Top Email Marketing Best Practices for 2025 - Klaviyo
2026-03-10 23:00 Diff
https://www.klaviyo.com/products/email-marketing/best-practices

EMAIL MARKETING BEST PRACTICES

A step-by-step guide to growing faster with email marketing in 2025

Find the best strategies, automations, workflows and more to grow your brand’s profitability through email marketing.

Summary

What are email marketing best practices?

There’s no one-size-fits-all strategy that works for every business. There are, however, email marketing best practices, including personalization, crafting effective subject lines, and focusing on email design, that form the pillars of every winning email strategy.

The email marketing best practices you’ll find in this guide are based on thousands of successful Klaviyo customers, and were written to empower you to grow your revenue and inspire you with new ideas.

This guide will walk you through 3 key goals you need to focus on in order to achieve strong, long-term growth through email. To help you see what “good” looks like and improve from wherever you are right now, we’ve broken this guidance down by your audience size.

You can view your audience size by clicking on Profiles in Klaviyo, and then View subscriber growth. The email tile will show your current total of subscribers who have explicitly opted in to receive marketing.

Before you continue reading, review our Getting started with Klaviyo guide. You should have already completed the following steps:

Integrated your ecommerce platform with KlaviyoSet up your branded sending domain and set your DMARC policyPublished your first sign-up form and established an email listWarmed your account through campaignsPublished a welcome series flow

Goal 1

Expand your revenue potential through continuous audience growth

Every new subscriber is a potential customer, even a potential brand loyalist. If you increase your marketable audience, you also increase your revenue potential.

Sign-up forms are an essential tool for growing your audience. The best-performing brands on Klaviyo see an average form submit rate above 3% (excluding embedded forms).

While forms are an essential piece of your acquisition strategy, sign-up forms alone won’t cut it. In order to sustain month-over-month list growth, collect email marketing consent at every possible touchpoint, and continuously test sign-up incentive offers to keep the new subscribers coming.

Email list growth best practices for all audience sizes

Collect email consent at checkout on your website

This is a key piece of the integration process. If you’ve already integrated your website with Klaviyo using a pre-built integration, this will be taken care of. Syncing email subscribers from your ecommerce store to Klaviyo is one of the key steps in our getting started guides for every ecommerce platform integration. If you need to verify that you’ve set this up correctly, check out the getting started guide for your specific platform integration.

Launch a pop-up form to collect consent from site visitors

At minimum, you should have a pop-up form live on your site to collect email consent. We recommend setting the form behavior to show the form as someone is about to exit your site. The exit-intent behavior setting gives site visitors the freedom to browse around without a pop-up obstructing their session. The form will only appear as they move to exit the site.

Set the Targeting settings for this form to Don’t show to existing Klaviyo profiles. This ensures that the form only displays to brand-new visitors, and not to people who may have already joined and then unsubscribed.

Launch a teaser-first form to target non-consented customers

You probably have a subset of customers who have placed orders in the past but did not consent to email marketing. If they’ve clicked on a transactional message (like an order confirmation) that you sent from Klaviyo, they may be cookied, which means you can identify them on your site.

Target these profiles with a more subtle on-site form that leads with a form teaser. A form teaser appears as a small, unobtrusive widget in the corner of your site with a call to action like Save 10% or Sign up. It allows visitors to open up a sign-up form once they’re ready to subscribe.

In Klaviyo, the consent status of unconsented profiles is marked as Never subscribed. In order to target these profiles with a form, group them together by building a segment with the following criteria: If someone can or cannot receive marketing > Person can receive email marketing > Because person never subscribed

Then, build a new sign-up form that has a teaser as the first step in the sequence:

Set the teaser to display Before displaying form.In the next form step, set the timing of your form to be Based on rules: after visiting a certain number of pages. Start with a 2-page threshold.Under Targeting > Visitors, choose Show to profiles in a specific list or segment. 4. Choose the segment you just built that contains your unconsented active profiles.Publish your form.

Capture passive browsers with an embedded form in your website footer

Users typically expect to find an email sign-up form embedded in the footer of any website. While the submit rate on this embedded form will be much lower than your pop-up, the intent here is to capture any passive browsers who may have scrolled all the way down to the bottom of the page. This form should always be visible in your footer, so set targeting to Show to all visitors.

Deliver personalized recommendations to new subscribers faster

Think about all the window shoppers who visit your site. They click around, they lurk, they read product reviews, and they may do this several times before they decide to give you their email address.

That browsing activity is valuable data that you could be using to make personalized product recommendations as soon as someone subscribes to email. You can achieve this instant personalization by turning on anonymous visitor tracking in Klaviyo. To do this:

1. Log in to your Klaviyo account.

2. Go to Settings > Data.

3. Click the checkbox to Enable anonymous visitor tracking.

Once this feature is enabled, website activity from anonymous visitors will be stored locally in their browsers. As soon as they provide their email address and become identified in Klaviyo, their locally-stored data will be backfilled with appropriate timestamps on their profile, giving you a full view of their onsite activity before they subscribed. This data allows you to include product feeds in your welcome series that remind subscribers of the products they recently viewed, or make product recommendations that are tailored to them.

If you use a cookie consent management tool like OneTrust, you’ll need to update your cookie consent policy to explicitly have customers opt in to having their anonymous activity tracked. Without this consent, Klaviyo will not be able to write data to the browser’s local storage.

Email list growth best practices for over 20K subscribers

Use Facebook Lead Ads to find more potential customers

Investing in lead ads on social media can significantly accelerate your audience growth. The Meta Ad network enables you to run ads across Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp, exposing your brand to a vast global audience.

With the Klaviyo Facebooks Ads integration, you can sync segments from Klaviyo into the Meta Ad Network, then use those segments for ad targeting.

Identify qualified prospects through lookalike audiences

The concept of a Facebook lookalike audience is simple: build a segment of current customers, and then let Meta identify a cohort of people who are not yet customers, but who share similar interests, demographics, and characteristics. For best results, Meta recommends using a base segment that contains between 1K and 5K profiles.

In order to identify qualified prospects, build a segment in Klaviyo that identifies the type of customers you want to attract (your high-value customers).

Predictive analytics are AI-powered calculations that you can use to segment customers based on their lifetime value. Customer lifetime value (CLV) simply means the total amount of money someone spends with your brand over their lifetime, and it’s helpful for identifying who your best customers are. Start with this suggested segment criteria:

– What someone has or has not done > Placed Order > at least once in the last 365 days
 – AND Predictive analytics about someone > Historic lifetime value > is at least $100

Your value threshold for what makes a “good” customer will vary based on the types of products you sell and the average CLV of your customer base. You should use the dollar value threshold that reflects what you would consider a “valuable” customer. This will be different for every brand using Klaviyo.

Create Facebook Lead Ads to capture new subscribers

A good lead ad contains a clear call to action and some form of an offer or incentive (also known as a lead magnet) that has perceived value for your target audience. You promise to provide an incentive or value-added piece of content in exchange for the user’s contact information and marketing consent.

Here are a few commonly-used lead magnets:

Quizzes that help prospects identify their perfect product match or gives them otherwise helpful or interesting suggestions related to your product (e.g., Take our style quiz to get matched with the perfect trend for the upcoming season)Guides or educational materials on how to do something related to your product (e.g., Get our easy 5-step makeup guide for a flawless face in under 10 minutes, every day)Exclusive time-sensitive offers or discounts (e.g., Buy two, get one free)A free sampleA free consultation

Need more inspiration? Look up your direct competitors in the Meta Ads Library to see what kind of ads they’re running. You should also explore our network of third-party integration partners, like Octane AI, that can help you build engaging experiences designed to collect zero- and first-party data (data that customers willingly provide to you).

Once you’ve designed your ad and built it out in Facebook, you can connect your lead ad to Klaviyo in order to automatically sync subscribers. Make sure you set up the connection so that all synced profiles are also marked as “consented to email marketing”.

Drive conversions with a welcome flow specific to your lead ad

Design an email welcome flow specific to this lead ad that delivers on the incentive from this specific lead magnet. To build this flow, take the following steps:

Go to your existing email welcome series and save each email in the series as a template.

Click on the Added to List trigger and add a profile filter to your existing welcome flow. Set the profile filter criteria to Properties about someone > $source > does not equal > -127. -127 is the numeric source value that indicates that a profile’s initial source was Facebook. This filter prevents people who subscribe through your lead ad from entering your standard welcome series.

Return to the Flows page, and create a new flow from scratch using the Filled out lead ad metric as the trigger. Add email messages into your flow. The first message should be tailored to your lead ad incentive and deliver whatever you promised (quiz results, style recommendations, curated product recommendations, etc.). The subsequent messages can be the same as your standard welcome series flow.

This is where you can apply the templates you saved earlier from your original welcome series. If you collected preference data through your lead magnet (like a style quiz or digital consultation), find ways to personalize the content within your flow messages based on that data you collected.

For example, SWAK Cosmetics ran a lead ad that included a lead magnet called Color Family Quiz. This quiz asked shoppers to specify the colors they usually wear, types of events they usually attend while wearing makeup, and types of products they typically use. The brand’s welcome series flow included the following elements:

First email: provides quiz results specifying which Makeup Color Family would work best for the recipient

Second email: provides a curated set of recommended products based on the Color Family assigned by the quiz, and includes a unique discount code for 10% off

Third email: provides product recommendations in the form of a lookbook for the occasions the shopper typically attends based on their survey results

Fourth email: highlights SWAK’s return and exchange policies, and features 5-star customer reviews

Regularly A/B test your forms to increase your submit rate

To figure out how your audience responds to different offerings and which form experiences lead to the best outcomes, run an A/B test on your sign-up form at least once a quarter.

Here are some recommendations for what to test:

Test the sign-up incentive.

Test a percentage off vs. a fixed dollar amount.Test a discount vs. free shipping (or other non-discount perk).Test early access to new products vs. free digital content download.


Test the behavior of the form.

Test showing the form after scrolling 50% of the page vs. exit intent pop-up behavior.Test a fixed time delay (e.g., 5 second delay) vs. showing immediately.


Test the design of the form.

Test whether single-step or multi-step works better for collecting customer data using radio buttons.

A/B testing for marketing is just like running tests in your high school chemistry class. You should only test 1 variable at a time and hold everything else constant so you can tell if that change is actually making a difference.

Never A/B test both the sign-up incentive and display timing within a single test, for example, because you won’t be able to tell which variable impacted the submit rate. Testing frequently empowers you to rotate through a variety of test variables and constantly iterate to improve your form.

Shopify only: Reduce sign-up friction by turning on Lead capture with Shop

ShopPay is Shopify’s branded checkout service that allows shoppers to store their payment and shipping information. This enables experiences like one-click checkout and shopping the entire Shopify ecosystem through the Shop mobile app, which also tracks order status.

If you have ShopPay activated in your Shopify store, use Klaviyo’s lead capture with Shop feature on your pop-ups and fly-outs. This feature allows site visitors who use ShopPay to submit marketing consent by authenticating through a 6-digit code on their Shop mobile app. Your incentive discount code will then be associated with their ShopPay profile and will automatically apply to their cart when they complete a purchase.

Use UTM targeting on your forms to create tailored sign-up experiences

UTM tags are tracking modules that are added to the end of URLs that help you identify where your website traffic is coming from. Most brands will use UTM tags as a way to interpret site traffic reports in Google Analytics. You can use the UTM targeting feature under form Targeting & Behavior settings to target your Klaviyo sign-up forms based on UTM. Klaviyo supports form targeting based on these UTM parameters:

Source

Medium

Campaign

Content

Term

ID

Custom (meaning the ability to add custom parameters)

One great use case for UTM targeting is to build full-page forms that act like landing pages. Building specific landing pages for all of your various web traffic ads can be time consuming and challenging to manage on the back-end of your site. If the goal of your landing page is to collect consent or collect additional customer data, save time by building full-page forms in Klaviyo as an alternative to a landing page.

Here’s an example. Say BeanTown Coffee is having a mid-year clearance event. When someone clicks on any of their search or social ads related to this sale campaign, BeanTown wants to show brand new site visitors a specific full-page form that builds urgency around the sale and collects their email address. To achieve this, they take these steps:

Create a new full-page form.Set the Visitor targeting to Don’t show to existing Klaviyo profiles.Set the UTM targeting to show when Campaign equals Midyear_clearance_event. This way, anyone who clicks through a link tagged with the Midyear_clearance_event UTM campaign tag will see this full-page form as soon as they land on the website.

The form orients them to the current sale, asks them if they’re interested in any specific product categories, and collects their email address. Full-page forms are a fast and easy way to build contextualized customer experiences.

Email list growth best practices for over 400K subscribers

Use AI to automatically optimize your form

As your brand grows, you’ll need to find new ways to save time and optimize in order to stay efficient. If you have more than 400K total profiles stored in your Klaviyo account (including both active and suppressed profiles), run a form display optimization test. This AI-powered test automatically creates multiple versions of your form with different display timings, and automatically tests them against each other until it narrows down the optimal display settings.

(Accounts with less than 400K profiles stored in their accounts do not have the option to use this test because it requires a large volume of site traffic to yield statistically significant results.)

Forms display optimization takes the manual labor out of creating multiple form variations by hand, and can help you reach optimal performance faster than a traditional A/B test. Learn how to configure this test in your own account.

Goal 2

Earn more revenue with a segment-driven campaign strategy

Email campaigns give you the flexibility to reach your entire audience at once, or hone in on a specific segment with a targeted message. The more relevant your messages are to recipients, the more likely they are to drive revenue. This is why segments are a key tool for revenue growth: they allow you to reach the right groups of people with the right campaigns.

Segmentation also helps you maintain a strong email sender reputation. Put simply, brands who send every email to every single subscriber all the time tend to end up in the spam folder. Inbox providers like Gmail and Yahoo may start routing your messages to spam if you repeatedly send messages to recipients who aren’t opening or clicking on them.

Brands that see the best results from Klaviyo send at least 8 email campaigns a month targeted at a variety of different customer segments. Pairing engaging campaign content with a purposeful segmentation strategy and a strong call to action will help you generate revenue while maintaining a strong sender reputation.

Types of email campaigns to send

Snackable editorial content

These are short, attention-grabbing blurbs or links to blog posts that reference your products, but also have novel value to your subscribers (e.g., makeup tutorials for makeup brands, styling guides for clothing brands, weekly cleaning schedules for cleaning supplies brands, weekly workout suggestions from gyms).

The purpose of this type of campaign is to keep your open and click rates strong. The call to action (CTA) for these emails is typically something like “Read our blog”, “Follow us on social”, or “Learn more”. These campaigns are not sales-heavy.

Traffic-driving content

These are marketing campaigns that drive traffic to your website by promoting products, services, or events without any form of incentive or discount (e.g., highlighting a new product or collection, showcasing bestsellers, curating specific products, or highlighting a press moment or collaboration).

The purpose of these campaigns is to drive awareness of your brand’s products and services, as well as increase revenue.

Conversion-driving content

These are marketing campaigns that use some form of time-sensitive promotion or incentive to drive conversions (e.g., highlighting clearance items, flash sales, larger promotions, limited-time discounts to specific segments, or any other deal).

The purpose of these campaigns is to drive revenue and increase sales.

Use segmentation to keep your email engagement metrics strong

Email engagement refers to how many people open, click, and convert through your emails. Most brands on Klaviyo use Placed Order to measure conversion. According to our email marketing benchmarks research, ecommerce emails earn the following stats on average:

Open rate: 39.74%

Click rate: 1.47%

Revenue per recipient: $0.11

Placed order rate: 0.09%

To meet and exceed these averages, you need a segmentation strategy. A good segmentation strategy strikes a balance between strong message engagement and maximizing revenue potential.

The type and size of segments you use will depend on your current deliverability health, as well as your list size. When we talk about engaged segments, we typically categorize them by the number of days in which subscribers were last active (e.g., 30-day engaged, 60-day engaged, etc.).

The general rule to follow is that you should send to your most engaged subscribers most often, and send to your less engaged subscribers less often. The visual below illustrates what it looks like to follow this method throughout the calendar year.

Your Klaviyo account comes with 30-, 60-, and 90-day engaged segments already built for you. These segments are designed to help you get started warming your account. Once your account is warmed, build additional segments for 180-day engaged and 365-day engaged.

We’ll dive in to the sending cadences that work best for your list size below.

Email campaign best practices for less than 20K subscribers

Campaign sending cadence

If your team is small (or you are a team of 1), sending campaigns twice a week can be tough to manage. Start by setting the goal to send 1 campaign a week, and hold yourself accountable by creating a content calendar framework to follow month after month. Add the following campaign types to your monthly calendar:

1 newsletter/snackable campaign

1-2 traffic-driving campaigns

2 conversion-driving campaigns

As you get into the habit of proactively building your content calendar, start adding in more emails. Work toward a cadence of sending 2 campaigns per week.

Campaign segmentation strategy

If your audience is under 20K profiles, focus on trying to engage as many profiles as you can while you grow your list. When your list is on the smaller side, it’s important not to segment too narrowly because you can’t afford to miss out on potential revenue at this stage.

Match your monthly campaigns up to these segments to create your base strategy:

All email subscribers: send 1 conversion-driving email per month and 1 traffic-driving campaign per month

180-day engaged: send your second conversion-driving email per month

90-day engaged: send 1 newsletter/snackable content update per month

As you send campaigns, be sure to check your AI-powered benchmarks report in Klaviyo to see how you’re performing compared to relevant competition. If you use this strategy and your benchmarks are Excellent, widen the segments you’re using. You can afford to have some lower-performing messages in an effort to capture more revenue.

For example, if your open rate benchmark score is Excellent, try sending your newsletter to your 180-day engaged segment instead of your 90-day engaged segment, or expand your second conversion-driving email to a 365-day engaged segment.

Email campaign best practices for over 20K subscribers

Campaign sending cadence

You should be sending at least 2 segmented email campaigns per week. Think of every email campaign as an opportunity to get closer to your revenue goals. The more targeted campaigns you can send, the more revenue you can earn. Use segments to identify audiences of interest that are likely to convert, and build messaging that speaks specifically to their interests or buying intentions. Some brands send every day and see great results because they are diversifying the segments that they send to.

Campaign segmentation strategy

Within a given month, you should break down your segmentation strategy as follows:

Send 70% of campaigns to 30- or 60-day engaged segments, or a highly-targeted segment, featuring:

Standard snackable content

General promotions or product highlights

Send 20% of campaigns to a broader audience (90- or 180-day), featuring:

Highly relevant or unique content, such as content from a guest writer or influencer campaign content

Most promotions

Most traffic-driving events

Send 10% to all subscribers, featuring:

Large promotions

Large traffic-driving events

As your email list grows and you collect more customer data, your segments should become more specific. This will allow you to focus your valuable time and effort on subscribers who are likely to buy. We recommend spending 75% of your marketing energy on these or similar segments:

Audience

Who they were

Goal for the segment

What to send them

High rollers

Your highest-value customers who purchase frequently

Retain these customers and leverage them for word-of-mouth marketing

Exclusive perks, first-dibs/pre-order access, first access to limited-edition drops, communications around loyalty and referral program membership, holiday gift guide suggestions

Brand enthusiasts

Loyal customers who frequently make small-value purchases from you

Retain these customers and increase their average order value

Volume discounts, subscribe and save options, product or bundle recommendations, holiday gift guide suggestions

Potential high rollers

Customers who recently made a high-value purchase but don’t shop regularly

Encourage more repeat purchases

Subscribe and save options on products they’ve purchased before, loyalty or rewards program communications, targeted deals that bundle products together, holiday gift guide suggestions

Potential enthusiasts

Customers who recently made a purchase but don’t purchase frequently, and their lifetime value is low

Encourage more repeat purchases and increase average order value

Bestseller promotions, social proof like reviews and user-generated content, relevant product recommendations, information about the value you provide over relevant competitors

Nearly theres

Subscribers who have recently been highly engaged with email but have never made a purchase

Get them to make a first purchase

Social proof like product reviews and testimonials, information about the value you provide over relevant competitors, content that builds fear of missing out (FOMO)

Waiting for wows

Subscribers who have recently been highly engaged with email but have never made a purchase

Get them to make a first purchase

Social proof like product reviews and testimonials, information about the value you provide over relevant competitors, content that builds FOMO, additional time-sensitive incentives

Goal 3

Increase customer retention rate with lifecycle flows

There’s a term for the concept of tailoring your marketing to a customer’s specific journey stage: lifecycle marketing. A strong lifecycle marketing strategy will increase customer retention because it involves specifically focusing on moving customers from one stage to the next and proactively mitigating churn.

Flows (automated email series) are the most efficient way to manage lifecycle communications because they enable you to respond programmatically to customer actions (or lack thereof).

Here’s the golden rule of flows: more is better than complex.

The top-performing brands on Klaviyo have at least 10 flows live in their account. Want to make more money? Create more flows designed to connect with customers at various touchpoints along their journey with your brand. Aim to have a minimum of 7 flows live in your account, and keep your average flow metrics at or above these benchmarks:

Placed order rate: 2.6%

Bounce rate: under 0.35%

These benchmarks are general. Some flows naturally drive higher placed order rates than others, depending on their place in the lifecycle. An abandoned cart flow, for example, will drive significantly more revenue per recipient than a thank you flow.

Review your flow performance benchmarks in your own account each month to see how your flows are stacking up to relevant competition.

Email automation best practices for all audience sizes

We know that more flows is better, but if you’re just starting out building your email program, which flows should you start with?

In the early stages of audience building, launch high-engagement flows first. These are flows that typically generate the highest open rates, click rates, and revenue per recipient.

No matter what your list size is, set up these 5 key flows in your account:

Welcome series

This is the set of automated messages new subscribers receive when they consent to email marketing. A welcome series typically occurs during the awareness or consideration phase of the customer journey. A new subscriber may have never heard of your brand before, or perhaps they’ve become aware of your products and want to learn more about what you offer.

If you offer an incentive on your sign-up form, deliver that reward in the first message of the flow. The subsequent messages, typically 3-4 in total, should introduce the subscriber to your brand and your products, and should get them excited about your unique brand story, values, or mission.

You can also add conditional logic to this flow to remind new subscribers to use their discount if they don’t use it within a few days.

Browse abandonment email automation

This flow helps move customers who are in the consideration phase toward conversion. It’s triggered when someone views a product on your website but doesn’t add it to their cart or purchase.

Nudge these window shoppers toward a purchase by reinforcing the unique value of the item they looked at, or recommending similar products they may be interested in using an AI-powered product recommendation feed.

Abandoned cart email automation

This flow is triggered when someone adds a product to their cart, but doesn’t start the checkout process. They may be browsing alternative products, waiting to see if there’s anything else they might be interested in, or just waiting to purchase due to indecision. Reassure them that the product they selected is worth purchasing by including customer quotes or testimonials in your flow.

Transactional post-purchase email automation

These flows are order-related updates such as order confirmations, shipping confirmations, and delivery updates. They deliver essential order details that are critical to doing business online, and they tend to earn very high engagement.

You can configure these flows to be sent from Klaviyo rather than your ecommerce platform. There are a few key benefits to sending transactional messages from Klaviyo:

• You can better control the branding and styling to make it feel cohesive with your marketing messages.

• You can view and compare the performance of transactional and marketing flows in one place.

• You can access a complete view of all messages an individual profile received, including both transactional and marketing. This holistic view can be helpful for your customer support team.

Klaviyo looks out for your best interest as a business and does not allow you to send marketing emails to unsubscribed profiles. Transactional messages are not considered marketing emails because they are essential to doing business online. Every customer who places an order expects to receive key updates via email, even if they have previously unsubscribed from your email marketing list or never subscribed.

Another popular post-purchase flow is a review request. You can trigger this flow based on when an order is delivered to ensure your customers have had time to actually use the product before asking them to leave a review. Klaviyo Reviews makes this incredibly easy with pre-built review request flows.

When you add a message to a flow that you would like marked as transactional, you will need to request transactional status for that message by clicking the Apply for transactional status box in the email details pane. Your message will be submitted for approval, and within 24 hours you will see if your message was granted transactional status. This will allow Klaviyo to route your transactional emails to the appropriate recipients, regardless of their marketing consent status.

Email automation best practices for over 20K subscribers

As your customer base grows, set more flows live to automate retention and bring customers back to make more purchases. The best-performing brands on Klaviyo have 10 or more flows live, each helping to drive conversions, retention, and brand loyalty.

If you do nothing else, set these flows live in your account:

Educational post-purchase email automation

Once someone makes their first purchase and becomes a customer, they enter the product evaluation phase. Their post-purchase experience is a combination of the communications you send them and the product they receive.

Depending on what you sell, you may have a great opportunity to educate customers about what to expect or the best ways to use your product. Examples include sending a set-up guide, maintenance instructions, information on creative use cases for the product, or customer testimonials.

Another popular post-purchase flow is a review request. You can trigger this flow based on when an order is delivered to ensure your customers have had time to actually use the product before asking them to leave a review. Klaviyo Reviews makes this incredibly easy with pre-built review request flows.

Back-in-stock email automation

For rapidly growing brands, inventory management can be a real challenge. At the risk of overproducing and being left with unwanted inventory, many brands experience quick sell-outs on their most popular products.

Don’t lose potential sales just because you’re out of stock. Use a back-in-stock flow to capture interest from prospective buyers and contact them as soon as the product they want is back in stock.

The Klaviyo back-in-stock flow has 2 key components:

  1. A back-in-stock code snippet: This code snippet is installed into your ecommerce site. Once a product has an inventory level of 0, the snippet will replace the Add  cart button with a Notify Me button that allows site visitors to subscribe to updates for that particular product.
  2. A back-in-stock triggered flow: When someone subscribes to back-in-stock notifications, it will be logged in Klaviyo as a Subscribed to Back in Stock metric. This metric is the trigger for your back-in-stock flow. The time delay is a special module that waits until the customer’s item of interest is back in stock. As soon as the item is restocked, the flow will send an email to all of the profiles that subscribed to get notified.

Back-in-stock functionality is available for the following ecommerce platforms:

  • Shopify
  • BigCommerce
  • Magento 2
  • Any other catalog-aware integration (requires manual configuration via API)

Win-back email automation

Getting a customer to make a single purchase is great, but you start seeing real return on your investment when a customer makes multiple purchases.

You can automate this retention effort with a win-back flow. This type of flow is triggered when someone places an order, but waits a relatively long time to purchase again. If they do not purchase again within, for example, 75 days, the flow prompts the customer to come back and shop (usually through some form of incentive).

The time delay depends on the buying habits of your customers and the types of products you sell. For makeup brands, 90 days without a purchase is a long time. For furniture brands, 90 days without a purchase is expected behavior. The best way to determine your win-back time delay is to export predictive analytics data about your current customers and calculate the Average time between orders.

Your win-back flow message should include a compelling call to action along with an incentive or offer that brings customers back to your site. You can even branch this flow based on a customer’s predicted lifetime value (CLV) to tailor your incentives accordingly. Consider giving a discount to customers with a high predicted CLV in order to reclaim the business, while offering a smaller incentive or no incentive to customers with a low predicted CLV.

Cross-sell email automation

Cross-sell flows are a great way to automatically recommend products that someone might like based on what they’ve already purchased. The key here is to give your customer time to use the product they just purchased before recommending more products.

The trigger for this flow varies depending on your tech stack. Choose the trigger that allows you to reach a customer after they receive their most recent order:

  • If you are on Shopify, use the Delivered Shipment metric.
  • If you use a third-party integration to manage shipping and logistics, use whatever Order Delivered or similar metric is available to you.
  • If you do not have a metric that tracks delivery status, use Fulfilled Order or Placed Order as your trigger. Set a time delay of 30 days to account for the time it takes to deliver an order to a customer in addition to the time they would need to start using the product. This method is not ideal because it does not account for shipping delays, but it should cover the majority of your customer cases.

In your cross-sell message, focus on personalization by highlighting products that the customer is likely to want based on their previous purchase history. Achieve this by creating a new AI-powered product feed. Once your feed is configured, drag a product block into your email and let the customer know you curated these recommendations just for them.

Price drop email automation

Price is one of the most influential factors in driving consumer behavior. Bring price-sensitive shoppers back to your site with a price drop flow.

This flow is triggered by the Price Drop metric. Within this trigger, you can specify the amount that the price of an item needs to drop in order to trigger the flow. The Price Drop metric is not product-specific, so we recommend using a percent-based amount. For example, you could set your price drop flow up to trigger when the price of any item in your shop drops 15% or more.

Within these settings, you’ll also choose who the flow should be sent to. Your 3 options are:

  • People who viewed the item
  • People who started checkout with the item
  • People who viewed or started checkout with the item (includes both groups)

Finally, choose the time period for which activities should be included. In the example above, the flow would be sent to people who viewed or started checkout with the item in the last 30 days. 30 days is a good starting point for most retail and CPG brands, but if you sell products that have a longer buying cycle or are more expensive (and thus require a longer time to make a purchase decision), you may want to widen this time period. The maximum time period available in Klaviyo is 90 days.

Birthday email automation

Birthday flows are a fun way to acknowledge a customer and show them your appreciation. In order to send this kind of flow, you need to collect birthday information from your customers, either through a targeted on-site form or through other methods (like a customer profile on your website).

Should you collect birthday information on your existing sign-up form? Our data shows that the more information you ask someone to type into a form, the less likely they’ll be to submit it. Protect your audience growth by leaving your existing new subscriber form as is and launching another form that specifically targets existing customers.

Show existing customers that you care about them by promising to send them a birthday reward if they give you more information. It’s crucial to make sure that you follow through on this promise if you decide to collect birthday information. If you don’t, it will erode trust in your brand and cause subscribers to question why you asked for that information but never followed through with the incentive.

Once you’ve started collecting this information, you can build a date-based flow that is triggered by the Birthday date property. Most brands keep this flow simple, to 1-2 messages.

Send an initial message on the recipient’s birthday which includes a special discount code or a reward of some kind. If you go with a discount code, set a conditional split to see whether or not the customer uses the discount code within 7 days. If they don’t, follow up with a reminder that their code expires soon. This is a great retention play that may also win back customers who haven’t purchased in a while.

Key takeaways

Your strategy and tactics will (and should) evolve over time.

As you grow, keep these 3 focus areas top of mind to achieve your long-term revenue goals:

1. Grow your audience continuously through as many channels as possible, including expanding your email lists, to increase your revenue potential.

2. Use a segment-driven email campaign strategy to hit your revenue goals and keep your customers engaged.

3. Automate customer retention efforts through well-placed, intentional flows throughout the customer lifecycle.

Email marketing is your foundation for building smarter digital relationships with your customers. Use the best practices and strategies outlined in this guide to grow like the most successful brands on Klaviyo.

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