Reuse your team's marketing standards in Composer
Generated by Klaviyo AI
Skills save reusable instructions so Composer can apply your team's standards to marketing tasks in Klaviyo. The guide explains how to create, test, and share skills, with examples for campaign reviews, reporting, deliverability checks, and experiment planning.
- Reusable team instructions: Each skill needs a name, description, and instructions, while task-specific details such as dates and offers belong in the prompt.
- Flexible skill selection: Choose a skill with an @ mention or let Composer match your request to its description.
- Shared team standards: Saved skills are available to anyone in your Klaviyo account and should be tested against real team requests.
- Separate recurring tasks: Saving a skill does not schedule it; running it on a cadence requires a recurring task in Composer.
Type @campaign-preflight into Composer, Klaviyo's AI marketing agent, and it checks your campaign draft against your team's pre-launch checklist, from audience exclusions to links. That's a skill: saved instructions that let you hand off a repeat job without explaining it again.
You already have a way of doing this job. It lives in a doc no one opens, a checklist pinned in Slack, or the head of the person who's run Black Friday Cyber Monday for 3 years. So each time you ask an AI tool for help, you paste the same context back in, and two teammates asking the same question get two different answers.
Skills cut out the repetition. You write the standard once, and Composer applies it to the campaigns, flows, segments, forms, and performance data in your Klaviyo account. Composer does the legwork. You set the goals, make the calls, and approve anything before it goes live.
What does a skill in Composer do?
A skill tells Composer how to approach a task. You build one from 3 required fields:
- Name: This becomes the @ command you type in chat, like
weekly-newsletter-tone. The form converts spaces to hyphens and capital letters to lowercase. - Description: This tells Composer when the skill applies. A specific description helps Composer choose the right skill on its own when your request matches it.
- Instructions: These spell out the steps, standards, and output you expect, plus what Composer should ask you for when a detail is missing.
Keep anything that changes out of the saved instructions. A skill holds what stays the same from task to task, like your checklist, your metrics, and your report format. The prompt carries this week's dates, this campaign's offer, and this launch's audience. Put a promotion in a skill and it goes stale the day the sale ends.
You can run a skill two ways. Type @ and pick it from the menu when you want to be sure which skill runs, or describe the task and let Composer match it to a skill's description.
5 AI skills to build first
Start with work you already repeat. Each skill below comes from a job ecommerce teams run weekly or before each launch, so you already know what good looks like. You write the expectation. Composer does the review of the work. You decide what to act on.
Deliverability review
Inbox placement rarely breaks all at once. Open rates sag for a week, complaints creep up, and by the time revenue dips, the problem is days old.
Give Composer your deliverability checklist: the signals you watch (bounce, spam complaint, and unsubscribe rates), the thresholds that worry you, and the order you investigate in.
@deliverability-review Review last week's email deliverability. Flag any issues and recommend what I should investigate first.You get a ranked list measured against your own thresholds, so the Monday check follows the same rules no matter who runs it. When something looks off, Klaviyo's email deliverability audit guide walks through the fixes.
Performance brief
Teach Composer how your team reads performance before the next meeting sneaks up on you. Name the metrics that lead (revenue per recipient, placed order rate, flow revenue), the comparisons you trust, and the format your leadership team expects: wins first, then misses, then next steps.
@performance-brief Compare last month's marketing performance to the previous month. Show me the biggest wins, opportunities, and recommended next steps.Composer shows the sources behind its answers, so you can check a number before it lands in a slide. Saving a skill doesn't put it on a schedule. To have the brief waiting for you each Monday, pair it with a recurring task. For what to watch, see campaign performance insights.
Campaign calendar review
Two promotions land on the same Thursday. Your best customers get 4 emails in 3 days. No one planned it, and no one saw the whole calendar either.
Write your planning rules into a skill: how close two sends to the same audience can sit, which segments get lighter frequency, and which promotions shouldn't overlap.
@campaign-calendar-review Review my next two weeks of campaigns. Flag audience overlap, scheduling conflicts, and opportunities to improve the plan.Composer checks what's scheduled against your rules and flags conflicts while there's still time to move a send. You choose what moves.
Campaign preflight
A clean launch and a correction email are often one missed exclusion apart. This skill holds your pre-launch checklist, from excluded segments and offer terms to links and final quality checks. Tell Composer to rank what it finds by impact, so the fix that matters most sits at the top.
@campaign-preflight Review my Black Friday campaign draft. Tell me what needs fixing before launch.Then preview the campaign and send yourself a test, the last two steps in this pre-send checklist from the Klaviyo Community. The skill catches the problems your checklist knows to look for. The test send shows you what subscribers will see.
Experiment planner
When a welcome flow's click rate starts sliding, it's tempting to change the subject line, the hero image, and the offer in one go. Then you can't tell which change worked. Put your testing framework in a skill: how you write a hypothesis, how long a test runs, which metric picks the winner, and how you'll read the result.
@experiment-planner Our welcome flow click rate is declining. Design an experiment to help us understand why and improve performance.Composer returns a hypothesis, a test design, and a plan for judging results before anything gets built. You approve the test and decide what ships.
Key features of skills in Composer
Feature | What it does for you |
Skills | Save your checklists, reporting methods, brand standards, and test frameworks as instructions Composer reuses. |
@ mentions | Run a specific skill by typing @ and its name in a Composer conversation. |
Automatic matching | Composer can apply a skill on its own when your request matches the skill's description. |
Shared skills | Skills you save are available to teammates in the same Klaviyo account. |
Edit in chat and duplicate | Refine a skill through a conversation, or copy one as the starting point for a variation. |
Recurring tasks | Schedule the work a skill defines, like a weekly performance review. |
Citations | See the sources behind Composer's answers before you act on them. |
Human approval | Review drafts and recommendations. Nothing goes live until you approve it. |
What to know before you share a skill
- Skills are shared with your account. Anyone in your Klaviyo account can use a skill once you save it, so write instructions that work for the whole team and test each edit against the requests your teammates make.
- A saved skill waits for you. Saving doesn't schedule it to run. Pair it with a recurring task when you want the work done on a cadence.
- Skills work within Composer's access. A skill guides how Composer uses what it can already reach. If a task needs data from another app, connect that app separately.
- You keep the final say. Composer prepares drafts, audits, and recommendations. Nothing goes live without human approval.
How to create a skill in Composer
Pick something you do on repeat, like a weekly report, a launch checklist, or a brand voice guide. You don't need to code or build an agent. You need to know how you want the job done.
- Open Composer and click Customize, then Skills. Click New, then New skill.
- Enter a short, recognizable name, like
campaign-preflight. That name becomes your @ command. - Write a description that says when Composer should use the skill. "Help with marketing" is too broad. "Use when reviewing a campaign draft before it's scheduled" tells Composer exactly when the skill fits.
- Write the instructions: the steps to follow, the standards to apply, the output you want back, and what to ask you when a detail is missing. A line like "Don't invent a discount, deadline, or product benefit" earns its place. Click Save.
- Test the skill in a new conversation. Type
@, pick the skill, and give it a real task. If you keep making the same correction, add it to the instructions, and keep feedback that applies to one task in the chat.
To change a skill later, go to Customize, then Skills, and open it. From there you can edit the fields, edit it in chat, duplicate it for a variation, or turn it off without deleting it. The full walk-through is in the Help Center guide on how to create and use skills in Composer.
Frequently asked questions about AI marketing agent skills
What's the difference between a skill and a prompt?
A prompt is a one-time request. A skill is a set of instructions Composer saves and reuses, so your checklist, metrics, or format comes along without retyping. Use both together: the skill carries the standard, and the prompt carries this task's details, like dates and offers.
Do I have to @ mention a skill for Composer to use it?
No. Composer can use a skill when your request matches its description. Mention the skill with @ when you want to choose it yourself. If Composer doesn't pick a skill you expected, rewrite its description to name the task and situation more clearly.
Who can use the skills I create?
Skills you create through the form in Composer are shared with others in your Klaviyo account as soon as you save them. That's what makes a skill a team standard, so write instructions that work for anyone who'll run them.
Can a skill run automatically each week?
Not on its own. Saving a skill doesn't schedule it. To run a skill on a cadence, like a Monday performance brief, set up a recurring task in Composer that uses it.
Does Composer send campaigns without my approval?
No. Composer prepares drafts, audits, and recommendations for you to review, and nothing goes live without human approval. A skill changes how Composer does the work, not who signs off on it.
Are Composer skills the same as Customer Agent skills?
No. Customer Agent comes with pre-built service skills, like order tracking and returns, that it uses in customer conversations. Composer skills are instructions your team writes for marketing work, like campaign reviews, reporting, and test plans.
Do I need technical skills to build one?
No. A skill is a name, a description, and plain-language instructions. If you can write a checklist for a new teammate, you can write a skill.
Get started with skills in Composer
Pick the checklist you ran last week. That's your first skill. Explore Composer, read how Composer automates marketing work, or browse the AI prompt library for prompts worth saving as skills. For the bigger picture, see what agentic marketing is.