What we find in 9 out of 10 Klaviyo accounts

Every audit starts the same way. A brand hands over Klaviyo access, usually convinced their email is mostly fine, and within an hour we're looking at the same problems we found in the last account. And the one before that.

The brands change. The size changes. The problems don't. Here are the seven we keep finding, why each one costs money, and how to check your own account this week.

1. The welcome flow gives up after one email

One email, a 10% code, then silence. That's the standard setup, and it wastes the most attentive audience your brand will ever have.

Someone who has just handed over their email address is more likely to open, click and buy in the next two weeks than at any other point in their life as a subscriber. A proper welcome series works that window: brand story, bestsellers, social proof, objection handling, and then the offer if you use one. Four to six emails is normal. One email is a handshake followed by a closed door.

Check yours: open the welcome flow and count the emails. If the answer is one, this is probably your fastest win.

2. Abandoned checkout is carrying the whole account

Most accounts have exactly one recovery flow: abandoned checkout. Often a single email, sent hours after the moment has passed.

Checkout abandoners are the warmest pool, but they're also the smallest. The bigger money sits upstream. Browse abandonment and add-to-cart flows catch people earlier in the decision, at far greater volume. If abandoned checkout is your only recovery flow, you're fishing the last metre of the river and ignoring everything above it.

Check yours: do you have separate flows for browse, add-to-cart and checkout abandonment? Most accounts we open have one of the three.

3. Every campaign goes to the entire list

Sending to everyone feels free. It isn't.

When you repeatedly email people who never open, inbox providers notice, and they start routing you to spam and Promotions for everyone, including your best customers. The result is a slow spiral: engagement drops, so placement worsens, so engagement drops further. By the time open rates visibly collapse, the damage has been compounding for months.

The fix is boring and effective: send most campaigns to an engaged segment (people who have opened, clicked or purchased within a defined window) and reserve full-list sends for the rare messages that genuinely warrant them.

Check yours: look at the recipient count on your last five campaigns. If they're all the same number, you're sending to everyone.

4. There's no sunset flow, so you're paying twice

Klaviyo bills on profile count. Every dead subscriber costs money to keep, and hurts deliverability every time you email them anyway.

A sunset flow makes one honest attempt to win lapsed subscribers back, then suppresses the rest. The list shrinks, the bill often drops a tier, and your engagement metrics start telling the truth. Brands resist this because a big list feels like an asset. A big list of people who never open is a liability with a monthly fee.

Check yours: what percentage of your list hasn't engaged in six months? If you don't know, that's the answer.

5. The discount habit

Every flow leads with a percentage. Every campaign has a code in the subject line. It works, which is exactly the problem.

Customers learn quickly. Train them that a discount always arrives and they will never buy at full price again. They'll abandon carts deliberately to trigger the code. The revenue still shows up in the dashboard, so the margin erosion stays invisible unless you go looking for it.

Offers are a tool. As the default message, they're a tax you've volunteered to pay.

Check yours: pull your last ten emails. If more than half lead with a discount, your list is being trained to wait.

6. The dashboard is flattering you

Klaviyo's default attribution settings are generous. Out of the box, email gets credit for orders inside a multi-day window, including plenty that would have happened anyway. A loyal customer opens your Tuesday campaign, buys on Friday the way they always do, and email takes the credit.

This matters because inflated numbers hide real problems. An account can look like it's printing money while the flows underneath are broken. Tighten the attribution window in settings, look at click-based attribution rather than opens, and if you want the honest answer, run a holdout test.

The point isn't that email is weak. It's that you can't fix what the dashboard insists is working.

Check yours: find your attribution settings and see what window email is claiming credit within. Most people have never looked.

7. Flows built at launch, never touched since

The flows were set up by whoever built the site, or by an agency that left two years ago. Since then the product range has changed, pricing has changed, the brand has changed. The flows haven't. They reference discontinued products, old offers, and a version of the brand that no longer exists.

Flows are the compounding asset in email marketing. They only compound if someone maintains them: reviewing performance quarterly, testing subject lines and send timing, updating content as the catalogue moves.

Check yours: open your top three flows and look at the last edited date.

What a healthy account looks like

As a rough benchmark (and it is rough, every brand differs), email should be driving somewhere between a quarter and a third of store revenue, with flows contributing a large share of that on autopilot. Campaigns go to engaged segments by default. Offers appear when they serve a purpose, not as a reflex. And the attribution settings are honest enough that the numbers mean something.

Most accounts we open are a long way from that. Not because email is hard, but because it was set up once and left to run.

The offer

We do this as a fixed-scope teardown: we go through your Klaviyo account against all seven of these points and hand you a prioritised list of what's costing money and what to fix first. It's yours to act on whether you ever work with us or not.