Summer gets a bad reputation in ecomm this time of year. Slower traffic, distracted shoppers, inboxes competing with beach read newsletters and flight deal alerts. A lot of brands go into maintenance mode and tell themselves they'll make it up in Q4. Some of them are right. Most of them are just deferring the work. The brands that use June through August to build their list, earn some trust, and set up the automations they've been putting off since January tend to have a very different Q4 than everyone else. Several Klaviyo features that launched or matured in the last year make this easier than it used to be, especially if you're a smaller team. Here are five campaigns worth trying before Labor Day.
How to run a summer giveaway that actually grows your list
The Klaviyo feature: Spin-to-win forms
The standard "10% off your first order" pop-up has been around long enough that most visitors have developed a reflex for closing it. Spin-to-win forms do something different.
They turn the opt-in into a moment of participation, where visitors spin a wheel to win a discount, a gift with purchase, or free shipping. It sounds like something a brand would A/B test once and quietly retire. Except the numbers don't cooperate: according to 2025 data from Wisepops, spin-to-win pop-ups convert at 125% higher rates than standard pop-ups.
Summer is a particularly good window to run one. Casual browsers (people who aren't in active purchase mode but stumbled onto your site from a social post or a friend's recommendation) are more likely to engage with something that feels like a game than to respond to a transactional discount offer. The lower the purchase intent, the more the experience of signing up has to carry the moment.
Spin-to-win is a native sign-up form feature in Klaviyo. Go to Sign-up forms in your account and look for the spin-to-win option in the form builder. You can customize the prize wedges, adjust winning probability for each prize, and connect the form directly to your welcome flow so new subscribers get their reward immediately.
One honest caveat: subscribers who come in through a giveaway tend to have lower engagement than organic sign-ups. Build a segment of your spin-to-win subscribers and track their open and click rates separately for the first 60 days. If engagement is low, suppress them from your main campaigns before they start affecting your deliverability.
How to turn your Instagram comments into owned contacts
The Klaviyo feature: Social Auto-replies
Here's a situation that probably sounds familiar. You post a summer product shot on Instagram. The comments light up. People are asking where to buy it, tagging friends, saying they need it in every color. And then nothing. Those signals disappear into the feed, unconnected to your email list, your SMS list, or anything you can actually market to. You spent real money getting that engagement. It evaporates.
Klaviyo Social Marketing launched in May 2026, and the first piece, Social Auto-replies, is free for every Klaviyo customer. It lets you set a keyword that, when someone comments it or DMs it on Instagram, triggers an automatic reply that captures their email or phone number with consent. That contact then lives on their Klaviyo profile alongside everything else you know about them: purchase history, browsing behavior, flow engagement.
For example, a skincare brand could use this for a summer UGC push, posting a "show us your summer glow" reel and telling followers to comment "GLOW" to get their routine guide. They'd then capture hundreds of consented contacts from people who had never been on their email list, each dropping directly into a welcome flow.
The play is straightforward: pick your highest-performing organic summer post, choose a keyword, set up the auto-reply in Klaviyo under Social Marketing, and connect it to a welcome flow that delivers something worth showing up for: a summer lookbook, a discount, or a product quiz. There are additional Social Marketing capabilities beyond Social Auto-replies for brands that want to go deeper on connecting social signals to their customer profiles, but the free piece alone is enough to start converting Instagram engagement into owned contacts this summer.
One thing worth knowing: Social Auto-replies currently works with Instagram. If your audience skews heavily toward TikTok or another platform, this specific feature won't cover that yet.
Learn how Happy Wax creates product quizzes, using zero-party data to remove friction and drive first purchases.
How to let customers tell you what they want, then sell it to them
The Klaviyo feature: Automated SMS Conversations
Most product recommendation emails are educated guesses. You look at what someone bought before, surface something similar, and hope it lands. Automated SMS Conversations let you do something more interesting: ask.
The campaign: a summer product quiz delivered via SMS. A subscriber texts a keyword (say, "SUMMER") and Klaviyo kicks off a short, two-way conversation. A few questions about their preferences, their situation, what they're shopping for. At the end, they get a personalized product recommendation. Their answers get stored on their Klaviyo profile, which means every future campaign you send them gets a little smarter.
Picture a swimwear brand texting their SMS list: "Not sure which suit is right for you? Text QUIZ to find out." The subscribers who complete the quiz convert at a higher rate than standard promotional sends, not surprising, since someone who bothers to text back is already engaged. But the personalization at the end is doing real work too, not just the self-selection.
Automated SMS Conversations is available to Klaviyo SMS customers once SMS is configured on your account. One thing to note: it's not available for accounts using branded sender IDs, so check your SMS set-up before building this out. To get started, go to Flows and create a new SMS automation triggered by a keyword. Keep the quiz to three or four questions maximum. Longer sequences see significant drop-off. And make sure the product recommendation at the end links to a specific product page, not your homepage. That's where most brands leave the conversion on the table.
How to use customer reviews to close the sale before the cart
The Klaviyo feature: Klaviyo Reviews
Browsers who land on your site in summer are often less decided than your usual buyers. They're coming in from a social ad, a friend's recommendation, or a Google search that started as idle curiosity. They haven't built any trust with your brand yet. A clean product photo and a price tag isn't going to close them. What does? Other customers.
Klaviyo Reviews lets you collect reviews natively, connect them to your customer profiles, and pull them directly into email campaigns and flows using the Review quote block. Klaviyo's own 2025 consumer marketing research found that reviews influence a customer's initial purchase more than competitive pricing or discounts. Worth sitting with that one.
The campaign: a "most loved" or "customer favorites" summer email that leads with your highest-rated products and features real review quotes. Not generic praise, but specific, textured feedback that sounds like a person actually wrote it. Picture a kitchenware brand doing a version of this called "what our customers are cooking this summer," built entirely around five-star reviews of their seasonal products. The email feels editorial, not promotional, and click rates tend to be up compared to standard product roundups.
To pull a review quote into an email, drag the Review quote block into your email editor and select the specific reviews you want to feature. Klaviyo Reviews is available for Shopify and WooCommerce merchants and is an add-on product starting at $25/month, scaling with order volume. You need to be on a paid Klaviyo Email plan to use it. If you're not on it yet, summer is a good time to start collecting, so you have a library to draw from heading into Q4.
How to win back your lapsed buyers before back-to-school
The Klaviyo feature: Pre-built flow templates and Personalized Send Time
By late July, a lot of ecomm brands are in coast mode. The summer campaigns are winding down, back-to-school still feels like someone else's calendar problem, and the winback flow that was set up eighteen months ago is still dutifully running the same three-email sequence to everyone who hasn't bought in 90 days. It's not broken. It's just not doing the work it could be.
The back-to-school spending period starts earlier every year (often late July for families and August for college-aged shoppers). A well-timed winback flow that hits lapsed buyers before the inbox gets crowded with back-to-school blasts from larger brands tends to outperform the same flow running in September, when you're competing with everyone and their remarketing budget.
To set this up: in Klaviyo Flows, search the flow template library. There are 60-plus pre-built templates, and finding a winback flow is a good place to start. The pre-built structure gives you a solid starting point with conditional splits for different engagement levels. From there, customize the copy for a summer-to-back-to-school framing, and if you have access to Personalized Send Time, turn it on at the flow email level for each step. It optimizes delivery based on when each individual subscriber is most likely to open, rather than sending to the whole segment at once. The open rate difference versus a fixed send time is meaningful. Note that Personalized Send Time is not available on standard Klaviyo plans, so check yours before building this in.
One housekeeping note: if your winback flow is more than a year old, audit the conditional logic before relaunching it. Klaviyo's suppression and engagement windows may have shifted since you built it, and you want to make sure you're not emailing people who have effectively moved on.
Start where you are
Summer is short. You don't need to run all five of these. Picking one or two and executing them well will do more than spreading thin across the whole list. If you're starting from scratch, the spin-to-win form and the winback flow have the fastest set-up-to-payoff ratio.
And if you've tried Social Auto-replies since it launched last month, drop what you're seeing in the comments. It's new enough that real-world data from this community is more useful than anything I can tell you about it.
What's your go-to summer campaign? Would love to see what people are running.