Strategic advice

7 ideas for using segmentation, AI, reviews, and SMS in Klaviyo to build up your brand voice, not lose it.Quick answer: As AI-generated marketing gets cheaper and more common, brands that stand out are the ones deciding on purpose where a human voice still shows up. In Klaviyo, that means using segmentation around customer behavior (not just data volume), treating Composer as a drafting tool that adapts your voice rather than invents it, surfacing real customer reviews and photos at the moments they're most persuasive, using SMS Conversations to actually listen instead of only broadcast, and protecting at least one customer interaction a month from full automation. The goal isn't choosing between efficient and human, it's deciding which parts of the customer experience should always feel like there's a real person behind them.Have you noticed how much marketing sounds the same lately? Same 3 adjectives. Same “here’s what’s new” structure. Same slightly-too-polished tone. It’s not your

What’s something you wish you knew earlier when planning campaigns? Here's mine that goes for general planning: good enough and done beat a perfection spiral. I get too caught up in optimizing something and that can be my downfall. Let me know if you relate to that one.Maybe yours is a lesson about timelines, audience strategy, creative testing, cross-functional collaboration, or measuring results. Share the insight you learned the hard way below 👇

Klaviyo’s price is one of the first hurdles a lot of people mention.For this question of the week, I want to open the floor up to addressing these concerns as a community. I would love to hear how you’re making Klaviyo work on a smaller budget.What tactics helped you get started with Klaviyo without overspending? Any tips for keeping costs down as your list grows? How do you decide which features or sends are “worth it” for your business? Tips for optimizing tech stack spend? Drop your best tips, workflows, or hard-won lessons below, especially anything that would help someone who’s just getting started with Klaviyo and worried about pricing/billing. 

Here are the pre-BFCM experiments I run (and why), how to run them as holdouts, the metrics that decide whether a cohort goes live on the big send, and how I leverage Klaviyo features and Composer.Why is deliverability the real BFCM testing filter? Test 1: how deep into the list can you safely send? Test 2: will your newest subscribers still be sendable in November? Test 3: average order value (AOV) mechanics, and what you really can't test beforehand What I don't test The result that changed my approach How does list size change what you should test? What carries forward and what doesn't A test I got wrong How I use this in my own workflow Share your experienceMost pre-BFCM advice covers subject lines, send times, and offer copy. None of that tells you what to actually do on Black Friday.Not because testing the above doesn't matter, but because leading into a compressed window like Black Friday Cyber Monday (BFCM), every test costs a send you can't get back, and those 3 don't change w

BFCM planning can easily become a race to add more campaigns, more segments, and more messages to the calendar. The strongest advice from our latest Office Hours with Klaviyo Community Champions was focused on: using customer signals to decide who gets what, when they get it, and what will help create the next purchase.Courtney Wallace, Head of Ecommerce at Dermalogica, and Marina Carroll, Head of CRM Strategy at New Standard Co., shared practical lessons from working across different business models, product categories, and customer journeys.How should you choose a BFCM segment – behavior or a default window?A 30-, 60-, or 90-day engaged segment can be a useful starting point, but it should not become a permanent rule. The right audience depends on the product, the purchase cycle, and the behavior you want to influence.For a premium brand with a long repurchase cycle, Courtney recommended starting with questions such as:How long does it typically take a customer to make another purcha

Learn how to clean up your Klaviyo account this summer for a more successful BFCM. Nothing says summer like long weekends, OOO replies, and a Klaviyo account full of disengaged profiles.Every summer I have a version of the same conversation with clients. Someone notices their open rates are softer than usual, clicks have flattened, and they're not sure if it's seasonal or something they should actually worry about. Most of the time, it's both.Summer is when engagement quietly softens. The list you've built over the past year starts carrying more weight than it should, and the fixes that would have taken a weekend in July turn into a scramble in October. The good news: a slower summer period is the right time to get ahead of it. Why does list hygiene matter before Black Friday Cyber Monday?Inbox providers use engagement signals to decide where your email lands. When a meaningful chunk of your list stops engaging, those providers start treating you like a sender they're less sure about.

Key lessons from our first Klaviyo Community Office Hours sessionFor our inaugural Klaviyo Community Office Hours session, digital marketers brought real-world questions about email and SMS segmentation, engagement, testing, and seasonal planning. Champions Eve Karon, Director of Retention at Boarderie, and Tabish Bhimani, Founder of Mastrat Digital, shared practical advice grounded in the realities of growing lists, changing inbox behavior, and balancing short-term performance with long-term customer value.Here are the biggest takeaways from the conversation.1. Let your data inform the calendar, but take a step back and use human judgment, tooThe strongest send calendar starts with the customer, not a generic benchmark.Eve recommended working backward from key events and holidays to map announcement timing, urgency, and reminders. From there, use Klaviyo’s Claude MCP integration to analyze historical performance by day of week and time of day.But historical data needs a sanity check.

Once I started treating our Klaviyo signup form as something worth testing and tuning, our submit rate moved — and so did the quality of who ended up on our list. Before that, I treated it the way most people do: build it once, plug in a discount, forget about it. That mindset cost Boarderie more than I realized. Here's what actually changed things, in the order I'd tackle them if I were starting over.Is your headline doing its job, or just being clever?Your headline gets a split second of someone's attention before they decide whether to engage or click away. It needs to be clear enough that a visitor understands what they're getting, immediately.We had a headline that leaned cute early on, something closer to "Join the Fam" than an actual offer. It didn't convert nearly as well as a plainer version that stated the deal outright: what they'd get and why it was worth their email. Clever can wait. Clear can't. Speaking of the click away, I asked my fellow Champion, ​@Christian Nørbjerg

It might be a welcome series bringing in first purchases, a post-purchase flow driving repeat orders, or a less obvious automation that quietly performs well month after month.Share with us:Which flow is it? What goal does it support? What do you think makes it work so well? Is there anything you recently changed or tested that improved the results?Respond below with as much or as little as you’re comfortable with! Your answer might give someone else an idea for what to build or optimize next. 

Most people set up profiles, segments, and events to power sends. Properties personalize the email. Segments decide who gets it. Events tell a flow when to fire. But somewhere in that setup, it's easy to stop asking what the data is actually telling you about the people receiving it.I asked four Klaviyo Champions to open up their own accounts and share what happened when they stopped treating their data as backend plumbing and started asking what it actually said about their customers. Between them, they cover four building blocks most of us touch every day: profiles and properties, segments, flow engagement, and event tracking.What they found didn't always match what they expected. A return they assumed meant churn. A no-show list that was actually a growth opportunity. A quiz answer that changed a product roadmap. A winback flow that revealed apathy instead of neglect.Here's what four brands learned when they stopped treating their data as a formality and started treating it as a con

Maybe it was sending to the wrong segment, forgetting to exclude recent purchasers, building a flow that didn’t work the way you expected, missing a personalization error, or learning the hard way about deliverability, timing, or testing.Share your story and the lesson you took from it below. Your experience might help someone else avoid the same mistake!