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!

Great thread! And ​@StefanUE this lines up with what we see on the luxury side too. In particular, we've run email + SMS for a luxury footwear brand for about two years now (moved them off Mailchimp), and the thing that's surprised me most is how much of the program a single flow can carry when the brand is high-consideration.

For a considered, high-AOV purchase, almost nobody buys on day one. So, we stopped treating the welcome series like a discount handoff and rebuilt it as an editorial introduction to the brand: the craft, the made-to-order story, the world the product lives in. It's now the highest-revenue automation in the account by more than 2x. For a luxury brand that doesn't want to lean on markdowns, that flow does the heavy lifting promos would do for a typical DTC brand.

Two things made it work: 

1. We carry the same editorial logic into campaigns. Sends are built around patterns, archival motifs, and collaborations rather than "sale" language, which keeps the list warm without cheapening the brand.
2. SMS only earns its place as a low-volume, curated channel. The moment it feels like a blast list, luxury subscribers are gone.
    

​@benzettler your relationship-vs-purchase segmentation point is absolutely the driving force behind all of this.

Really good thread and really great points ​@benzettler ​@StefanUE ​@Ashley I. The points on relationship segmentation and shopping preferences are things we've bumped into too, just from a different angle.

Something we've seen consistently with service based businesses is that the standard "purchase behavior" metrics in Klaviyo tell you almost nothing useful about where someone is in their actual decision process. A person who booked a free consultation three months ago and never converted is not the same as someone who opened every email but hasn't clicked anything. Both look like non-buyers,, but they need completely different messages.

The tactic that actually moved the needle for us was building what we call an "intent signal" flow, triggered not by a purchase or a form fill, but by a specific combination of page visits, email clicks, and time that passed. If someone visits your pricing or services page more than twice in a 14 day window without converting, that's a strong signal worth acting on. You can track that using Klaviyo's Active on Site metric combined with a conditional split on page URL,, then trigger a short 2 to 3 email sequence that speaks directly to hesitation rather than just re-pitching the service. In our experience, that one flow consistently outperforms standard abandoned cart logic adapted for services.

Excellent thread, I love working with high-end luxury brands.

I always come back to the in-store experience as the benchmark. These emails should mirror how a client is treated in the physical retail environment: considered and unobtrusive. It’s less about pushing, more about quietly serving the right information when it becomes relevant.

With one luxury diamond client, for example, I built journeys around engagement ring browsing behaviour, introducing educational content, guidance, and reassurance at key moments in the decision process, rather than overwhelming upfront.

We also layered in a more personal dimension. Where customers had an in-store relationship, we reflected that digitally by featuring their assigned personal shopper within emails. It helped bridge the gap between physical and digital, making the experience feel continuous rather than channel-specific.

And consultations are absolutely critical in this space. We supported these with ‘internal alerts’ ensuring the relevant store teams were notified in real time and could follow up in a way that felt timely, informed, and genuinely personal.

Another layer I see overlooked is the role of brand admirers. Many high-end brands have deeply engaged audiences who may not be in a position to purchase right now (and in some cases, may not convert for years) but that doesn’t make them low value. They still require thoughtful, intentional communication.

Your strategy needs to account for how you nurture these audiences over time: maintaining aspiration, delivering value through content, and building emotional connection without forcing conversion. It’s a very different mindset to typical performance-driven email.

And similarly, return behaviour doesn’t follow standard e-commerce patterns. Customers aren’t necessarily coming back on a predictable cadence, so traditional winback “best practices” often don’t translate well here. Instead of reactivation pressure, it’s about staying relevant, present, and aligned with where they are in their journey, however long that journey may be.

One of my favourite hotel chains tease me with city guides rather than room offers, and i love this so much. They are about focusing on the dream of travel, and they will meet you there rather than pushing offers. I don’t book regularly with them, but they are always front of mind when I travel because of their content and keeping informed and engaged.