Service-based or 'non-traditional' businesses using Klaviyo: What's your favorite tactic?

We've done a fair amount of work with personal brands and athlete/creator businesses on Klaviyo — coaches, athletes, foundations — where the "product" is a mix of merchandise, content, services and ticketed experiences all in one place.

The tactic that's made the biggest difference: segmenting by relationship to the brand rather than by purchase behavior alone.

A fan who bought a signed item once behaves completely differently from someone enrolled in a coaching program or a foundation donor. Same list, completely different intent and lifecycle. Treating them the same way kills engagement fast.

Building conditional splits in the welcome flow based on what someone actually signed up for — merchandise buyer vs. coaching inquiry vs. event attendee — and tailoring the first 30 days of messaging to that context has consistently moved the needle more than any single campaign tactic.

The fundamentals still apply. But the segmentation logic has to reflect how people actually connect with that brand, which in non-traditional businesses rarely maps cleanly to a standard ecommerce model.

Great post and good questions! Love ​@benzettler’s take, too.

On my side, having worked with a number of luxury, automotive and education brands worldwide, the biggest differentiator came from shopping preferences and if sampling or sizing is offered.

Some luxury jewelry brands will offer sizing, for example, where you order a sizing kit first, and then receive the actual product. The drop off (or churn) between sizing kits and full placed orders can be huge, so correctly tracking both events within Klaviyo, and making sure segmentation, flow triggering, and overall strategy, and fine-tuned to both nodes in the journey is very important.

Shopping preferences play a big part in the nurture, pre-purchase section of the retention strategy, because many times engagement falls flat because a person is simply not interested in ecom, rather than the brand or the content. This could be because they have a store (or a distributor) nearby, or simply because they enjoy touch-and-feel more than ecom (this is especially true in East Europe, for example). It then becomes important to collect this preference in popups and emails, and make sure the correct type of content reaches these audiences (e.g. store locators, in store events, launch dates...).

I’ll be following this thread to check out more good ideas!