Klaviyo

What it is

Klaviyo sends email and SMS based on what people actually do in your store. The difference from a classic newsletter tool is not the editor but the database underneath: Klaviyo knows orders, viewed products and abandoned carts as events, and can react to them instead of only mailing lists.

Where it holds

Everything that should happen automatically rather than by hand once a week: the welcome sequence after signup, the reminder about the abandoned cart, the follow-up after a purchase, the win-back after months of silence. Once set up these keep running, and in most stores they account for the larger share of the revenue the email tool contributes.

Segmentation is the second reason. Someone buying for the third time needs different wording than someone who has only read along for a year.

Where it bites

The price scales with the list, not with revenue. Every stored contact counts, including the one who has opened nothing for two years. Anyone who does not clean up regularly pays for dead weight and quietly degrades their own deliverability at the same time.

Delivery stays your problem. Klaviyo sends, but whether the mail lands in the inbox depends on your domain, your authentication, and how often people ignore you. That is work nobody does for you.

A dead flow looks like a quiet flow. When a flow stops reaching anyone because a condition changed, there is no error anywhere. The mails simply stop, and it surfaces only when somebody compares the numbers. Which is exactly why every important flow needs a check that measures the result rather than the status.

What it looks like when it runs

Somebody buys for the first time and the welcome sequence runs without you. Somebody fills a cart and leaves, and the reminder goes out at the right hour. Somebody who has not bought in six months reads something different from your regular. None of it is a campaign that gets built on a Monday, and that is exactly why it earns month after month while nobody thinks about it.

What to think about before choosing it

Klaviyo pays off when you have a store with real purchase data. For a service business without a cart it is too expensive for the part you actually use, and a simpler tool does the same job. And before you put money into flows: check that your mail arrives at all. The best welcome sequence in the spam folder is worth nothing.