5 Steps to Building a Retention Marketing Strategy in Klaviyo
2026-03-10 19:49 Diff
https://www.klaviyo.com/blog/how-to-build-a-retention-marketing-strategy-in-klaviyo

If you’re a direct-to-consumer brand, I have news for you: you’re not really in the product business. You’re in the customer relationship business.

That’s the first thing I try to get every brand to accept when they start working with my team at A-Game Digital. Because whether you realize it or not, you’re competing with Amazon. And Amazon owns around 40% of ecommerce transactions. They excel at logistics, convenience, and speed in a way no other brand can realistically match.

So if you try to win on transactions alone, you’ll lose.

Where you can win, and where Klaviyo B2C CRM gives you a real advantage, is in the relationships you build with your customers.

Once your team understands this, you’ll start to understand something else, too: Klaviyo isn’t just an email and SMS marketing platform. It’s a CRM that helps you:

  • Anticipate what your customers want next.
  • Show up like a helpful friend rather than a pushy salesperson.
  • Build a profitable business that grows through both retention and acquisition.

Getting brands to that realization takes a few steps. Here’s how I walk them through it:

Step 1: Zoom out (you’re probably leaving retention money on the table)

I start with a simple question: How much money are you losing every month because your customers never return?

To answer that, I download a brand’s data from Klaviyo Marketing Analytics and run it through a simple model that calculates:

  • Revenue from returning customers
  • Revenue lost because those customers did not return, based on customer lifetime value

A very normal outcome looks like this:

  • You sold $1 million to new customers.
  • You lost $5 million in potential revenue from customers who never came back.

In other words, you may be sprinting on the acquisition treadmill, chasing the same carrot over and over, when you could be building a predictable, compounding retention program instead.

Marketing Analytics makes that loss impossible to ignore. When a brand sees that number quantified, it opens a door that tactical conversations never could. Suddenly, the brand has something concrete they can take back to their team.

Once you see the opportunity, the question becomes: How do we fix this?

Step 2: See your best customers (and how you’re losing them)

Almost every brand has a group of high-value customers, or champions, who spend around 4–10x what the average customer spends. And almost every brand is quietly losing those people.

With Marketing Analytics, this is crystal clear. You can see:

  • How many champions you have
  • When their engagement starts to drop
  • The point where they begin to churn

From there, I show brands something very simple: how to speak differently to someone who spends 4–5x more than average.

A great starting point is the abandoned check-out flow in email and SMS, because it’s high-volume and high-intent. When you add a layer of personalization (even something as basic as a profile property that marks a customer as a champion), you can send a different version of that flow just to them.

You don’t have to calculate anything manually. Once Marketing Analytics identifies those customers, you can use Klaviyo to:

  • Tag them in their profile.
  • Trigger a different experience automatically.
  • Treat them the way a high-value customer should be treated.

What we’ve seen is that even this small step can increase the value of that abandoned check-out flow by 10%—and, in some cases, up to 30%.

And when you think about what happens if you lose 10% fewer champion customers, and those champions are worth 10x more than a one-time purchaser, you very quickly get into 7-figure territory.

At that point, the mindset shifts. Brands are no longer asking: Why would I pay more for this? They’re asking: How do I stop losing that much revenue?

Step 3: Extend your strategy beyond email and SMS

Once the strategy clicks, you’ll start to see that the customer experience isn’t limited to email and SMS. It spans every touchpoint. A lot of brands use several third-party tools for things like:

  • Preferences
  • Subscriptions
  • Product recommendations
  • Account pages

But this is usually where I introduce Klaviyo Customer Hub. Customer Hub isn’t a rip-and-replace for your valuable partnerships. It complements what you already have.

When you stack Customer Hub on top of the retention strategy you’ve already built with Marketing Analytics, you’re no longer just sending better messages. You’re delivering a cohesive, personalized experience everywhere the customer interacts with you.

That includes:

  • Klaviyo Email
  • Klaviyo SMS
  • Web, through Klaviyo Customer Hub
  • Brick-and-mortar stores, when you use Shopify POS

We see it all the time: someone opens an email, clicks through, and then walks into the store within 4–5 days to make a purchase. When you look at the data, you realize the email didn’t just drive an online order. It influenced an in-store transaction as well.

When thinking about the relationship between service and marketing, bidirectional communication between your teams is crucial.

“Make sure your customer service team and your email marketing team are talking to each other,” says Anna Sophie Fokdal Christensen, head of email at FABO, a holistic growth partner for ecommerce brands working in the lifestyle and apparel industry. “Your support team sits on a goldmine of real customer language, objections, FAQs, and moments of friction: exactly the insights you should be feeding into your flows and campaigns.”

“The best-performing emails are built on what customers ask, complain about, and get excited over every single day,” Christensen says.

The best-performing emails are built on what customers ask, complain about, and get excited over every single day.
Anna Sophie Fokdal Christensen

head of email, FABO

Step 4: Pay more attention to repeat purchase rate

Every executive understands revenue. So I like to reduce retention to a number that clicks immediately: repeat purchase rate.

Here’s a simple version of that math. Let’s say:

  • Your repeat purchase rate is 20%.
  • You generate $1 million a year in sales.
  • That means $200,000 a year in repeat revenue.

If you can increase that repeat purchase rate by just 2%, that’s another $20,000 a year. And most of the cost to earn that revenue is already baked into your existing operations and your current use of Klaviyo Email and SMS.

Now, most brands we work with aren’t doing $1 million a year. They’re often doing $1–5 million a month.

If you take an average repeat purchase rate of 18 to 20 percent and improve it by just one to two points, the impact is massive. You are looking at hundreds of thousands of dollars in incremental annual revenue from new customers making a second purchase alone. That does not include customers who go on to a third or fourth order.

This isn’t a one-time lift. It compounds. Over time, it becomes a new baseline for the business.

You don’t need a complicated tactic to make this happen. You need a real retention strategy and the discipline to execute it inside Klaviyo as a true B2C CRM.

What does a strong retention strategy actually look like?

It starts with a mindset shift. Stop celebrating the first purchase as the finish line. Treat every first-time buyer like a prospect. You don’t truly have a customer until they buy again. That belief alone forces better decisions about how you design the post-purchase experience and prioritize the second profitable sale.

Next, borrow from software-as-solution (SaaS). SaaS companies live and die by retention, so they obsess over onboarding, educate users, reinforce value, and build habits early before momentum fades.

B2C brands can do the same. Beyond flawless fulfillment, the task is to design a post-purchase content experience that helps customers get more value from what they bought and naturally introduces what comes next.

One more thing. Let the data guide you. A simple look at cohort analysis in Klaviyo Marketing Analytics will show you exactly when the likelihood of a second purchase drops. For most brands, that window is 30 to 60 days. Yet many wait until 90 days to act with a poorly performing winback flow, long after customer momentum has already faded.

The goal is simple. Engineer an experience that makes the second purchase feel inevitable.

"You can stack engagement metrics on top of repeat purchase rate to tell a much clearer revenue story,” says Stefan Milicevic, strategy director at Underground Ecom. “When teams see how improvements in clicks and engagement naturally cascade into more returning customers, it makes retention feel concrete, not abstract.”

When teams see how improvements in clicks and engagement naturally cascade into more returning customers, it makes retention feel concrete.
Stefan Milicevic

Strategy director, Underground Ecom

Step 5: Break up with your scarcity mindset

The biggest barrier to all of this is usually not technical. It’s mindset.

Some marketers are buried in daily tactics, so they focus on:

  • Short-term campaign performance
  • Year-over-year comparisons
  • Sending more emails when they see declines

Others understand what’s at stake a bit better.

Think about it. Would you rather fight for every transaction based on price and product, or have your customers think of you as a helpful, trusted friend?“Retention isn’t driven by frequency,” says Christensen. “It’s driven by relevance and relation.”

Klaviyo gives you the data and functionality to become that trusted friend. But you have to get real about if your brand is a commodity that’s easy to replace, or one people would miss if you disappeared.

A surprising number of leaders admit, “If we went away today, our customers would just find someone else.”

That’s the reality check. It’s uncomfortable, but it’s honest. And it’s exactly where meaningful change starts.

Why this approach works

This is not template-driven work. It’s not, “Here’s the best-practice welcome series.” It’s, “Here’s how your brand should show up for your customers, based on what you told us matters and what your data is already telling us.”

Everything I’ve described comes back to one simple idea: brands win when they build relationships, not when they chase transactions.

Unlike acquisition, which is volatile, increasingly expensive, and easy to become dependent on, retention is predictable, compounding, and stabilizing for your business.

Big ecommerce platforms want you to stay on the advertising treadmill. If you don’t understand your own retention, you’ll keep spending there by default.

Most brands don’t need to increase their ad budgets. They need to step back, see their brand from the customer’s point of view, and build an experience that makes people want to come back.

Klaviyo B2C CRM is built to power that shift. Here’s how:

  • Klaviyo Marketing Analytics shows you exactly where you’re losing money.
  • Klaviyo SMS adds a strong, direct channel on top of email.
  • Klaviyo Customer Hub unifies the website experience.
  • AI-powered personalization makes sure your best customers feel like your best customers.

That’s not just a different set of tactics. That’s a different way of doing business.

You stop being a brand that’s easy to replace. You become a brand people are genuinely glad to hear from, and happy to buy from again and again.