Shopify has built-in email marketing. It’s Messaging (formerly Shopify Email) lets merchants build, send, and automate campaigns from the Admin, with 10,000 free emails included on every plan each month.
This guide is for Shopify store owners, including print-on-demand sellers, who want to turn one-time buyers into repeat customers without hiring a marketing team. It covers Shopify Messaging's built-in features, when a dedicated email service provider such as Klaviyo or Omnisend earns its cost, how SMS marketing and push notifications fit around email, and how to read campaign performance.
Automation, not send volume, decides whether an email program pays off: automated flows generate 41% of total email revenue from just 5.3% of sends.
Key takeaways
- Shopify Messaging includes 10,000 free emails per month on every plan, a drag-and-drop editor, purchase-history segmentation, and campaign analytics.
- Automated flows outperform one-off campaigns by a wide margin: flows drive 41% of email revenue from only 5.3% of sends.
- Shopify has no native SMS or push notification tool. Both require a separate app, such as Klaviyo, Postscript, or Omnisend.
- Personalized emails generate six times the transaction rate of generic ones.
- The average ecommerce click-through rate sits at 2.44%, so a cart-recovery or post-purchase automation that beats that number is already outperforming the norm.
Does Shopify have email marketing?
Shopify has run a built-in email tool since 2019, now called Shopify Messaging, that lives inside the same admin as the website builder and store tools, under Marketing. Store owners on the Basic, Grow, Advanced, or Plus plans can send Shopify email campaigns and set up automation templates without connecting a third-party email service provider.
The free allowance resets every calendar month and does not carry over unused emails. Sending beyond 10,000 emails costs $1 per 1,000 additional emails up to 300,000 emails, dropping to $0.65 per 1,000 up to 750,000, and $0.55 per 1,000 beyond that.
Important
There’s one detail merchants often miss: abandoned checkout automations never count against the monthly limit, no matter how many the store sends.
Shopify Messaging does not, however, cover SMS marketing, SMS campaigns, or push notifications. Those channels need a dedicated app, covered further down.
Key features of Shopify Messaging
Shopify Messaging's key features cover email templates, segmentation, automation, and reporting, giving Shopify users a full basic toolkit without installing anything extra. Advanced features such as SMS and multi-condition segmentation are outside this list and covered in the apps section below.
Drag and drop editor and pre-built templates
Email marketing campaigns are designed from a drag-and-drop editor with pre-built templates for newsletters, product launches, and basic campaigns, so a merchant with store products but no design background can still ship a professional-looking email.
Templates pull directly from store data, including product images, prices, and titles, cutting the manual work of building each send from scratch.
Segmentation based on purchase history
Shopify Messaging groups customer emails into segments based on purchase history and customer engagement and behavior, such as total spend, order count, or specific products purchased.
A store selling custom apparel through Print on Demand, for example, can create segments for customers who bought hoodies in the past ninety days and send that group a coordinated accessory launch, rather than blasting the entire list.
Built-in automation templates
The platform ships with automation templates for welcome emails, abandoned cart reminders, and post-purchase emails, each triggered by a specific customer action. Merchants can adjust timing, copy, and conditional logic (for example, only sending a discount to first-time buyers) without rebuilding the flow from scratch.
Campaign performance analytics
After a send, the activity report shows open rates, click rates, unsubscribes, and spam complaints for that specific campaign. It is enough to judge whether one subject line beats another, though it stops short of the revenue-per-recipient and cross-channel reporting that dedicated platforms provide.
Shopify email marketing apps: when to move beyond Shopify Messaging
Shopify Messaging suits stores running basic campaigns: newsletters, sale announcements, and simple welcome sequences. Growth tends to expose its limits in three places: segmentation stays shallow compared to behavior-based tools, there is no SMS or push channel, and A/B testing options are limited.
The two most installed alternatives on the Shopify App Store solve those gaps differently.
- Klaviyo combines email and SMS marketing in one dashboard and syncs Shopify store data, including purchase history and browsing behavior, in near real time. Its segmentation supports conditional logic across multiple customer actions at once, which is why it tends to suit stores that already have a few thousand customer emails and want deeper personalization than Shopify Messaging offers.
- Omnisend bundles email, SMS, and push notifications with a visual automation builder and includes a free tier covering up to 500 contacts. It fits stores that want one platform for every channel rather than paying separately for email and messaging tools.
Both integrate with Shopify's customer lists directly, so segments built in Shopify carry over without a manual export.
Tip
Printify's Shopify integration syncs store products and fulfillment status back to Shopify automatically, so the same product and order data feeds into whichever email tool a store picks.
SMS marketing and push notifications: The gap Shopify leaves open
Shopify has no native SMS marketing or push notification tool, unlike its built-in email option. Every SMS campaign on a Shopify store runs through a separate app: Postscript, Klaviyo's SMS add-on, or Omnisend's SMS credits are the three most common choices on the Shopify App Store.
- SMS pricing works differently from email. Rather than a flat free allowance, most apps charge per message once a store exceeds a monthly credit limit, and US carriers require 10DLC (ten-digit long code) registration before a brand can send SMS campaigns at scale.
- Push notifications, by contrast, typically ship free with these same apps and reach customers through their mobile devices without needing a phone number at all, making them a lower-friction second channel for stores testing beyond email.
Automation templates that carry the most weight
Four automation templates account for most of the revenue in a typical Shopify store's flow program:
- Welcome emails, sent to new subscribers after sign-up, introduce the brand and often include a first-purchase incentive.
- Abandoned cart reminders, triggered when a shopper adds a product but leaves without completing checkout, recover a share of otherwise lost sales. On Shopify Messaging specifically, these sends never count against the free monthly allowance.
- Post-purchase emails, sent after an order ships, cover shipping updates, upsell emails for complementary store products, and requests for reviews.
- Reorder reminders, timed to a customer's typical repurchase cycle, work well for consumable or seasonal products and turn one-time buyers into repeat customers.
Each of these runs on conditional logic: a specific customer action, such as an abandoned checkout or a delivered order, starts the flow automatically, so the merchant sets it up once and lets it send emails when a condition is triggered.
Segmentation and personalization
Segmentation is what separates a marketing email sent to an entire list from one built around actual customer behavior: personalized subject lines lift unique open rates by 29% over generic ones.
Skincare brand Three Ships, for example, built its list to 150,000 engaged subscribers and now generates 30% to 35% of total revenue from email. Co-founder Laura Thompson called email "such an underrated channel" and credited long-form, founder-written content, not just discount codes, for keeping subscribers engaged.
To build effective campaigns from segmentation, most merchants start with a handful of groups:
- New subscribers
- Loyal customers who buy repeatedly
- Existing customers who have gone quiet
- Customers are segmented by the specific product category they purchased.
Advanced segmentation features in apps such as Klaviyo let a merchant combine several of these conditions in one segment, something Shopify Messaging's basic campaigns cannot do.
Measuring campaign performance: what the numbers mean
Three metrics indicate whether a campaign worked: open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates. Across all industries, the average open rate is 19.21%, and the average click-through rate is 2.44%.
Campaigns landing meaningfully above those numbers signal a well-matched subject line and a relevant offer; one falling well below usually points to a list that needs cleaning or content that missed the segment it targeted.
Mobile devices account for roughly 55% of all email opens. Every template, whether built in Shopify Messaging or a dedicated app, needs to render correctly on a small screen before it goes out, since a broken layout on a phone costs the click regardless of how strong the subject line was.
Revenue generated per email, not open rate alone, is the number that determines whether an automation is worth keeping. A welcome flow with a modest open rate but a high conversion rate can outearn a newsletter that gets opened by nearly everyone but converts almost no one.
Growing your list: how to collect customer emails without hurting deliverability
New subscribers rarely appear without an incentive. A discount code, an early-access offer, or a free digital product tied to signup gives shoppers a reason to hand over their email address rather than browse anonymously.
Whatever the offer, a double opt-in process, where a new subscriber confirms their email address before entering the active list, keeps the list made up of real, engaged people and supports compliance with US email law.
The Federal Trade Commission's CAN-SPAM Act sets the baseline rules for every marketing email sent to a US customer: accurate sender information in the header, a subject line that reflects the actual content, and a working unsubscribe link that the business must honor within ten business days.
None of this is optional, and it applies equally to Shopify Messaging and any third-party email service provider.
List hygiene, meaning the regular removal of bounced addresses and long-unengaged subscribers, protects sender reputation and keeps future marketing emails landing in the inbox rather than the spam folder. Smaller, engaged lists consistently outperform larger ones padded with addresses that never open anything.
Tip
Printify's guide to other marketing channels for Shopify covers how segmentation, paid ads, and content marketing work alongside email.
Shopify email marketing costs: free plan versus paid apps
Shopify Messaging's free plan covers the first 10,000 emails sent each month at no charge, an allowance generous enough for most stores under a few thousand active customers. Beyond that volume, the pay-as-you-go pricing described above kicks in automatically, with no subscription commitment required.
Dedicated apps price differently, usually based on the number of contacts stored rather than emails sent, and unlimited emails within that contact limit is common across Klaviyo, Omnisend, and similar platforms.
A store choosing between Shopify Messaging and a paid app is really deciding between lower cost with basic campaigns or a higher monthly bill in exchange for advanced segmentation, SMS, and deeper automation.
Tip
For a store just getting its first product live through Printify's print-on-demand integration for Shopify, starting with Shopify Messaging's free plan and upgrading once the customer list justifies the cost is the lower-risk path.
Conclusion: Matching the setup to the store
The best email marketing for Shopify depends on where a specific online store's customer list and business goals currently stand.
- A small business with a short list can run effective campaigns entirely on Shopify Messaging's free plan: welcome emails, abandoned cart reminders, and basic segmentation, at no cost.
- A store with a larger base of existing customers and specific goals around SMS marketing or deeper segmentation gets more value from a dedicated email service provider.
Either path uses the same customer data already sitting in the Shopify admin to keep customer relationships active after the first sale.
