five pairs of boots are not in the same place. The second one can get a slightly more direct email, built around the products they spent time with.
Keep Smart Sending on during sale weeks. In Black Friday week you will be sending campaign emails about the sale at the same time your browse flow is firing. Klaviyo's Smart Sending skips anyone who already got an email from you within a set window, 16 hours by default, so a shopper does not get your sale announcement and a browse email on the same afternoon.
Most small stores need one browse email, or two at most: the first with no code, and an optional second for first-time shoppers only. A third email does very little except make your store feel like it is following people around.
Shopify and Klaviyo Already Built the Browse Abandonment Email. Turning It On Takes an Afternoon.
You do not need a developer for any of this. Both platforms ship a ready-made version.
On Shopify: go to Apps, then Messaging, then Automations, and click Create automation. Choose the template called Convert abandoned product browse, then pick email, text or WhatsApp. Your store needs to be on the Basic plan or higher, and Shopify Flow needs to be installed for the automation to work fully. Before you turn it on, open the email, rewrite it in your own words using the four parts above, and send yourself a test.
Two cost notes. Browse emails count toward your monthly email sends in Shopify Messaging, so a busy flow uses up your allowance faster. Texts are billed per message at the rate for each recipient's region. If you are tempted to send the browse message by text, read why every text you send costs you something first. For a message this light, email is usually the right channel.
On Klaviyo: first make sure the data is there. Go to Analytics, then Metrics, and check that "Viewed Product" is collecting events. On Shopify, that tracking comes from Klaviyo's app embed, which has to be switched on in your theme. Then go to Flows, click Create flow, search for "browse abandonment" and start from Klaviyo's template. Klaviyo recommends the template over building from scratch, because the template's product block is set up to show the item the shopper actually viewed.
One Klaviyo trap to know about. Do not clone your abandoned cart email to make the browse email. The two use different kinds of product blocks, and switching the block type in a cloned email erases its settings. Start from the browse template, or build the product block fresh.
Whichever tool you use, test it on yourself. Subscribe with an email you control, click through from one of your own emails, look at a product, leave, and wait. If nothing arrives after the delay, your tracking is not recording you, and the flow will not reach anyone else either.
Open Rates Don't Pay the Bills. Revenue per Email Tells You Whether a Browse Abandonment Flow Works.
Once the flow is live, resist judging it by opens. Open rates are inflated by email apps that open messages automatically, and an open does not pay for anything.
The number to watch is revenue per recipient: the revenue the flow is credited with, divided by the number of people who received it. Klaviyo shows it on every flow. Its 2026 benchmark gives you a yardstick: $2.08 per recipient for the average browse abandonment email, and $4.32 for the top 10 percent of brands. If you are well below the average, look at the email itself first, especially the subject line and whether the product shows up correctly.
There is one catch with that number. Klaviyo credits the flow with any order placed within its attribution window after someone opens or clicks. Some of those shoppers were coming back to buy no matter what. Your past customers especially.
The honest way to find out what the email actually adds is a holdout. In Klaviyo, add a split at the top of the flow with a random sample condition, and send a small share of people, say 10 to 20 percent, down a path that gets no email. After a few weeks, compare how often each group bought. The difference between the two is what the email really earned. If the group that got nothing buys almost as often as the group that got the email, the email is mostly taking credit for sales that were already happening. In that case, rewrite it before you scale it.
This is how we look at every automated email when we work with online stores: who it can actually reach, what it costs to send, and whether it creates sales or just takes credit for them. If you would like a second set of eyes on your store's emails before the holidays, our ecommerce marketing team does this every week. If you would rather set it up yourself, everything you need is above. Start with the Viewed Product check, because that one number tells you how big this email can ever be.
