Mastering Klaviyo

Most brands jump straight into building flows before their foundations are solid. The result is campaigns that look good in Klaviyo but land in spam, bounce at high rates, or get flagged by ISPs. Deliverability is not glamorous, but it is the difference between your emails being seen and your emails being invisible.

Three DNS records stand between you and the inbox. All three must be configured before you send a single campaign. Without them, your emails are unverified strangers knocking on someone's door with no ID.

A new sending domain has no reputation. ISPs don't know whether to trust it. Warming up means gradually increasing send volume so you build that trust before sending at full scale. Skipping this is the fastest way to land in spam permanently.

Most DTC brands treat email sign-up as an afterthought. A single generic "subscribe for updates" field buried in the footer, no incentive, no promise of what they'll receive. The brands that build high-performing lists treat sign-up as a conversion in itself and design it accordingly.

A single pop-up is not a list growth strategy. You need capture points at every stage of the customer journey on your site. Each placement targets a different visitor intent level.

The first email in a welcome series averages an 83.6% open rate in 2026 — the highest-performing automated email type across all industries. That's 3 to 4 times higher than any campaign you'll ever send. Most brands waste it by sending a generic "thanks for signing up" email with a 10% discount code and no follow-through. The welcome series is where you set expectations, build brand affinity, and move a subscriber toward their first purchase. Flows as a whole generate 41% of total email revenue from just 5.3% of sends, with revenue per recipient nearly 18x higher than campaigns.

Abandonment flows target people at the highest-intent moments in your funnel. Someone who added a product to their cart and left is not a lost customer. They're a warm lead who got distracted, had a question, or wasn't quite ready. A well-structured abandonment sequence captures a significant portion of that revenue back without any additional ad spend.

Campaigns are broadcast emails, sent manually to a segment of your list. Flows run automatically. Both matter, but they serve different purposes. Campaigns are for moments: launches, promotions, seasonal events, editorial content. The mistake most brands make is treating campaigns as a conveyor belt of discount codes that slowly erodes their list quality and trains subscribers to only open when there's an offer.

Most brands use segmentation as a deliverability trick, only sending to engaged subscribers before a big send to protect their sender score. That's a misuse of what segmentation actually does. Done properly, it means your subscribers receive emails that are genuinely relevant to where they are in their relationship with your brand, which dramatically improves engagement, conversion rates, and list longevity.

Tag subscribers based on behaviour: which links they click, which products they view, which categories they browse. A subscriber who always clicks fragrance content should receive fragrance emails. One who clicks fitness content should receive fitness emails. Klaviyo makes this straightforward with conditional splits in flows and tag-based segments in campaigns.

Klaviyo surfaces a lot of data. Most of it is either vanity metrics or requires context to be useful. Open rates look good in a report but can be inflated by Apple Mail Privacy Protection. Click rates are more reliable. Revenue per recipient is the number that actually tells you whether your email programme is working.

Every test should start with a written hypothesis: "Because [data or observation], we believe [change] will [outcome]. We will know it worked when [metric] improves by [X%]." If you can't write this, the test is not ready to run.