The SOP your flows don't have

Happy Wednesday!

An audit this week pulled up an abandoned cart flow that had been firing on the wrong trigger for three years. The dashboard said the flow was live, the recipient count looked healthy, and nobody had touched it since 2023.

The trigger was a third-party tracking tool sending events into Klaviyo instead of the native Checkout Started event. Native events fire on every checkout, while third-party events fire when the tool's script loads, which means an ad blocker, a slow page, or a script delay quietly drops the event.

Roughly a third of carts never entered the flow at all. The brand had been losing recoverable revenue on every cart, every week, for three years, and nobody caught it because there was no checklist to fail against.

The asymmetry nobody names

Every campaign has an implicit SOP. Subject, preview, send time, segment, exclusion, deliverability check on the sending domain, owner, post-send report.

The SOP isn't usually written down, but it exists. When a campaign goes wrong, you can walk back through those eight things and find the missed step.

Flows have no equivalent. You build the flow once, mark it active, and walk away, which is exactly why flow errors live in accounts for years.

The same checklist gap shows up behind welcome flows that quietly drift from 50% opens to 18% after a brand rename, cross-sell flows that recommend products before they ship, and abandoned cart flows like the one above. Different surface, same root cause.

What a flow SOP should contain

A flow SOP is two checklists in one doc per flow. One you run before flipping the flow on. One you run every quarter while it's live.

Here's the pre-launch one — the questions to answer before the toggle goes green.

Then every ninety days, you run a different checklist on the same flow. The question shifts from did we build it right to is it still built right, because product fields rename, sender personas drift, time delays go stale, and complexity stops paying for itself.

The point of the doc isn't sophistication. The green dot in Klaviyo only tells you the flow is firing, not that it's firing on the right trigger, to the right segment, with the right exclusions, from the right sender, on a cadence that still matches the buyer's rhythm.

A brand with flow SOPs catches a broken trigger in ninety days. A brand without one catches it in three years, usually by accident, during an audit they paid for to fix something else.

The silent cost

Campaigns get SOPs because campaign mistakes are loud. The wrong list goes out at 10am and the support inbox lights up by lunch.

Flow mistakes are silent. The trigger misfires, the filter lapses, the sender drifts, the delays go stale, and nobody sees it for years, which is exactly why the silent ones end up costing more.

Write the SOP for every flow you own. Two checklists, one doc per flow, quarterly review. That's the gap, and naming it is the fix.

If you want me to look at your flows and tell you which ones are running correctly or broken, grab some time with me. Flow audits are 100% free.

Have a great week. Go write your flow SOPs.

- Raymond