Frequently asked questions about email marketing

The digital landscape is constantly changing, and we agree that it’s necessary to be strategic and thoughtful about where you spend your marketing dollars. Increased competition and data privacy make third party advertising expensive, but email marketing is an owned channel—you can control it. In fact, Bloomberg released a report that states that for every $1 spent on email marketing, you can expect an average return of $36. It all comes down to getting the highest return on your investment, no matter the current landscape, and email provides a reliable ROI.

It can be a bit confusing, but there actually are not different types of email marketing—email marketing is one type of marketing, using email as the channel to reach customers. However, there are several different types of email campaigns you can use as part of your email marketing strategy, including email newsletters, promotional emails and event emails. So if you do an online search for types of email marketing, you’re likely finding types of email campaigns.

An email marketing campaign is a one-time send to your email subscriber list, such as an event promotion.

An email automation is an email or series of emails that are automatically sent to customers based on a specific set of triggers or conditions. For example, you can set up a welcome series to be sent whenever a new customer subscribes, or an abandoned cart reminder to automatically send when a customer doesn’t complete checkout. At Klaviyo, you’ll see these automations referred to as “flows” in the product.

Email marketing works by messaging customers who have signed up, or subscribed, to your emails and enticing them to perform an action. So an important part of email marketing is building your list of subscribers. Once you have subscribers, you can send personalized email campaigns and automations to engage your customers and get them to take certain actions, such as encouraging them to shop based on a personalized product recommendation, completing checkout, or providing a review of your store. Successful email marketing services help businesses acquire and retain customers and see an optimal ROI.

Some of the benefits or advantages of email marketing are:

• Cost effective — as an owned channel, there are no advertising fees
• Scalable — allows marketers to grow at their own pace with limited overhead
• Increased sales — higher retention and lower acquisition costs
• Measurable — ESPs, like Klaviyo, provide complete reporting
• Integrated data — allows for omnichannel marketing options
• Personalization — branded emails with personalized communications for customers

Some of the disadvantages of email marketing are:

• Being reported as spam, impacting sender reputation and deliverability
• May require some education for users to scale
• May need design resources, but may be offset by the ESP selected

Each email marketing service provider has both key attributes and limitations, so it’s really about which platform is best for your needs. We recommend researching different companies and speaking with a sales rep to fully understand the value the ESP can provide to your ecommerce business and how seamlessly you can scale and grow with the platform.

We, of course, recommend Klaviyo email services.

Yes, Klaviyo provides over 100 pre-built, fully customizable email templates. One-click branding allows you to quickly and easily make them represent your brand, and the email builder’s simple drag-and-drop function allows you to edit templates to your needs, including adding, deleting, or rearranging content blocks like text, images, products, and buttons. Get email design inspiration from the Klaviyo showcase.

The Klaviyo Academy offers free courses at every level, and you can take them at your own pace, on your own schedule. You can start with the basics and work your way to intermediate and advanced.

Check out the Klaviyo blog and marketing resources pages to find tips, tricks, strategies, and other educational resources to help you develop or improve your email marketing strategy. We are also constantly updating our platform with new Klaviyo tools to assist you in your email marketing needs.

We offer several features designed for flexibility—intuitive enough for use as a beginner, but sophisticated enough to scale for global companies. It just depends on how you use them. You can check out our full list of automation features and email marketing features to learn about all the tools at your disposal with Klaviyo.

We can tell you all the reasons Klaviyo is the right choice for your email marketing, but there’s no better way to believe it than trying it for yourself. With our free plan, customers can access all that Klaviyo has to offer and get hands-on experience working with our tools. We also have flexible monthly pricing, so if you want to try a paid plan (for a larger number of contacts and emails), you can—without getting stuck in a long term contract. We’re confident that once you sign up for Klaviyo, it will be easy to see why over 100k brands across 80 countries use Klaviyo for their marketing needs.

Check out our case studies for real world examples of how Klaviyo customers have used the platform to grow their business.

The key to using Klaviyo for email marketing is data, and that all comes back to connecting your tech stack with the platform. Klaviyo’s real-time email data syncs allow you to have the most up-to-date information on every one of your customers, so you can send the most relevant, hyper-personalized emails at the right time.

And the best part is that setting up your connections—or integrations—is simple. Klaviyo has over 300 pre-built integrations to connect with tech platforms for everything from reviews to logistics. And, Klaviyo seamlessly integrates with the top ecommerce platforms.

When you get started with Klaviyo, the first thing you’ll do is integrate your online store using our Setup Wizard, providing you with a simple step-by-step guide for bringing in all your current and historical data.

You can also find more information about integrating with many of our pre-built ecommerce integrations here:

You can learn how to integrate with your ecommerce platform using the articles linked below:

• Shopify
• WooCommerce
• BigCommerce
• PrestaShop
• Magento 1
• Magento 2
• Salesforce Commerce Cloud
• Mi9
• OpenCart
• Shift4Shop
• Spree
• Volusion

For a custom platform, or one without a pre-built Klaviyo integration, check out our Developer Portal.

Email pricing at Klaviyo is flexible—no long term contracts. For email, the price you pay is based on the number of contacts you send to each month. Based on the number of contacts, you’ll have access to a certain number of emails you can send.

For example: If you have 1000 contacts, your price would include up to 10,000 emails per month.

There are 3 Klaviyo plans: Free, Email, and Email & SMS

The Free plan allows you to send up to 500 emails to up to 250 contacts per month. It also includes 150 free SMS credits that can be used to send SMS or MMS messages.

For the Email plan, you will select the number of contacts you want to send emails to. You will have a maximum number of emails you can send per month based on your number of contacts. You will also get 150 free SMS credits that can be used to send SMS or MMS messages.

For the Email & SMS plan, you will select the number of contacts you want to send emails to. You will have a maximum number of emails you can send per month based on your number of contacts. You will also select the number of SMS/MMS credits you want per month. SMS and MMS messages use up a different number of credits, based on the location of the recipient.

For example, to send to a U.S. recipient, an SMS would cost 1 credit, and an MMS would cost 3 credits.

But regardless of which plan you choose, you get access to much more beyond email and SMS marketing. Every plan has access to a built-in CDP and CRM, support, paid and advertising channels, and access to all of the features that help companies grow and scale—including segmentation, automations, and reporting.

Klaviyo allows you to schedule email automations, campaigns, reports, and email forms in advance to improve efficiencies for your team.

For email campaigns, we have help documents that outline send options that you can schedule, including who you send the campaign to and at what time, and you even batch the sends depending on the recipient’s local time.

Want to send specific reports to different teams? Use help documents that allow you to set up a report to auto-run on specific dates and times via an email.

If you are running or discontinuing a specific discount, you can schedule a sign up form to be displayed or hidden, so you can interact with specific shoppers at specific times.

We are always improving our product, creating new features and updating existing ones to meet the needs of our customers. You can learn about our feature releases on our What’s New page, and sign up to receive monthly updates. We also have a quarterly Klaviyo Product Event where our product teams walk through some of our larger updates.

Check out our case studies to learn about the businesses using Klaviyo email marketing services and their success stories.

Nope! Regardless of which ESP you switch from, you continue to own all your data—with just a simple integration, you will be able to migrate all of your historical and real-time data to Klaviyo. None of it will be deleted, unless you choose to manually go in and remove any data yourself. Your data will remain in your Klaviyo account once you remove the original integration.

Once you’ve connected Klaviyo with your ESP (Mailchimp, Constant Contact, Hubspot, etc), your data will start syncing between the accounts within just a few minutes. Once your data sync is complete, you can start using Klaviyo right away.

We have migration guides to walk you through integrating with Klaviyo:

• Mailchimp
• Constant Contact
• Campaign Monitor
• Hubspot
• Listrak
• Sailthru
• Salesforce Marketing Cloud

No problem. We support custom platform migrations as well. If you’re on an ESP that we don’t have a native integration with, you can import or copy/paste your subscribers into Klaviyo from a CSV or Excel file.

Need more help integrating with Klaviyo? Check out Klaviyo’s Agency Partners.

We have over 300 pre-built integrations with platforms for everything from shipping to reviews. And, Klaviyo is an open source API, so you can create custom solutions if we don’t have a pre-built integration ready to go.

Klaviyo’s customer data platform (CDP) ingests data from every platform you connect and adds it to your customer profiles, providing you with comprehensive profile info for every customer and the ability to have hyper-targeted messages.

Absolutely—and at no additional cost to you. Account owners and administrators can add new users and set up their roles, allowing for seamless communication between teams both inside and outside of marketing.

We have 300+ integrations with Klaviyo, including top ecommerce platforms like Shopify, Bigcommerce, Wix, Magento, WooCommerce, Prestashop, and Salesforce.

Other integrations include Refersion for affiliate marketing, Gatsby for influencer marketing, a quiz solution like Octane AI, LoyaltyLion for loyalty programs, Okendo and Judge.me for reviews, Recharge for subscription, shipping platforms like ShipBob and Aftership, and many more.

Yes! Klaviyo has an email benchmarking feature that allows users to compare their deliverability metrics against those of approximately 100 industry peers, giving you a solid understanding of your performance within your specific industry landscape.

We do not recommend buying a list of email addresses—sending emails to people who did not subscribe to receive them can have a negative impact on your sender reputation, making it more difficult to get in front of customers who do want to hear from you.

The best way to grow your email list is by having users opt in and subscribe to your emails via sign-up forms, retargeting on social media and paid media, and using creative integrations like surveys, quizzes, and loyalty programs—all options available with the Klaviyo platform.

Depends on the type of message you are sending! There are times when an email blast is appropriate—a new product drop that you want to let all your subscribers know about, or perhaps a company announcement.

However, to get higher opens and click rates, it always helps to send hyper-targeted emails using conditional splits—ensuring that you’re sending the most relevant messages to the people that most want to receive them.

Klaviyo has several features that help you retain your current customers and grow your list.

Forms: We have over 50 pre-built, customizable email forms to help you add new subscribers and collect customer data

Lookalike audiences: You can use your Klaviyo data to create lookalike segments for Meta ads, helping you reach and add more of the types of people who tend to engage with your business

SMS: You can add an opt-in for SMS to attract customers who are interested in hearing from you via text

Klaviyo’s built-in CDP is key to retaining your customers once they become subscribers—by integrating with your entire tech stack and centralizing all of your customer data, you can hyper-personalize your messages using segmentation, conditional splits, and dynamic blocks.

Email deliverability is impacted by the IP address or the sender’s reputation. A dedicated IP address is one way of improving your deliverability. When you use a general IP address (the default), you’re using the same IP address as several other Klaviyo companies, which means that your deliverability could be affected by other companies—if another company using the IP address spams their customers, that could negatively impact your deliverability as well.

When you have a dedicated IP address of your own, you alone are responsible for it, and only your company’s actions will impact your deliverability.

Things that can negatively impact your deliverability and sender reputation include spamming customers and emailing people who are not on your list or who have unsubscribed.

Our customer support team is also available to help you maintain your reputation for good deliverability.

We recommend that you keep your email list “clean” by removing unengaged subscribers from your Active Profiles list. This will help maintain and improve the quality of your list to ensure good deliverability, which can be negatively affected by sending emails to recipients who are no longer interested. To clean your list, simply create a segment for unengaged profiles, and then suppress or delete them.

Lists are a general group of people that have subscribed to your email campaign or email newsletter. Segments are a curated group of people from your subscribed lists that you create based on a specific set of conditions, such as a segment of VIPs or a segment of customers who have purchased a particular product.

There are several ways to grow your email lists, including our advanced email segmentation tools. Our Klaviyo Segment Builder is a powerful tool that can be used for everything from simple, straightforward segments to extremely granular, more complex segments using machine-based learning—all depending on your needs.

You can learn more about using advanced email segmentation to grow your lists through optimized forms, social media, and more with our advanced email segmentation tutorial.

When you segment an email list, you group your subscribers or audience based on their behavior on your website, their personal interests, and specific characteristics. This data is gathered through your ecommerce store integration and the other tech and data stack integrations with Klaviyo.

Using all of the customer data available to you, you are able to define a set of conditions to create your segments, which can then be used to drive your email marketing, such as:

• Trigger email flows or automations
• Send hyper-targeted campaigns
• Re-target users via social and paid ads
• Enhance the serving of forms on your website
• Analyzing your campaign performance

Here are 7 key segments you can use to boost email performance:

• Cross sell segment
• Location-based segment
• Item and brand-specific segment
• Engagement tier segment
• Churn risk and CLV segment
• Average order value (AOV) segment
• Holiday shoppers segment

Learn more with our free email marketing course on segmentation.

It all comes down to data. The more data you have populating each customer profile, the more you’ll be able to create granular segments for hyper-personalized emails. And you get more data by integrating your tech stack with Klaviyo.

Some types of data you can collect are:

• Customer information: gender, birthday, anniversary, age
• Preferences: Email frequency, type of content, coupon preferences
• Questionnaire responses: You can collect any type of data that will be relevant to you using custom properties, gathered through forms, surveys, etc (there is no limit to the number of custom properties you can include)

All of the data in your customer profiles is available for segmentation. Klaviyo segments are dynamic, so as the customer profiles get updated through data syncs and collection, customers will move in and out of segments in real time, based on how you set up the conditions for each segment and profile. Some types of data that can be tracked and updated on a profile level, and used to segment, includes average order value (AOV), customer lifetime value (CLV), and order frequency purchase month.

Klaviyo creates highly personalized customer profiles through its built-in customer data platform (CDP). Using Klaviyo’s 300+ tech integrations, the CDP ingests data from all your platforms (including your ecommerce store) and stores the data for each customer in their own profile. You can have as many fields in a profile as you need, and you can even create custom profile fields for specific data that will help you better personalize your experiences.

Email segmentation is the key to Klaviyo’s personalization, but our tools go beyond that. For example, you can include personalized product recommendations in your emails, and the AI subject line builder helps you create personalized subject lines based on data and metrics like high open rates.

Klaviyo has built in compliance, as well as several resources to make sure you understand the different regulations around privacy, including privacy policies, collecting consent, and targeting and excluding customers.

Savvy email marketers have heard of Salesforce’s Marketing Cloud with reference to  AMPscript. It’s their proprietary scripting language that allows for dynamic content in marketing channels like email. Klaviyo uses Django statements for conditional split logic. Using Django statements marketers can:

• Personalize emails sent to subscribers using their profile data
• Create dynamic email blocks with and/or and if/else logic
• Format data in a clear manner
• Add date and time that is real time

When using the conditions, you can have 1-3 elements, and the statement must include variables (e.g., person|lookup:’Favorite Color’). Add comparative functions, like = (equals) or > (greater than) and a value, that relates to a specific property to look for. You can begin certain conditions with not—these block profiles that do not meet the conditions.

You can use template tags to create custom messages and experiences for subscribers as well. These are pre-templated, so no coding is needed.

As an example, if you send events to Klaviyo through the API, all the properties will be available through the event variable and lookup filter.

Thanks for your purchase of ${{ event|lookup:’total_price’ }}. = Thanks for your purchase of $29.00.

How do you like your new {{ event|lookup:’Items Purchased’ }}? = How do you like your new blue suede shoes?

Yes! Every customer has a single customer profile that includes both Klaviyo default and custom properties.

• Default properties are identified by a dollar sign prefix.
• Custom properties and events data can include gender, size, interest, special dates, email frequency preference, type of content, and responses to surveys, etc.

Klaviyo is a platform with built-in CDP functionality available to all users. That means there is no end to the data that can be stored, and you can collect any type of information with the custom property feature. There is no limit to the custom properties you can store to an individual profile.

Yes, but for each customer profile you have to ensure that the common identifiers are formatted exactly the same. Formatting is important for custom properties, so any changes to names and their values can generate an entirely new property in Klaviyo. This includes capitalization – custom properties are case sensitive.

The types of email forms and sign-up forms we offer include:

• Popup forms: These eye catching and high conversion forms appear in the middle of a browser window.
• Flyout forms: These forms avoid disrupting your customer’s experience by displaying at the edge of the page—the user can continue to browse without needing to close the form.
• Embedded forms: These forms are embedded on a specific page or section of your site, and are preferable for experiences that you want to always have available and accessible to the customer—such as a newsletter sign-up form in the footer of your site. 
• Full Page forms: These forms act as a landing page and cover the entire window. These work best to grow your email list.

To target your customers with forms, you’ll need to set up email list segments based on certain customer behavior or attributes, such as how many times they’ve visited your site or the type of device they’re using.

Some recommended targeting types include:

• Timing
  • Load delay: Show 3 seconds after page load
• Frequency
  • Don’t show again after submit form or Go to URL action
  • Show again 2 days after closing
• Devices
  • Show on: Desktop and Mobile
• Targeting
  • By visitor > Target visitors in a list or segment: Don’t show to visitors in a certain list or segment > [your main list].

Yes, you can create a Klaviyo popup or flyout form with a custom trigger on your site using the API for triggering forms.

We offer over 50 pre-built automations, including:

• Welcome series: Introduce your email list subscribers to your business and convert them into customers.

• Abandoned cart: Automatically message customers when they have products left in their cart.

• Post-purchase: Engage customers further after purchase with options like recommended or similar product options.

• Winback: Re-engage past customers that may be interested in purchasing again if they are sent products or services they are interested in.

When working with different stores, you may need to copy automated email flows from one account to another. Klaviyo allows you to use the multi-account login feature, where automated flows and templates can be cloned between accounts. This reduces duplication of work, but it’s dependent on the varying permissions associated with the accounts.

Within the platform there is an option for an Apple Privacy Open flag (which is set to either True or False for every open event). This will differentiate MPP opens from true recipient engagement.

Klaviyo has robust ​​A/B testing functionality for email, including email campaigns, automated email flows, flow branches, and sign-up email forms. You can test different subject lines, content blocks, optimal send times, form colors, fonts, CTAs, and more. You can also set-up variations, do split testing, and get reliable data to understand the statistical significance of one test performance over another.

Klaviyo offers support to help you optimize your marketing efforts. All accounts have access to the free Academy courses (basic, intermediate, and advanced) for email, SMS, improving AOV, CLV, and using Klaviyo to maximize your return. Paid accounts also have an account manager that can help with more personalized onboarding, best practices, strategic guidance, and more.

Klaviyo offers an email benchmark feature that allows you to measure performance against 100 of your industry peers—including average order value, click through rates, and unsubscribes, and you can see how your automated flows like abandoned cart and browse abandonment are performing against your peers, giving you confidence to know which emails are successful and where there is opportunity. You can also analyze your account data in relation to Klaviyo best practices, industry trends, and seasonality.

The email benchmarking feature aggregates data for all Klaviyo customers and provides benchmarking for content and trends. Individual customer data remains private, and your benchmarks are based only on data from businesses similar to yours.

Benchmarking data includes:

• Business performance
• Email campaign performance
• SMS campaign performance
• Flow performance
• Sign-up forms performance

More granular email data includes:

• open rates
• click rates
• click through rate
• placed order rate
• email revenue per recipient
• bounce rate
• spam rate
• unsubscribe rate

Our predictive analytics feature offers Customer lifetime value (CLV) and defines it as the total amount, past and future, an individual customer will purchase over their lifetime. Academy courses on CLV teach you how to use this data to create predictions, analysis, and more for a better ROI on every campaign. We also have support articles to help you predict risk of churn, next expected order date, and more to further refine segments and flows for better targeting and retention.

Our predictive analytics allows you to calculate the expected date of next purchase. This takes into account individual customer behavior and placement of orders, derived from patterns of purchase. Our AI requires a specific amount of data to make accurate calculations.

For example, the tool will show the frequency and duration between orders and also calculate the churn rate. If the churn rate is high, the customer is not likely to place an order. However, flows can then be created to motivate a customer at risk of churn, using coupons and loyalty programs.

Yes, we offer a send time optimization feature called Smart Send Time. We start with an exploratory email, where random times are assigned to customers based on their local time zones. We then are able to use the data from that exploratory email to pinpoint the ideal send time for maximum engagement. To get accurate send time data, the feature needs at least 12,000 active profiles and campaigns with at least 12,000 recipients.

Klaviyo provides email reporting and email benchmarking tools to help you collect data and understand your performance. For example, for channels like email and SMS, you can measure the bounce rate of email campaign landing pages, email conversion rates per your industry standard, behavioral triggers, and click through rates. You can also track site traffic and even share or forward rates for your campaigns. This data, along with benchmarks, will all help you understand where your emails and marketing strategy are performing and where there are opportunities.

For statistical significance, the Klaviyo email tool can mathematically determine whether an email variation will show better performance. For example, when you send a campaign as an a/b test, the tool will calculate the number of people who received a message and the win probability based on behavior. This helps determine the variation that will outperform the other variation(s).

The Klaviyo email software does predict customer churn, providing the likelihood of a customer leaving a service or canceling a subscription. This data can help you create brand campaigns and flows that help retain customers, as it is always more costly to acquire customers than retain them.

We’re always innovating and offering new products and features to our customers. You can learn about all updated on our What’s New page, and you can subscribe to get product updates sent directly to your inbox.