Start strong, scale fast: build foundations for success
Starting a new business is exciting but comes with some big challenges. You need customers, a way to reach them, and a plan to keep them coming back. Without a solid strategy in place, it’s easy to waste time and money on marketing that doesn’t work.
This lesson will help you start with Klaviyo to attract the right audience, build trust, and turn first-time buyers into loyal customers. You’ll learn how to:
- Configure your Klaviyo account and sending infrastructure.
- Connect your ecommerce store.
- Grow your subscriber list using sign-up forms.
- Automate key messages to engage and retain customers.
- Evaluate your performance.
Throughout this lesson, you’ll find recommendations from Peyton Fox, a seasoned Klaviyo Agency Partner, Community Champion, and Owner & Lead Strategist at Spark Bridge Digital. Peyton will share the proven strategies she uses to drive success for her clients. By the end, you’ll have a clear plan to market your business effectively and start seeing real results.
Define your brand voice
Successful strategies begin with a clear brand voice and a deep understanding of your audience. Define your ideal customer, outline their challenges, and tailor your messaging to build lasting trust and engagement.
Ecommerce integration
Connect your ecommerce store to Klaviyo to collect customer data, track behavior, and automate marketing in real-time.
- Sync customer and order data to track purchases, website activity, and browsing behavior.
- Enable marketing consent at checkout so customers can opt into marketing when placing an order. This helps grow your subscriber list while ensuring compliance.
- Review the Metrics tab to ensure your integration syncs key data like purchases, cart activity, and browsing behavior, which are needed to automate marketing based on customer actions.
Pro tip: Set up Klaviyo Reviews to collect feedback and build trust. Social proof encourages new customers to buy and makes a strong first impression, which is key for new brands.
Infrastructure and compliance
Set up proper email infrastructure and follow compliance regulations to ensure inbox providers trust your sending practices and deliver your emails.
- Use a branded sending domain to help customers recognize your emails and reduce the chance of them landing in spam. Major inbox providers like Gmail and Yahoo enforce this, making it a requirement for successful email delivery, not just a nice-to-have.
- Set up SPF and DKIM records, which are security settings that tell inbox providers like Gmail and Yahoo that your emails are real and not spam.
- Send emails regularly to build a good reputation and maintain trust with inbox providers. If you only send emails once in a while, inbox providers may not trust them as much.
Pro tip: If your domain is brand new and hasn’t sent at least 500 emails per day for 30+ days, then start small. Your first send should be 500 emails or less and to consenting profiles only. As a best practice, each campaign's recipient count should not exceed twice the volume of the previous one.
Sign-up forms
Grow your subscriber list with sign-up forms to capture contact information, convert visitors into loyal customers, and nurture relationships over time.
- Create simple sign-up forms with Klaviyo’s builder to capture key details like email addresses and names. Add an embedded form to your footer and use a popup with a compelling message to grab attention.
- Offer incentives like discounts, early access, or exclusive content to encourage sign-ups and clearly highlight the value for subscribers.
- Use multi-step forms to collect SMS consent by first capturing email addresses and then requesting phone numbers. This improves completion rates and lets customers opt into email without sharing their phone numbers.
Pro tip: Ask only for essential information to keep sign-ups quick and reduce form abandonment.
Essential flows
Set up automated flows early to build relationships, drive conversions, and keep customers engaged from the very beginning.
- Introduce your brand with a welcome series to share your story, showcase bestsellers, and fulfill incentives to connect with new subscribers and make a strong first impression.
- Use an abandoned cart flow to remind shoppers about items left in their cart and encourage them to complete their purchase.
- Introduce a browse abandonment flow to remind visitors who viewed products but didn’t add them to their cart.
- Set up winback and post-purchase flows to re-engage past customers and nurture new buyers, keeping your earlier customers coming back for more, and building loyalty every step of the way.
Peyton’s recommendation: “When it comes to ROI, these are your heavy-hitters! They'll be driving the most email volume and revenue for your business.”
Measure performance and drive growth
Now that you have set up your Klaviyo account, you’re ready to start building relationships and driving growth. In the dropdowns below, you’ll learn how to use Klaviyo’s reporting tools to evaluate your success; that way, you can focus your marketing efforts, improving where needed to scale your business. As you explore the following reporting strategies, be sure to check out our guide on getting started with reporting tools in Klaviyo to get the most out of your data.
Track revenue from campaigns and flows
As a new business owner, you might be thinking, 'How do I know which campaigns and flows are actually driving sales? And where do I look to find out?'
Peyton’s recommendation: “When first getting started in your campaign sending, don't be too overwhelmed with performance analytics. You really just need to start getting campaigns and flow messages out there and setting some benchmarks. For a brand new account, I like to see at least 2 to 3 months of campaigns actively going out to figure out what we have to work with. After you set those benchmarks, then you can focus on optimizations and testing.”
Where to find it:
To check your flow performance, navigate to the flow you would like to analyze, and then click the Show analytics button in the top right corner of the flow builder.
You will then see the analytics associated with each individual message in your flow. The data appears within the message cards themselves, showing analytics around placed order rate and value. Click to learn more about understanding flow analytics.
To check your Campaign overview report, click the Campaigns button in the left-hand navigation panel. This report provides insight into how individual campaign sends perform so you can easily monitor conversion metrics.
Click into a specific sent campaign to see performance, recipient engagement, a deliverability snapshot, and a summary of the campaign details. Click the Conversions tab to see a detailed breakdown of your campaign’s impact. For even more detailed reports, click to learn more about building a campaign performance report.
Analyze your list growth
Your subscriber list is the backbone of your marketing efforts. Keeping an eye on how it's growing (or shrinking) helps you fine-tune your strategies early on and build a solid audience.
Track subscriber growth rate:
To access your list growth report, click Audience > Lists & Segments, select a given list, then click the List Growth tab at the top of the page. This report will show you the total number of new subscribers and let you break it down by week or month.
If you see a jump in new subscribers, find out where they're coming from - maybe a specific sign-up form or campaign is working really well. Understanding the source of your new subscribers helps you double down on successful strategies.
Identify subscriber churn:
Also in the List Growth report, look at the net membership graph to see how many people are leaving your list in a given time frame. Pay attention to spikes in unsubscribes, as they could indicate issues with your sending frequency, messaging, or targeting. For example, if unsubscribes increase after a particular campaign or flow, it might suggest that the content wasn’t resonating with your audience, or they felt overwhelmed by too many messages.
Peyton’s recommendation: “This is a fantastic pulse check on your list health! My biggest red flag is seeing our unsubscribe surpass our new subscribers. Improving user experience on-site with your pop-up could help on the growth side, while mitigating unsubscribes through thoughtful segmentation and targeting is key.”
There’s plenty to explore when analyzing your list growth. Check out our list growth reporting reference for more recommendations.
Monitor subscriber engagement
As a new business, you might be wondering how your subscribers are interacting with your messages, and how that could impact your bottom line.
When it comes to generating revenue from your marketing efforts, more profiles does not necessarily equal more revenue. In fact, sending regularly to a group of unengaged profiles will hurt your deliverability and sender reputation, as well as irritate subscribers. Sending to engaged profiles will boost open rates, click rates, and revenue per recipient.
Tracking open and click rates over time helps refine your messaging, adjust send frequency, and improve segmentation for better engagement. To find the engagement report for a particular list or segment:
- Navigate to Audiences > Lists & Segments
- Choose the list or segment you want to view
- Click the Engagement tab to run the report
Pro Tip: As your audience grows over time, it’s important to keep an eye on any low engagement in specific segments. To mitigate poor deliverability risks, be sure to clean your list or remove inactive domains to boost deliverability and reputation.
Peyton’s recommendation: “I love to create these 'ready for suppression' segments that help me keep tabs on my coldest subscribers; ones who haven't ordered, opened, checked out, nothing! After a set time of giving them chances to engage with email, they are the first to move toward suppression.”
Evaluate campaign trends over time
If you're in the early stages of growing your business, you might be wondering which campaigns are driving the most engagement and revenue. Understanding how each campaign performs will help you refine your strategy and focus on the ones that are most effective. For this reason, keep an eye on your campaigns trend report to get a big-picture view of performance over time.
Peyton’s recommendation: “This is my first stop for answering the question of what day/time works best for emails. You'll be able to clearly see if a spike in engagement is falling on a certain day or time. And using Smart Sending is even better!”
Where to find it:
Go to the Campaigns tab, then click the three dots in the top of the page, then click Email trends.
This will show you key metrics like open rates, click rates, and conversion rates for your campaigns over time.
What to focus on:
- Engagement trends: Track your open and click rates to identify which campaigns are connecting best with your audience. Are your rates higher on certain days or times? Use these insights to adjust your strategy.
- Revenue impact: Look at the conversion rate and conversion value to see which campaigns are driving sales. This helps you pinpoint which offers and messages are most effective in converting your audience into customers.