Strategic advice

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

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

Deciding what to hand off to Customer Agent isn't really a setup problem. It's a trust problem of figuring out what you're willing to let AI own, and what still needs a real person no matter how good the tool gets. I found that out for real in June, when our full-time CS person had to take an unexpected leave of absence.Customer Agent picked up the tickets that would've buried the skeleton crew we had left, so the team we did have could keep their heads above water instead of drowning. And it kept getting better the whole time, because every ticket it touched that stretch was basically free training data.Getting to that point wasn't easy, though. Setting up skills felt overwhelming at first. There were a lot of options, a lot of decisions around tone and guardrails, and it took us a minute to find our footing. That's what this piece is about: not the setup, but the judgment calls that came after it.Which workflows should you trust Customer Agent with first?We'd actually beta tested Cus

We are well beyond the days of relying on batch-and-blast email sends and constant discounting to drive revenue. In my experience, those tactics might create short-term spikes, but they usually come at the expense of margin, list health, and long-term engagement.What I've seen work better is personalization that helps customers find the right products faster and gives them a reason to add more to their cart without immediately reaching for a promo code. The data backs this up: brands that shift away from batch-and-blast to personalized sends consistently see stronger revenue lift.At Black Diamond Equipment, we have a customer base that spans several different activities including climbing, skiing, hiking, and trail running. There's overlap between those audiences, but there are also very different purchase behaviors depending on where someone is in their outdoor journey.Because of that, personalization has become less of a "nice to have" and more of a profitability strategy. When we se

Not sure what emails to send? You’re not alone. Most ecommerce brands don’t have a tools problem. They have a “what do I send?” problem. Use this ecommerce email marketing framework to plan campaigns for launches, slow weeks, restocks, and holidays. I run email and SMS marketing for Mint & Lily, a personalized jewelry brand. Over the past several years, I've built and optimized dozens of Klaviyo flows, written hundreds of campaign emails, and spent more time than I'd like to admit staring at segmentation logic at 11 p.m. on a Tuesday.And here's what I've learned: the hardest part of email marketing is not the platform. It's not the design. It's not even the copy. The hardest part is sitting down and deciding what to send and who should receive it.Most small ecommerce brands I talk to have Klaviyo set up. They've connected their store. They might even have a welcome flow running. But when it comes to campaigns, they freeze. They wonder if their idea is good enough, if they're emaili

Short answer: A back-in-stock flow in Klaviyo automatically emails customers when a product they requested becomes available again. To set it up: connect your ecommerce platform, verify inventory tracking in your catalog, capture the correct variant data via a signup form, and build a flow with a "Subscribed to Back in Stock" trigger plus a conditional split that checks real-time availability before sending.You've got a product that sells out fast. That's a good problem…until you realize you're losing customers who would've bought if they'd known it was back.A back-in-stock flow helps capture sales you’d otherwise lose by automatically notifying interested customers the moment inventory returns. This guide walks you through the complete setup for Shopify and Klaviyo, plus a troubleshooting checklist for when products restock but emails don't send.This looks like a lot, but the actual build takes under an hour – here's what you actually need to know! 👇What a back-in-stock flow doesA ba