In my role as cofounder of Sticky Digital, Shopify’s premier retention marketing agency, I work with some of the most sophisticated marketing teams in the industry. These enterprise brands have massive audiences, deep creative resources, and years of hard-won customer data.
Almost every single one comes to us with the same problem: their lifecycle program has been built up in layers over years, and nobody has ever gone back to look at the foundation.
That's what my team and I do. We go back to the foundation.
The campaign trap
The most common problem we see when we start with an enterprise brand: they're sending 3–4 emails a day. They've developed real sophistication around segmentation: messaging cat owners differently than dog owners, or tailoring by where someone is in the customer lifecycle. But they're doing all of it at the campaign level.
That's not sustainable. Designing multiple campaign emails every single day eats through your creative team's capacity fast.
And when we dig into what those campaigns actually are, we find that only about 25% of them are truly campaign-appropriate: seasonal sends, promotions, new product launches. Meanwhile, educational content, brand values, and evergreen messaging perform far better as automated flows triggered by a customer action or a specific attribute.
Here's a simple example: if you want to tell your audience that your brand is environmentally friendly and you send that as a campaign, anyone who joins your list the day after that send will never see it. Put it in a flow, and every new customer gets it at exactly the right moment in their journey.
The goal is to send messages when they actually make sense to the subscriber.
Getting back to the actual customer journey
What I tell every enterprise team we work with: stop building around your marketing calendar, and start building around your customer.
Most brands come to us carrying years of layered strategy. Something worked for a competitor so they added it, or a new channel launched so they bolted it on. Over time, the program stops reflecting what you're actually trying to do.
My team and I visually map the entire lifecycle first: where customers are entering and exiting different phases, how the brand speaks to them at each point, what's missing. That map becomes the foundation everything else gets built on.
But the mapping is only half of it. The second part is a full tech stack audit.
You're probably not using what you're already paying for
We have clients come to us who have Klaviyo Data Platform and aren't using its segments to power anything meaningful in their lifecycle. Or they have Marketing Analytics sitting idle. Or they haven't connected Customer Hub yet. That's one of my personal favorites, because it's what brings customers from an off-site experience into a fully personalized on-site one.
The same pattern holds outside of Klaviyo, too: brands with subscription programs that have set up maybe a third of what's available, or integrations they turned on once and never optimized.
Bandwidth is usually the culprit. When your team is spending all their time orchestrating campaigns, there's nothing left for the deeper work. And this is true even at very large brands: a resourcing problem that shows up at every point in your workflow.
Stefan Milicevic, strategy director at Underground Ecom, one of the fastest-growing retention marketing agencies, sees a similar problem. “With enterprise clients, decisions are slow to happen and slow to be implemented, and then course correction is slow when things don’t work out,” he explains. “This causes a lot of technology debt which then needs to be resolved with additional cost.”
With enterprise, slow decision making, implementation, and course correction can cause technology debt.
But once those brands get through those issues, they see real results:
- Grooming brand Dollar Shave Club reduced total cost of ownership (TCO) over 30% after consolidating their email marketing platform, standalone CDP, and pop-up form tool in Klaviyo.
- DKNY reduced total email sends 24% YoY. This means they got more efficient, not just busier.
These are the kinds of things that can happen when a team stops running in place and starts running with a real system behind them.
Shifting from campaigns to flows: what it actually looks like
When my team and I recommend shifting away from batch campaigns toward automated flows, most enterprise brands are open to it in theory. In practice, they're scared. They've built a program that works, even if it's patched together, and they don't want to risk breaking it.
So we don't ask them to make a leap. We begin by running a test.
We'll take the top-performing campaigns from the past 3 months, build them into a flow, and run it on a limited cadence—for example, Tuesdays and Thursdays only. Then we compare: is this flow outperforming that one campaign send on Tuesday, week over week? It's not a typical A/B test. We're testing larger parts of the system to let the data build the case for bigger changes.
With most enterprise brands, that trust takes about 6 months to build. That's completely normal. In my experience, there are really two kinds of enterprise clients: the rare ones who say, "We know what needs to happen, just do it as fast as you can," and the much more common ones who need you to prove it first. My team and I plan for the second type every time.
The payoff is real. DKNY, for example, earned 30% of their Klaviyo-attributed value from flows in the last 3 months. Flows convert better than campaigns because the timing is right for the individual customer, not just convenient for your content calendar.
And working within Klaviyo, you can build automated experiences that campaigns simply can't replicate: channel preference routing, dynamic SMS capture blocks inside email, cross-channel personalization that accounts for what a customer has and hasn't engaged with.
What migration to Klaviyo makes possible for enterprise brands
A lot of the enterprise brands my team and I work with are in the middle of migrating to Klaviyo, or seriously considering it, when they come to us. The hesitation is understandable: these are complex organizations with years of history in their current stack, and switching feels like a big risk.
What I can say from experience is that the risk of staying put is bigger than most teams realize. Legacy platforms were built around batch-oriented processing and siloed data models, which means your team ends up doing a lot of manual work just to run basic segmentation, and then still ends up with data latency that limits what kind of personalization is even possible.
Once brands are on Klaviyo, the programs we're able to build are significantly more capable. Here are just a few of Klaviyo’s capabilities that simply aren't available on legacy platforms:
- Conversational SMS
- Certain types of cross-channel personalization
- The kind of email and SMS integration that lets you route the right message to the right channel based on actual individual behavior
We've migrated several brands off Salesforce Marketing Cloud, for example, and the difference is substantial, both in what the team can execute independently and in what the program delivers for customers.
"In our experience working with enterprise merchants across Australia and New Zealand, we see management teams that aren't in the tools day to day assessing risk through the lens of a chunkier platform migration that can take years,” says Omer Hazer, founder and CEO of Atlas Studios, a strategy, creative, and retention marketing agency.
By comparison, Klaviyo migrations “feel too good to be true, so they stall at the approval stage,” Hazer explains. “What I tell those stakeholders: the risk and opportunity cost of not moving compounds every single month. Even the hairiest migrations we've worked through have shown meaningful uplift within weeks, not just in revenue, but in how liberated the internal team feels once they're out of the legacy system.”
The risk of not moving compounds every single month.
Migration is also faster than most enterprise teams expect. Publicly traded company Helen of Troy migrated 3 major brands to Klaviyo in about a month, and reduced TCO over 40%. That's not a small brand moving quickly. That's a complex organization making a clean transition and coming out the other side with a stronger program and a leaner stack.
Enterprise lifecycle programs stall because the strategy has outgrown the foundation it was built on. Getting back to the actual customer journey, and building a program around that, with the right tools properly connected, is how the brands we work with start seeing results that campaigns alone were never going to deliver.
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