Shift to autonomous marketing
Generated by Klaviyo AI
The post explains how Klaviyo’s Marketing Agent moves teams from manual campaign execution toward more autonomous, strategy-focused marketing. It outlines how unified customer data, practical use cases, and built-in guardrails enable brands to generate, refine, and govern AI-driven campaigns without sacrificing control.
- From manual to autonomous: Marketing Agent reduces operational work like building campaigns step by step so marketers can focus more on lifecycle strategy and customer experience.
- Unified data foundation: Klaviyo’s built-in CDP unifies customer, product, and engagement data so Marketing Agent can generate relevant ideas, audiences, and channel recommendations with full context.
- Practical use cases: Brands use Marketing Agent to accelerate onboarding, maintain an educational campaign calendar, and act as a strategy engine for larger teams during planning and optimization.
- Guardrails and control: Brand voice analysis, fact-based content generation, promotion accuracy checks, and compliance safeguards help keep AI-generated campaigns on-brand and compliant.
- More time for strategy: By taking on repetitive implementation tasks, Marketing Agent frees retention teams to identify new lifecycle moments, refine segmentation, and focus on growth-driving work.
The most effective way to prevent mistakes in your emails is actually fairly boring: it’s a checklist.
All marketers, even the most tenured, can benefit from a comprehensive checklist before launching a new campaign or automation.
Here, we’ve broken down a main checklist into 7 mini checklists that can help you prevent mistakes and maximize revenue for every email you send.
Depending on the size of your list and the number of ways you personalize your emails, you may want to rely more on one checklist over another.
1. Performance goals: You’re set up for success
According to Klaviyo’s 2026 email benchmarks, email campaigns see an average click rate of 1.69% while flows see an average of 5.58%. Automated messages consistently deliver 6–8x more revenue per send vs. campaigns.
That being said, your industry average may be different from the overall average. When you’re deciding on performance goals, it’s important to get a good sense of what success looks like in your industry for click rate, conversion rate, revenue per email, and unsubscribe rate.
Once you’ve aligned on these goals with your leadership team, establish tracking and attribution mechanisms. Omnichannel, linear multi-touch attribution spreads the credit evenly across all meaningful touchpoints, but you’ll need to decide how you want to customize your model to consider the credit granted to your email campaigns and flows.
The important thing to remember is that this approach to attribution hinges on the concept that real-life buying journeys don’t follow a straight line. A customer might first discover your brand via an ad, browse your products on mobile, click through an email campaign later, get a cart reminder via text message, and finally make a purchase on desktop.
To achieve a holistic sense of attribution, you’ll need to implement UTM parameters in all your emails. These are short text tags added to the end of a URL, so your site analytics can track email performance by campaign and content block, such as your hero banner vs. your final CTA.
Finally, make sure your email campaigns and flows follow a standardized naming convention format in your marketing automation platform. This is so that your campaigns and flows are searchable by your entire team, and so that your reports are easy to generate and interpret.
Performance goal checklist:
- Email performance benchmark review
- KPI alignment with leadership
- Attribution model customization
- UTMs and tracking codes
- Standardized naming conventions
2. Deliverability: Your emails are making it into primary inboxes
Before sending any email, you’ll need to signal to email clients that you’re a legitimate sender. This requires setting up infrastructure in your marketing automation platform to signal that it’s allowed to send on your behalf and that nobody is forging your domain.
Specifically, this means setting up:
- Sender Policy Framework (SPF): This record lists the servers allowed to send email on behalf of your domain, so mailbox providers can confirm a message really came from you.
- DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM): This signature is added to every message so the receiving server can verify the email wasn't altered in transit.
- Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance (DMARC): This policy tells mailbox providers what to do with messages that fail SPF or DKIM, and reports back on who is using your domain to send mail.
You’ll also want to run a placement test. A test can tell you whether you're landing in people’s primary inbox or in promotions or spam. It also flags spammy phrasing or a bad link before your real list ever sees it.
If your reputation has taken a hit, check whether your domain or IP has turned up on a public block list, which can throttle your delivery until you sort it out.
Finally, make sure you’ve implemented a one-click unsubscribe link with the necessary infrastructure to automatically remove recipients from your list. Not only is this required by regulations, but it also prevents recipients from flagging your email as spam, which can ultimately drag down your sender reputation and damage deliverability.
Deliverability checklist:
- SPF, DKIM, and DMARC set-up
- Successful placement test
- Check public block lists (if you can’t achieve a successful placement test)
- One-click unsubscribe
3. Segmentation: The right people are getting the right emails
According to Klaviyo’s Future of Consumer Marketing Report, 74% of shoppers expect personalized experiences from brands.
Granular segmentation is the precursor to personalization. Every single email campaign and flow should be using audience segmentation to make sure your messages are relevant to recipients.
That means targeting shoppers based on:
- Behavior: purchases, browsing, channel preferences, etc.
- Preferences: quiz results, anniversaries, lifestyle, etc.
- Predictive analytics: churn risk, customer lifetime value (LTV), average order value (AOV), etc.
Before sending, determine exactly who is most likely to respond to the offer. For example, if the goal is to make VIPs feel special with an early access offer, figure out which VIPs are most likely to engage. Maybe you want to break it down by browsing behavior, AOV, or quiz result.
If you want to speed up this process, an AI marketing agent can build out your segments from scratch or find the right segment for your message. AI can also optimize that audience further by automatically suppressing who’s most likely to unsubscribe, so you can protect deliverability.
Segmentation checklist:
- Behavioral, preference, and/or predictive audience segmentation
- Larger audience segment breakdown
- With AI: audience segment creation
- With AI: automatic suppression of likely unsubscribers
4. Copy: There’s a clear reason to buy for each segment
Your copy should follow the segment you want to reach. A first-time subscriber and a loyal customer should receive different messages. Tailor copy to the shopper’s lifecycle stage, based on what they browsed, bought, or skipped.
When creating your email copy, you’ll also want to lead with a benefit that’s relevant to that audience segment. Open with what the reader can expect from your offer, so the value is clear in the first line and the preview text. Your subject line should also orient toward the same promise.
Pull in dynamic, personalized content to boost the likelihood of engagement. That means using personalized blocks like AI product recommendations drawn from real customer data housed in a CRM. When your product recommendations reflect real purchase and browsing data, they’re much more likely to land.
Finally, make sure you’re using only one call-to-action button. This is to make sure your email has a clear next step, so recipients can easily jump on the offer you want them to convert on.
Tip: Use an AI marketing agent to speed up the production process. With plain-text prompts, marketers can direct AI to draft the email, write follow-up messages, and stage timing.
Copy checklist:
- Segment-offer alignment
- Subject line-offer alignment
- Benefit-led opener and preview text
- Dynamic blocks of personalized content
- One clear CTA
- With AI: copy production with prompting
5. Accessibility: Everyone can read and understand your emails
An accessible email is one that reaches more people, including people with disabilities and without.
By default, every email should come with the option to view as plain-text only for screen readers and those who choose not to view images in their emails.
Background and text color should have sufficient contrast for people with visual impairments, and every image should come with alt text for screen readers.
Accessibility runs deeper than alt text, though. Screen readers move through your email by its structure, so use real heading hierarchy rather than simply bold text.
Also, make sure your text is large enough for people with low vision to read: the recommendation is a font size of 14 pt or larger.
Accessibility checklist:
- Plain-text version
- Screen reader test pass
- Dark mode legibility
- Alt text for all images
- High color contrast between background and text color
- Sufficient white space
- 14 pt or larger font size
- No image-only design
6. Frequency and timing: You’re sending emails at the right time
Before you send an email campaign, make sure it’s not doubling up on the work of your automations.
Automations are triggered by customer behavior, such as abandoning a cart or even a lack of engagement over a certain period of time. Those automations do a lot of work behind the scenes to generate revenue: as previously mentioned, they deliver 6–8x more revenue per send vs. campaigns, according to Klaviyo’s 2026 benchmarks.
This is why it’s important to let automations do their job rather than sending an email campaign that’s too similar. To keep unsubscribe rates low, rely on email campaigns for more time-sensitive communication, such as news, events, and seasonal moments.
You’ll also want to make sure your emails are sent at optimal times, too. With AI, your CRM can predict when each recipient is most likely to open, click, and convert across channels. Personalized send time replaces batch sending with AI models that can send emails at the optimal time for each customer based on past behavior and similar profiles.
Frequency and timing checklist:
- Unique email campaign content compared to automations
- With AI: personalized send time
7. Omnichannel messages: You’re sending on the right channel to begin with
To build an email strategy that complements text messaging, you can use AI to choose the right channel for each person.
AI that’s embedded within your CRM can draw from customer data to determine where someone is most likely to engage.
Let’s say someone has been ignoring your text messages for a few months but has engaged consistently via email. AI channel affinity would automatically route an email to that customer, then switch up the strategy if that same customer decided to start engaging with text messages again.
When email, text messages, and other touchpoints read from one shared, real-time profile, AI can sequence a customer's experience across channels instead of blasting each one in isolation. This reduces message fatigue and increases the likelihood of conversion.
Omnichannel messages checklist:
- With AI: engagement-based email campaigns and flows
- With AI: engagement-based text message campaigns and flows
Send more personalized emails with Klaviyo Composer
Checklists are important for avoiding email marketing mistakes, but Composer, Klaviyo’s AI marketing agent, can reveal the revenue opportunities you may be missing.
With plain-text prompts, marketers can ask where customers are dropping off and how they can make their email campaigns and flows better. Composer analyzes the sequence end-to-end, surfaces which step is underperforming and why, and recommends fixes in plain language.
From there, marketers can use a single prompt to build a complete campaign: audience, copy, channel coordination, timing, all in one conversational session.
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