Is your email really working? Five checks

What is an email marketing audit?

An email marketing audit checks whether your email is actually sending, reaching real people and producing orders. It answers a plain question: how do you know if a flow is working? It uses your store's own numbers, not the email platform's dashboard. For a Shopify store on Klaviyo, the five checks below take about ten minutes to run. Fixing what they find takes longer.

Check one: are your flows sending to the whole list?

Open each flow and compare emails sent with the number of people who should have received them. On one store, a weekly sequence of 13 emails showed as live for three weeks and had sent seven emails to a list of 488 people.

On August 20, 2026, Klaviyo's own screen put it plainly: 438 of 488 had received nothing in 30 days. A pass is when the number of emails sent is close to the list size times the number of emails each person should have received. A fail is a live flow with only a handful of sends.

Check two: what does each flow trigger on?

That flow triggered on Added to List, which only fires for people added after the flow goes live. The 488 were on the list before the flow existed, so almost none entered: in six weeks it reached 13 people.

Removing people from the list and adding them back through Klaviyo's API (the connection other software uses to change a list) does not fire the trigger either. The fix that held was replacing it with a scheduled weekly email, which reached 484 people on its first send. Klaviyo's help center has a checklist for troubleshooting a flow that is not sending.

Which flows a store should have, and what each one triggers on, is in Klaviyo flows: the ones every Shopify store needs.

Check three: is your open rate telling the truth?

One account’s list engagement screen showed a 92 percent open rate. Counted by sends, it was 238 opens on 263, about 90 percent. Apple Mail Privacy Protection loads images automatically and records an open whether or not anyone looked.

On the same account, a 5.31 percent click rate and a $359.43 average order value both held up. The full explanation is in the guide on why a 92 percent open rate is not real.

Check four: how many people can each flow reach?

On a store doing about 7,500 sessions a month, 41 people started checkout and 33 finished in the 30 days to August 20, 2026, leaving eight people a month for an abandoned cart email.

Browse abandonment had a different ceiling: the store could identify about 0.8 percent of its visitors. See the abandoned cart arithmetic and why browse abandonment was starved.

Check five: do Klaviyo's orders match Shopify's?

For August 17 to September 15, 2026 on one store, Klaviyo credited email with 23 orders. Shopify's Total sales by referrer report traced 10 orders to an email click.

Klaviyo's help center says it counts a conversion when someone opens or clicks an email and then orders within its attribution window, even if they came back to the store another way. The attribution window is the number of days after an open or click that Klaviyo still credits the email, five days by default for newer accounts. An automatic Apple Mail open counts as an open. Shopify credits the channel the order arrived from. Both numbers are defensible. Know which one you are looking at.

How to read that report, and why email platforms claim more sales than Shopify, is covered in Shopify analytics: which reports show where sales come from. If you also use Google Analytics, turn on Automatically add UTM parameters to links in Klaviyo’s UTM tracking settings, so traffic tools can see which visits came from email. Tagging links so GA4 credits the right channel covers the rest.

Why is the welcome email not sending?

Start with the list: if new sign-ups never reach the list the flow is watching, the flow has nobody to send to. Signing up on your own store and getting nothing back is unnerving, and each cause below is a single setting you can check. Klaviyo’s help center points to these:

1. The flow watches a different list. Lists with similar names make this easy to miss, so open the trigger and read the list name.
2. The form is in draft, or fills another list. A sign-up form has to be published, and its submit button decides which list people join.
3. Shopify sign-ups go nowhere. People who subscribe through Shopify forms or checkout only reach the welcome series if a list is chosen for them in Klaviyo’s Shopify sync settings.
4. The list uses double opt-in. People join it, and enter the welcome series, only after they confirm.
5. Smart Sending skipped it. If it is on for that email, anyone who got another email within its window, 16 hours by default, is skipped, and skipped messages are not resent.

Then test with an address that has never been through the flow. A welcome series can only be entered once, so an address that went through it before will not get it again.

Should an email audit check deliverability?

Yes, briefly, because a flow that sends into spam folders looks exactly like a flow that sends. Google's email sender guidelines ask everyone sending to Gmail to set up SPF or DKIM authentication, which shows Gmail the email really came from your domain, and to keep reported spam rates below 0.3 percent. Since February 1, 2024, senders of more than 5,000 messages a day to Gmail accounts must also set up both SPF and DKIM, set up DMARC (a policy that tells inboxes what to do with mail that fails those checks) and support one-click unsubscribe.

In Klaviyo, the usual fix is a branded sending domain, so email is authenticated as coming from the store's own domain instead of a shared one. Klaviyo's help center walks through the setup.

Is the list healthy enough to keep sending to?

Check three rates over the last 30 days against the ranges Klaviyo’s help center publishes:

One bad campaign is normal. A trend outside those ranges across a month is the red flag. Leave open rate out of this check: Apple Mail’s machine opens make it the least reliable number on the screen.

Suppressing people who never engage also trims the bill. Klaviyo charges by billable profiles, meaning the people who can still receive your marketing, and a suppressed profile leaves that count once Klaviyo has processed it. How to lower your Klaviyo bill without losing sales walks through the cleanup.

What does the audit look like as a worksheet?

What is on an email marketing audit checklist?

1. Every live flow sends to close to the number of people it should reach.
2. Each flow's trigger fires for the people it was built for. A flow triggered by joining a list only catches people added after it went live.
3. Cart and browse reminders stop when someone buys.
4. Sign-up forms sit on the pages that get traffic, including the best product pages.
5. You know what share of visitors Klaviyo can identify.
6. The sending domain has SPF and DKIM set up, plus DMARC if you send more than 5,000 emails a day to Gmail.
7. Reported spam stays below 0.3 percent, the line Google sets for senders to Gmail.
8. Bounces, unsubscribes and spam complaints sit inside Klaviyo's healthy ranges.
9. Every marketing email has a clear way to opt out and your physical postal address.
10. Opt-out requests are honored within 10 business days, as the FTC requires.
11. Open rate is not used to judge anything on its own.
12. Clicks and revenue per recipient are tracked for each flow and campaign.
13. Klaviyo's orders are compared with Shopify's Total sales by referrer for the same dates.
14. Someone owns the review, and it happens every month.

What should you check in each flow?

If the post-purchase row fails, see why a post-purchase flow stops sending. For the win-back row, see who should get a win back email before you count the pool.

What does a finished audit look like on one store?

What are the red flags in an email audit?

• A flow marked live that has sent almost nothing.
• An open rate that looks too good to be true.
• No campaign sent to the full list in weeks.
• Email revenue in Klaviyo that Shopify cannot find.
• Nobody able to say how many people each flow can reach.

How often should you run it?

Run the five checks once a month, and again after any change to a flow, a list or a sign-up form. The expensive failures are the quiet ones: a flow that stops sending after an edit, or a list that grows while nobody on it receives anything.

Run them again a few weeks before your busiest sending season. The Black Friday guide lists the Klaviyo settings that can quietly skip Black Friday emails.

The proof, from one store

Straight from the case study, with the source and what it does not prove. See all five results.

Does this sound like your store?

If it does, the service that fixes it is Klaviyo email, done for you. You can see the before and after on one store in the case study.