Reorder reminders with Shopify Messaging: how far you get.
Most small Shopify stores already have Shopify Messaging. It gets you further than you might expect for repeat purchases, as long as you know where a “days since last order” segment stops being enough.
Oftenflow does this per customer, every morning.
Join the waitlistWhat you get
Shopify’s help centre says stores can send 10,000 marketing emails a month for free, manual and automated sends together, and Shopify’s pricing page lists $1 per extra 1,000 after that. Campaigns go to all subscribers or to a customer segment.
Segments are built from data Shopify already has, such as orders, products, amount spent, location and tags, so they don’t need syncing.
A simple reorder reminder
- Create a segment of email subscribers who bought a consumable product and whose last order is between, say, 28 and 35 days ago.
- Leave out customers on a subscription and anyone who ordered in the last few days.
- Send a plain reminder with a link straight to the product. Skip the discount for now; see who reorders without one.
- Repeat weekly, so new customers move into the window.
Example segment: subscribed to email, bought House Blend 1 kg, last order between 28 and 35 days ago, no active subscription.
Mind the send limits
Shopify applies safe send limits that cap how many subscribers you can email per day or week, and suggests splitting a large list into smaller segments. For reminders that’s rarely a problem, because the windows are small by nature.
Where fixed windows stop working
A 28-to-35-day window is right for some customers and wrong for most. Someone who finishes a bag in three weeks has already bought elsewhere; someone who takes six weeks isn’t ready yet. Buying two bags at once doubles the time, and the window doesn’t know that.
The fix is a window per customer: their own usual interval, adjusted for quantity. You can approximate that with tags you update by hand, or let a tool calculate it and write the tags for you.
Oftenflow is being built to calculate each customer’s rhythm and write it back as tags and segments, so Shopify Messaging can send at the right moment.
Oftenflow is in development. This describes what we’re building.
