Everyone obsesses over abandoned cart. Don't get me wrong, it matters. Someone got as far as the basket, so of course you chase them. But the reality is the basket is the small end of the funnel. Way more people look at a product and leave than ever add it to a cart, and most brands either don't have a browse flow at all or have one that's quietly broken.
what "broken" usually looks like
When we audit an account, the browse flow is one of the first places we look, because it's so often doing nothing. The usual suspects:
- The delay is too long. Thirty minutes is too slow for high-intent traffic. Fifteen minutes is our baseline, and ten is comfortable for fast-moving products. By the time a 30-minute email lands, they've already bought from someone else or forgotten you exist.
- Smart Sending is switched on. Brilliant for campaigns, rubbish for intent flows. It quietly suppresses the very people who just showed you they're interested.
- The filters are fighting each other. Exclusions stacked on exclusions until email one only reaches a fraction of the people who triggered it.
Here's a rough sense check. If you're doing six figures a month with decent traffic coming through Klaviyo, a properly set up browse flow should be making you a few grand a month on its own, passively. If yours is making close to nothing, it's not that browse doesn't work for your brand. The triggers and settings are almost certainly broken.
the five emails we build
I'm not gonna reinvent the wheel here. This is the structure we use, and then we test the life out of it:
- Email one: a reminder, no discount. They were interested. Show them the thing again.
- Email two: cross-sells and social proof. Maybe that product wasn't quite right. Show them what else people love.
- Email three: the nudge. Now you can introduce an offer to push them across the line.
- Email four: urgency. A 24-hour push so the offer actually means something.
- Email five: a handwritten note from the founder. Plain, personal, human. It's often the one people reply to.
If two emails in a row aren't making money, we don't just leave them there. We work out whether the barrier was the reason or the cost, then realign the purpose of that email or add an offer or urgency push and test again.
"You've already paid to get these people to your site. Browse is just making sure you don't waste it."
Founder, Smiles Consulting