List import/segmentation struggle

Hi @Noah Susong, welcome to the community!

You’re on the right track! If you just integrated Klaviyo with Shopify, and you want to do a one-time update to the consent status (Subscription Status), you can just import them to your main List and check the box that says “Yes, update subscription status for all imported contacts to subscribed.”

Just note, if your List has double opt-in enabled, those subscribers may receive the double-optin confirmation email.  If you don’t want that to happen, make sure to switch the consent settings in your List to Single Opt-in while you do the import (or keep it on Single Opt-in).

You can read more about Double vs Single-Optin here:

• Understanding the double opt-in process

Managing consent consistently, can be tricky because Klaviyo gives you plenty of options of how you prefer to do it - since different merchants have different touch-points of how they get an email - e.g. on the ecommerce platform, on third party sites or plugins, maybe you even collect email addresses from a paper clipboard… 

The only thing Klaviyo enforces is if anyone is unsubscribed or are suppressed, they will ensure they don’t receive any marketing emails.

Regardless of how an email is captured, in an ideal situation, you should try to centralize their consent status in Klaviyo, since that is typically the point of contact for the subscriber.  If you prefer to manage consent elsewhere, then you need to know how to Segment your users accordingly and make sure to only send emails to those who provided consent.  

If we’re strictly talking about Shopify and Klaviyo, moving forward, all consent captured on Shopify can be synced if you have this option enabled:

And vice versa to Shopify if “Email Subscription Status” is enabled:

Also remember, all customers (emails) from Shopify get synced to Klaviyo! That includes people who do NOT CONSENT to marketing, but they are still synced to Klaviyo for tracking, segmentation, and automation purposes. So just because you have their email address, doesn’t necessarily imply that they opted in to marketing.

If you use third party tools or plugins, or periodically import emails, you should make sure that if you have the proper consent, check that box when you upload just like your initial batch.  Or, if it’s integrated via the API or other methods, that the vendor marks the subscriber as “Subscribed.”  Most tools that integrate with Klaviyo will provide this option or stipulate the rules that govern when someone has consented (or has not).  

It can take some time to properly clean up all the historical consent status, but if everything is properly setup from the beginning, and you have strict processes whenever you import emails or connect to new email capture tools, you won’t have to worry about the ambiguity between “Subscribed” or “Never Subscribed” moving forward since it will all be in Klaviyo.