6 Signs Your Klaviyo Account Is Underused
6 Signs Your Klaviyo Account Is Underused
This article explains why most Klaviyo accounts are generating a fraction of what they are actually capable of — not because anything is obviously broken, but because the platform’s most powerful features are sitting untouched. A welcome flow that stops at a discount. Segmentation built on basic filters instead of real behavior. Flows that haven’t been opened since they were first turned on. These are not edge cases. They are the standard state of most accounts.
The post walks through six specific signs that a Klaviyo account is underbuilt, what each one costs, and what a better version looks like. The main takeaway is that the fix is rarely starting over — it is finding what the account is already capable of and building from there. For most ecommerce brands, flows should be driving 25 to 40 percent of total email revenue. If campaigns are carrying everything, that gap is worth closing before adding more campaigns on top of it.
- A flow being live is not the same as a flow working Trigger conditions go stale, timing drifts out of sync with actual customer behavior, and dynamic product grids break silently when collection URLs change. Nobody catches it because nobody looks. A flow audit is maintenance, not a luxury.
- Segmentation built on filters treats wildly different customers the same A five-time buyer and a one-time browser are not the same audience. Klaviyo has purchase history, browse behavior, product affinity, predicted lifetime value, and discount responsiveness sitting in every account. Most brands never use it, which means the most valuable customers on the list get the same message as someone who clicked once and disappeared.
- SMS used as a shorter version of email loses the one advantage it has SMS open rates are extraordinary compared to email — and that advantage disappears the moment the channel gets used to broadcast the same promotional content email already delivered. SMS earns its place when the message is genuinely time-sensitive. Not as a second send of the campaign calendar.
Imagine you just bought the fanciest, newest sports car. It’s sleek, fast, luxurious- everything you wanted. So you drive it off the lot, and it feels great. Miles go by. Months go by. And then one day, completely by accident, you find a button you’ve never noticed. Sports mode. You press it. And suddenly the car you thought you knew feels like an entirely different machine. It’s just sooooo much better than before. You’re ecstatic…then the regret starts creeping up: I’ve been missing out on this the whole time.
Your Klaviyo account could be the same way. Not that anything is obviously underperforming (unless it is), but there could be a mountain of potential wealth sitting underneath your nose, and you would never know unless you give it a good snooping…or unless you’ve got a friend (who just so happens to be a Klaviyo Master Elite Partner like us), letting you know what to look out for.
The inclination is to go back and change your creative. Change your strategy, but why reinvent the wheel when the potential fix is finding the sports mode button?
Here are six signs you are underusing your Klaviyo account and what it could be costing you.
Sign 1: Your Welcome Flow is “Only” A Discount
A welcome flow that leads with a discount and stops there is not a welcome flow.
The subscriber signed up for a reason. Maybe the brand caught their attention. Maybe a friend recommended it. Maybe they were already close to buying and the signup form was the last step before checkout. Whatever brought them there, it’s our job to start tending the young embers of a relationship.
A discount is not a bad thing to include. But it’s only one part of the relationship, not the whole relationship.
We want them to come back. But how? Help them get to know us better.
Here are some ideas for Welcome Flow Emails (with the discount sprinkled throughout).
Email 1: The Introduction
Who the brand is and why it exists. Not a feature list. The story behind the product, the problem it was built to solve, the reason someone started it.
Email 2: The Differentiation
What makes this brand different from the alternative the subscriber is probably also considering. Education that earns confidence before asking for anything.
Email 3: The Trust Builder
A story about the founder’s journey coupled with customer reviews. Not a generic star rating but specific testimonials from customers who had the same hesitation the new subscriber probably has right now.
Email 4: The Shopping Entry Point
A category guide, a pain point filter, a use case that helps them find their entry point into the brand rather than pointing them at the bestsellers list for the third time.
A welcome flow that skips all of that is leaving the most valuable real estate in email marketing almost completely empty.
Sign 2: Your Segmentation is Basic
Most brands have segments. The problem is what those segments are built on.
Subscribed in the last 90 days. Opened at least once. Located in the United States. These are not segments. They are filters. And campaigns built on filters like these treat a first-time browser the same as a five-time buyer, a customer who spent $400 last month the same as someone who clicked one email and never came back.
Klaviyo is sitting on significantly more than that. Purchase history. Browse behavior. Product affinity. Average order value. How recently someone bought, how often they buy, and how much they spend when they do. Predicted lifetime value. Whether someone responds to discounts or consistently buys at full price. All of it is there. Most brands never touch it.
The result is a list that looks healthy on the surface but sends the same message to wildly different people. The VIP customer who buys every month gets the same new subscriber campaign as someone who opened one email six months ago and never came back. Neither message is right for either person.
Real segmentation is not about dividing the list into a few buckets. It is about making sure the message that arrives in someone’s inbox reflects what they actually did, what they actually bought, and where they actually are in their relationship with the brand.
A big list segmented poorly will almost always underperform a smaller list segmented well. Because relevance is what drives opens, clicks, and purchases. Not volume.
Sign 3: Your Live Flows Haven’t Been Touched Since You Built Them
A flow being live is not the same thing as a flow working.
Most flows get built, turned on, and then left alone. Months pass. Sometimes years. The business changes, the product catalog changes, the customer behavior changes, and the flow keeps running exactly as it was built, as if none of that happened.
Trigger conditions that made sense when the flow was first set up might no longer reflect how customers are actually moving through the funnel. Timing that worked for a different season or a different audience size may be off. Messaging that referenced a specific product or promotion might be outdated in ways that are embarrassing at best and confusing at worst.
And then there are the dynamic product grids. These are among the most common silent failures in Klaviyo. A flow pulls products from a specific collection URL. The collection gets renamed. The URL changes. The product is discontinued. The flow keeps sending. The email still looks fine in the dashboard. But the customer opens it and sees a broken block, a blank space, or the wrong products entirely. Nobody caught it because nobody looked.
A flow audit is not a luxury. It is maintenance. The same way a sports car needs more than fuel to perform at its best, a Klaviyo flow needs someone to actually open the hood periodically and check whether everything still works the way it was designed to.
Sign 4: You’re Treating SMS Like Email
If your SMS sounds like a shorter version of the email you sent two hours ago, you are not running two channels. You are running one channel twice and paying for the privilege.
Email and SMS are not the same tool at different lengths. They have different jobs, different expectations, and different relationships with the customer’s attention. Conflating them does not double the impact. It halves the effectiveness of both.
Email has room. Room to tell the brand story, educate the customer, merchandise a collection, build the case for a product, and warm someone up to a decision they are not quite ready to make yet. Email is the channel that does the heavy lifting between purchases.
SMS has none of that room, and it does not need it. SMS earns its place when the message is genuinely time-sensitive. A restock the customer has been waiting for. A shipping cutoff that is actually closing. A flash window with a real end time. A cart that has been sitting for hours and needs one specific nudge. One message. One reason. One clear action.
When SMS is used to broadcast the same promotional content email already delivered, two things happen. The customer starts ignoring the texts because they already know what they say. And the channel loses the one advantage it has over every other touchpoint in the stack, the fact that people actually read their texts.
SMS open rates are extraordinary compared to email. That advantage evaporates the moment the channel gets treated like a cheaper, faster version of the campaign calendar.
Sign 5: Your Abandonment Flows Treat Everyone the Same
A first-time buyer who left a cart has a different problem than a returning customer who did the same thing. And both of them have a different problem than someone who made it all the way to checkout and stopped there.
Most brands send the same email to all three.
Abandoned Cart vs. Abandoned Checkout
Abandoned Cart
This customer is still weighing options. They found the product interesting enough to add it but have not committed yet. They might be comparing you to a competitor. They might have an unanswered question. The job of this flow is not to remind them their cart exists. It is to remind them why you, specifically, are the right choice.
Abandoned Checkout
This customer already made the decision. They picked the product, went to checkout, and then something interrupted them. A phone call. A text. A meeting. Life. Maybe a shipping fee. They are not weighing options anymore. They just need a clear, easy path back to where they were. Not another pitch. Just the door held open.
First-Time Buyer vs. Returning Customer
First-Time Buyer
The trust is not fully built yet. A discount or a strong trust signal at the right moment can be the difference between a lost sale and the start of a long customer relationship.
Returning Customer
They already trust the brand. Leading with a discount trains them to abandon on purpose next time. This customer needs a message that speaks to where they are in the relationship, not one that assumes they needed a coupon to come back.
A well-built abandonment flow branches from the start, responds to where the customer actually is, and earns the conversion without giving away more than it needs to.
Sign 6: You Can’t Tell What’s Actually Carrying Your Email Revenue
Knowing that email is successful via total attributed revenue seems like a fine plan on paper. But when it’s time to double down on what’s working, pull the insight that shapes next quarter’s strategy, or make a case for where to invest more, that single number stops being useful. It tells you that something is working. It doesn’t tell you what, or why, or what to do more of.
Without that clarity, brands make decisions in the dark. They rebuild creative when the real issue is flow logic. They add more campaigns when flows are the gap. They scale what looks strong without knowing whether it’s actually driving the purchase or just showing up close enough to take credit for it.
A few specific things worth knowing that most brands don’t:
Flow revenue versus campaign revenue.
If campaigns are doing all the work and flows are quiet, the program is fragile. Campaigns require someone to keep building them. Flows earn revenue while nothing else is happening. The ratio between the two tells you more about the health of the program than the total number ever will.
Which flows are earning their credit versus riding the attribution window.
A flow with a wide attribution window can look like a top performer while taking credit for purchases that had nothing to do with it. Knowing the difference between a flow that converts and one that just happens to fire near a conversion is the difference between improving the right thing and breaking something that was actually working.
What a healthy benchmark looks like.
For most ecommerce brands, flows should be driving somewhere between 25 and 40 percent of total email revenue. If campaigns are carrying everything, there is a gap worth closing before adding more campaigns on top of it.
The number on the dashboard is not the answer. It is the starting point for the right questions.
How ECD Helps Ecommerce Brands Get More From Klaviyo
Most brands will read through these six signs and recognize at least one. Some will recognize all of them. Either way, the fix is rarely starting over. It is finding the button that was already there and building from what the account is already capable of.
ECD is a Klaviyo Master Elite Partner. We audit accounts, identify where the gaps are, and build the flows, segmentation, and reporting infrastructure that turns a Klaviyo account from something that runs into something that compounds.
We have helped ecommerce brands drive 25 to 60 percent of total revenue through email and SMS systems. We have helped brands increase email-attributed revenue by more than 150 percent by rebuilding the lifecycle infrastructure underneath their campaigns. We have helped brands get to a point where flows are carrying 40 to 50 percent of total email revenue consistently, not because the creative changed but because the setup finally matched what the platform was already capable of delivering.
You already have the sports car. Let’s find the button.
Before your next campaign goes out, find out what your Klaviyo account is actually capable of.
Get Your Free Revenue ForecastFrequently Asked Questions
What should a Klaviyo welcome flow actually do beyond sending a discount?
A welcome flow that leads with a discount and stops there is leaving the most valuable real estate in email marketing almost completely empty. The subscriber signed up for a reason, and the flow’s job is to tend that relationship before asking for anything. That means introducing who the brand is and why it exists, explaining what makes it different from the alternative the subscriber is probably also considering, building trust through founder story and specific customer testimonials that speak to the hesitation a new subscriber likely has, and giving them a way to find their entry point into the catalog based on their situation rather than just pointing at the bestsellers list again. The discount belongs in the sequence — just not as the whole sequence.
What is the difference between a Klaviyo segment and a filter?
A filter narrows the list by a single condition — subscribed in the last 90 days, opened at least once, located in a specific country. A segment uses layered behavioral data to identify who someone actually is in relation to the brand. Klaviyo holds purchase history, browse behavior, product affinity, average order value, recency, frequency, predicted lifetime value, and whether someone responds to discounts or consistently buys at full price. Real segmentation uses those signals together so the message that arrives in someone’s inbox reflects what they actually did, what they bought, and where they are in the relationship — not just whether they meet a basic criteria. A big list segmented poorly will almost always underperform a smaller list segmented well, because relevance is what drives opens, clicks, and purchases, not volume.
How do Klaviyo flows break silently without anyone noticing?
The most common silent failure is the dynamic product grid. A flow pulls products from a specific collection URL. The collection gets renamed. The URL changes. The product gets discontinued. The flow keeps sending, the email still looks fine in the dashboard, and the customer opens it to find a broken block, a blank space, or the wrong products entirely — because nobody went back to check. Beyond that, trigger conditions drift out of alignment with how customers are actually moving through the funnel, timing settings that worked for a different season go unreviewed, and messaging that referenced a specific product or promotion becomes outdated in ways that range from embarrassing to confusing. A flow being live is not the same as a flow working.
Why should abandoned cart and abandoned checkout flows be treated differently?
They represent two different stages of the decision. A cart abandoner is still weighing options — they found the product interesting but haven’t committed. The job of that flow is to answer the question that stopped them and make the case for why this brand specifically is the right choice. A checkout abandoner already made the decision. They selected the product, entered the checkout, and then something interrupted them — a phone call, a fee they didn’t expect, life. They don’t need another pitch. They need a clear, frictionless path back to where they were. Sending the same email to both audiences misses the actual job each flow is supposed to do.
How should ecommerce brands think about flow revenue versus campaign revenue in Klaviyo?
The ratio between the two tells you more about the health of the program than the total attributed revenue number ever will. Campaigns require someone to keep building them — they stop when the team stops. Flows earn revenue while nothing else is happening. For most ecommerce brands, flows should be driving somewhere between 25 and 40 percent of total email revenue. If campaigns are carrying everything and flows are quiet, the program is fragile and the gap is worth closing before adding more campaigns on top of it. It is also worth checking which flows are genuinely converting versus which ones are simply firing close enough to a purchase to take credit for it through a wide attribution window — because improving the right thing and breaking something that was actually working require knowing the difference.
Written by: Nathan Pitchan
Full-time daydreamer and professional persuader, Nathan is a fearless word alchemist crafting copy that connects, converts, and feels undeniably magnetic. E-commerce. Food & beverage. Horticulture. Destination tourism. And beyond. In a world overrun by AI-generated fluff, his secret sauce is unmistakable: engaging, conversational, and deeply human storytelling. Why? Robot copy gets read. Human copy gets remembered.