We're a few weeks out from Memorial Day weekend (May 23-25th) and I'm going to tell you something that most brands don't want to hear. I bet your abandonment flows are probably leaving $100,000+ on the table!
Not because your copywriting sucks or because your designer messed up the layout but because your flows are static and way too generic. They were set up once and maybe tweaked a few times but now you’re sending the exact same email to every shopper regardless of who they are or how they engaged with your brand. That was fine in 2020 but it’s not going to work in 2026 and you need to change this asap. IMO, if you just updated this one thing, you would see a massive increase in both engagement and sales. Let me explain.
The way most brands run abandonment flows is broken:
If you open up most brand's ESP accounts, you'll find a pretty similar setup when it comes to abandonment flows. They’ve got one send delay for everyone with one subject line approach, one body copy template, one discount code that gets auto applied and then once it’s set up, it just sits there untouched and running on autopilot for months (and sometimes years!)
So the same flow is trying to convert the shopper who almost bought at 10:30pm, the loyal customer who doesn’t need a discount, the price sensitive prospect who is cross shopping 4 different brands, and the browser who looked at one item 6 times and then bounced. These are not the same person. But they're getting the same email!
Your in-house email team tells you this is not a problem because the low effort email they set up is still getting opens, clicks and a few sales but little do you know, these flows are performing 5-10X worse than your most sophisticated competitors because they adopted a completely different approach.
Abandonment flows should sell. Campaigns should storytell.
Too many brands treat abandonment emails like mini brand campaigns. They have a big hero image and a soft headline with a few product sections, lifestyle imagery, and a founder-tone paragraph about the brand mission. That's a great welcome email or campaign send but that's a terrible cart abandonment flow!
The shopper already knows your brand. They literally just had your product page open. They don't need another brand story email. They need the exact product they viewed with a clear reason to come back, the right level of urgency, and a clear path to checkout. Campaigns are where you tell stories. Flows are where you actually sell and close.
What actually changes when AI runs yours flows
You’ve seen me talk about this before but the only way I’ve been able to solve this problem is by using a tool called Instant. They have AI-powered email flows that personalize every aspect of the email including the subject line, body copy, imagery, offer/discount, send time, etc in a way that’s 100% custom to every prospect on your list. It is a complete game changer and it’s the only way you should be executing on your abandonment flows in 2026. They even just updated their product to allow you to view analytics with different attribution windows.
For those who run really tight SMS & email windows, you can adjust your Instant reporting to reflect that. And if you just use Klaviyo’s standard, that will be the default on Instant too. If you want to see exactly how this works and just how powerful it is from a brand who drove $3.5 million in revenue at a 96X ROI from Instant, I recorded a video that you can check out here.
I’ll also share another example here so you can understand just how different and valuable this is. Imagine that a shopper lands on a fashion brand’s website on a Tuesday afternoon. They look at a dress, look at a few different colors, stop on the light blue variant, scroll to read the reviews, add it to their cart, then leave. In a normal ESP flow, that shopper will get a generic "you left something behind" email that night.
But with Instant, that shopper is now getting a 1:1 personalized flow based on what she actually viewed. It lands when she is most likely to convert, not when the flow timer says so. The product featured will be the blue variant of the dress. The subject line will be tied to whatever's been performing best for the brand that week. The copy will be tight, on-brand, and tied directly to her intent. If the first email doesn’t convert, she’ll get a follow up with a custom discount to push her toward a sale.
Now think about a different shopper who came to the same brand’s website at the exact same time. But instead of looking at one item, he adds 3 items to his cart, browses for 10 minutes, leaves, comes back, and looks at the same 3 items + 1 more and then bounces. Should he get the same email as the first girl looking at the dress? No way! Instead, he gets his own custom flow with different copy, different products featured, and a different offer and incentive which ends up performing way better for the brand.
This playbook is obviously better than one size fits all emails. We had two different shoppers who visited at the exact same time but they showed different intent, looked at different products, and spent different amounts of time on site. They should never receive the same email, and that's the unlock that you need to be using to boost your engagement and sales. This is only possible with Instant who can send personalized follow-up flows to all of your shoppers. It doesn’t matter if you have a 1000 people on your list or 1 million. It will send personalized follow-ups to each one, which will dramatically increase the results you see from email.
If you want to see just how effective Instant is, I recommend checking out some of their case studies. 2 that stood out are The Collagen Co who brought in $10.6 million dollars in revenue from Instant and Nakie who made $2.7M from Instant since signing up. Both brands have seen ROIs above 75X vs what they paid for the tool. They are now sending hundreds of thousands of unique 1:1 personalized emails to their shoppers which are converting better than ever before. When you see numbers like this, it’s very hard to ignore. Also, here’s a few other things I want you to keep in mind.
1. Discounts shouldn't be one size fits all
A lot of well known ESP’s tell you to send 10% off codes to everyone who abandons. The problem is that half those shoppers were going to buy anyway. So you just lost margin on a conversion that would have happened anyway. The smarter approach is to set your guardrails with a max discount, min AOV, eligibility rules (i.e first time shopper vs returning etc) and let the system decide when an incentive is actually needed. Some shoppers convert at full price. Some need a 5% nudge. Some need 15%. Treating them identically is one of the most expensive mistakes brands make with email and it’s costing you a ton of money to your bottom line.
2. Memorial Day is going to expose your weak email flows
I wrote this email now because Memorial Day is one of the biggest DTC moments of Q2. You know that traffic and intent are about to spike and you also know that add to carts are going to increase but so are abandoned carts. If you sign up to Instant now and get your abandonment flows where they need to be, Memorial Day is one of the easiest revenue wins on the calendar. But if your flows remain weak, you're paying to bring people into your funnel and then handing the recovery job to an outdated template that’s not going to perform.
3. "I don't have time for another tool"
A lot of brands I talk to about new email tech say some version of "I don't have bandwidth for a four-week onboarding right before a sale period." That might have been true for more complex tools in the past but Instant goes live same-day. Most brands are live in under 60 minutes. You connect your Shopify and DNS and that's it. You pick the flows you want to use, go live and if it doesn't work, you pause it and go right back to your existing emails. There’s no drama or long term contract. It’s easy to turn on and easy to turn off and smart rules also let you swap creative and messaging in and out for sale windows in minutes, schedule it ahead of time, all inside the same flow. That used to take a few people and a multi-day sprint in other ESPs.
4. Focus on Flows first. Then campaigns.
Once your flows are running on AI, the next question every brand I talk to asks is "Why are our campaigns still manual?" Most brands still run campaigns as a series of one-off sends. The sale starts, a reminder goes out a few days later, a last-chance email lands the night before it ends, and that's the whole plan. It's better than nothing but it's not as effective as it could be. My advice is to always get your flows running first and then use campaigns for the moments that actually matter like product drops, holiday pushes, restocks, back-in-stock alerts, and sale windows.
The segmentation is also way easier than what most teams are used to. You can target shoppers who spent $100 in the last 60 days or people who looked at one collection but never bought with one filter instead of building a messy stack of conditions, which means you can move from broad batch sends to much sharper campaigns without needing three marketers building segments all day. Instant has agentic campaigns in beta right now where AI plans the whole campaign, writes it, sends it, and gets sharper every cycle. But start with flows. Prove it there before you expand into campaigns.
If you want to try Instant, you can go live before Memorial Day and you get 50% off your first 60 days. They want to help you 3x email revenue in the first 15 days, starting with your core abandonment flows. You don't have to rip out your ESP if you don’t want to. Most brands keep their ESP for campaigns and use Instant for flows. Some replace it entirely. Both options work but I highly recommend giving it a try here.
The last point I want to land before you close this email is your shoppers don't see your brand the way you do. They don't care how long you spent dialing in the abandonment hero image. They care whether the email shows up at the right time, references what they actually looked at, and gives them a clean reason to come back so they can convert. If your flows do that for every shopper, you will win Memorial Day. If they're firing the same email at everyone, you won’t.
I hope this email helps and I’ll see you back here on Thursday for another send!
Thanks for reading.
Nik