In this post, I’m breaking down four lessons we learned the hard way from working on real Klaviyo accounts — and how applying these frameworks changed everything for us and our clients.
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Running an email marketing agency means we’re constantly testing, failing, and improving in real time. That’s the nature of the game. In this post, I’m breaking down four lessons we learned the hard way from working on real Klaviyo accounts — and how applying these frameworks changed everything for us and our clients.
If you're managing retention in a DTC brand or working with email clients, these are the insights I wish I had on Day One.
Here’s the problem: Most marketers treat email revenue like a black box. “My welcome flow generated $10K this month — awesome.” But the truth? That number means nothing if you don’t understand the levers that got you there.
Enter the Value Tree. This concept changed how we approach email completely. Think of revenue as the fruit. The tree? That’s every KPI feeding into it: traffic, pop-up conversion rate, list growth, email frequency, revenue per recipient, return rate, AOV, and more.
For example: Optimizing your welcome flow might boost performance by 5%, but improving your pop-up opt-in rate could 5x the volume feeding into it. That’s where the real lift is.
📈 Pro tip: Build a “goal tree” for your account. Break top-line KPIs into all the inputs that influence them. Find the weakest branch — fix that first. That’s where your growth lives.
If you’ve ever rebuilt a footer while neglecting broken flows, you’ve felt the pain of bad prioritization. Early on, we chased every shiny object: rebrands, conditional splits, hyper-segmentation. Meanwhile, broken checkout flows were leaking thousands in revenue.
What changed? We adopted simple prioritization frameworks (PIE, ICE, or just IR columns in a Google Sheet). Every task gets scored on impact, ease, and urgency. And we always ask: What’s the business case?
This also applies to flows. An anniversary flow might sound smart — until you realize the first email fires in a year. Build the high-impact, high-frequency flows first: welcome, abandoned checkout, browse, post-purchase.
🎯 Key takeaway: Prioritize what makes you money now. Not what makes you feel busy.
We’ve all fallen for them. Flow revenue. Klaviyo-attributed % of total revenue. Open rates. They look great on paper — but often hide weak strategy underneath.
Let me give you a real example. One client’s welcome flow was crushing it. We were obsessed with optimizing it. But then we ran an A/B test on the pop-up and 5x’d the list growth. Welcome flow revenue jumped from $10K to $46K — without touching the flow.
Turns out, more impressions beat more optimization. It’s not that the welcome flow was “bad” — we were just solving the wrong problem.
And about that Klaviyo dashboard showing 50% of your revenue? Cool. But if 80% of that comes from welcome and checkout flows, you're not really retaining customers — you're converting visitors. Big difference.
🔥 Hot tip: If you’re not tracking post-purchase flow revenue and repeat purchase % separately, you're not doing retention — you're doing acquisition on autopilot.
This one’s gonna ruffle feathers.
The industry standard says: “Only email your engaged subscribers.” Sounds smart, until you realize most brands end up ignoring 60–80% of their list.
Here’s what we’ve seen in the real world:
Are we saying blast your entire list every day? No.
Are we saying be smarter about re-engaging, segmenting by RFM scores, and understanding intent over just engagement? Absolutely.
📊 Real talk: If someone hasn’t opened an email in 90 days, maybe they haven’t needed your product yet. But if they bought before, they might again. Especially if you’ve stayed top of mind.
Every lesson above came from messing up first. From wasting hours building perfect logic trees for flows no one entered. From blindly trusting “best practices.” From ignoring our own gut instincts.
But if we had to sum it up?
👉 Understand your numbers.
👉 Prioritize impact.
👉 Challenge assumptions.
👉 And always ask: What actually moves the needle?
This post is based on Episode 2 of Klaviyo Geeks, our no-BS podcast where we get real about email strategy, retention, and lessons learned in the trenches. We’d love it if you gave it a listen, dropped us a rating, or shared it with a friend stuck in the “best practices” trap.
Got a question or want us to cover a topic? DM us. We might rant about it in the next episode.
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