The Klaviyo Segmentation Playbook

Why one segment is not a strategy

I see it in almost every Klaviyo account I audit.

A brand tells me they segment. Then I look inside and it is one segment: "Engaged 90 days." Every campaign goes to the same group.

That is not segmentation. That is a filter.

A multi-figure brand came to us last year with 200,000 email subscribers. They knew enough not to blast the whole list, so they were sending to about 120,000 people per campaign. Still way too wide.

On the surface it looked fine. Open rates hovered around 20%. Click rates were about 1%. But revenue per campaign was dropping quarter over quarter and they could not figure out why. They thought it was a creative problem. It was a segmentation problem.

Here is the math that mattered.

They paid Klaviyo to deliver 120,000 emails every send. Only about 24,000 opened. Around 130 people actually checked out.

The other 96,000 were not just dead weight. They were actively hurting the buyers. Every time you mail someone who does not open, Gmail, Outlook, and Apple see your engagement rate drop, and they route your future emails away from the inbox. The people who WOULD buy stop seeing your campaigns.

Mailing too wide is not free. It is expensive. Not in send cost, in deliverability.

Real segmentation means your most engaged subscribers get more emails with deeper content. Your fading subscribers get your biggest promotions and nothing else. Your cold subscribers get a win-back sequence instead of your regular newsletter.

Below is the exact structure we build.

Here is the video version.

The engagement tiers

Every send decision starts here.

Build these as saved segments in Klaviyo using opened or clicked within a rolling window. The segments update themselves as people move in and out.

Think of these windows as a dial, not a fixed setting.

When open and click rates dip, tighten the window. Pull 90 days down to 60. Still soft, pull it to 30. When rates are strong and you want reach, push 30 out to 60 and watch how it holds. Bigger audience means slightly lower rates, but more total revenue.

You do not need to A/B test which window to use. In Klaviyo, build engaged segments at every window, 14, 30, 60, 90, and 180 days, then pull the segment performance report. Find the window where your rates are still strong but the audience is big enough to matter. For most brands that sweet spot lands between 30 and 90 days. Below 30 the audience is tiny. Above 90 or 120 the rates fall off a cliff.

The numbers to hit. Open rate between 30 and 50%. Click rate above 1%, though some clients clear 3 to 5% and others fight to get past 0.2%. Placed order rate is the one that pays the bills.

The e-commerce campaign average for placed order rate is 0.08%. That is eight purchases per 1,000 emails. Apparel runs lower near 0.07%. Food and beverage is much higher at 0.17% because it is replenishable. Health and beauty sits just above average. Jewelry runs lower near 0.05% because people do not buy it often.

We use these as a floor. The real goal is steady improvement and a revenue per campaign that climbs month over month.

Watch the negative metrics too. Keep unsubscribe rate under 0.3%, spam complaint rate under 0.1%, and bounce rate under 1%. Track them weekly. If most are green and one is red, you have one fixable problem.

The buyer segments

Engagement tells you who is paying attention.

Purchase history tells you how to talk to them. We layer these on top of the engagement tiers so a single subscriber sits in both.

The buyer split changes real money.

In abandoned cart and checkout emails, we only give a discount to people who have never bought. Repeat customers get no code, ever.

They already showed they will pay full price. A coupon only trains them to wait for the next one.

Behavioral and predictive segments

Engagement and purchase count are the base.

These behavioral segments make each campaign land on the right list without you touching it.

Category affinity is where personalization jumps a level.

Segment on click and buy behavior. Then send that subscriber more of what they already told you they want.

Layer site behavior on top of email

Opens and clicks are not the only signal.

Plenty of buyers ignore your emails but still visit the site. If you only segment on opens and clicks, you miss them.

So we build a second dial: the site-engaged segment. The person can receive marketing because they subscribed, AND they did something on site, viewed a product, added to cart, or started checkout, in the last X days. That captures the whole funnel from homepage to checkout.

Now you have two dials instead of one. Email engaged and site engaged. If one is dragging your metrics, tighten that window on its own and leave the other alone. Run the engagement report on each segment to see open rate, click rate, AOV, and profile age. That is how you stop guessing and start operating.

Go one level deeper with product-engaged segments. Same idea, scoped to a product or category. Someone who viewed, added to cart, or started checkout with a specific product in the last X days. Match the creative to exactly what they browsed.

Then cross-purchase patterns. If they bought product X, what is the most common second and third purchase? On a skincare brand, that is people who bought serum but skipped the toner, or bought the starter kit and never came back for the refill. This is where seven, eight, and nine figure brands pull extra revenue, because the customer feels like the brand actually knows them.

Zero party data: the segments people hand you

Zero party data is information people volunteer about themselves.

It usually comes from your popup. What are you shopping for? What is your skin type? Wholesale or retail? Build one segment per answer choice, because it is the cleanest segmentation data you will ever get.

A standard Klaviyo popup converts at 2 to 4%. A well-built zero party data popup on Alia converts at 6 to 8%, and in some cases up to 12%. We use Alia with almost every client because it grows the list AND feeds segmentation at the same time. Most brands only get one of those two jobs done.

How dynamic segments drive every send

The point of building these once is that they never go stale.

A dynamic segment recalculates its members every time you send. Someone who opens today moves into "Highly engaged" on their own. Someone who goes 91 days without a click drops into "Dormant" and stops getting your full campaign calendar.

So a campaign is never "send to everyone."

A new-product drop goes to highly engaged plus category affinity. A sitewide sale goes to fading and dormant, where the discount does the heavy lifting. A full-price restock skips the discount and goes to repeat and VIP.

You pick the segment, and the segment is already accurate.

Who to exclude from every campaign

Segmentation is not only about who you include. It is also about who you leave out.

Three groups get excluded from campaigns:

1. Recent purchasers. Do not send campaigns to someone who just ordered. The window depends on your product. A food and beverage buyer might be back in three days. A furniture buyer will not.
2. Never engaged. Received 10 or more emails, never opened, clicked, visited, added to cart, or bought. Pure dead weight. Sending only to engaged segments excludes these by default, but check it once you start layering in site activity.
3. Repeat soft bounces. In Klaviyo, hard bounces get removed automatically. Suppress anyone who soft bounced more than three times in the last 90 days.

One more gray area worth a conversation: explicit versus implicit consent. Explicit is the person who filled out your popup or checked the box at checkout. Implicit is the person whose email landed in Klaviyo from a Shopify checkout without opting in. You can technically email them, but by default we hold them back except during your biggest promotions like Black Friday. They convert lower and bounce higher, so it is a per-brand trade-off.

Cadence: match send volume to each tier

Once the segments exist, decide how often each one hears from you.

• 30-day engaged. Tightest, highest tolerance. Three to five sends per week.
• 60 to 90 day engaged. The middle ground and the default for most brands. Two to three per week.
• Dormant, 90+ days. No more than a couple times a month. Save them for hero moments, product drops, sales, and win-backs.

For total campaign volume, start from your average revenue per campaign. Most brands land on 8, 12, 16, or 20 core campaigns a month.

If you make about $1,000 per campaign, do not exceed eight. At $2,000 per campaign, 16 sends nets $32K a month versus $24K at 12. At $5K to $10K per campaign, 16 to 20 makes sense if your team can keep up. Each extra send earns slightly less, so treat it as a dial. For most brands the bottleneck is not the audience, it is getting campaigns approved and out the door.

The key: no matter the total volume, the average subscriber still receives two to four emails a week. More volume does not mean blasting the same people. It means more room for niche, tailored sends to specific groups while average exposure stays steady. Disengaged people drop to one or two max.

Two campaign types to pepper in for every client. Resends to non-openers, same content with a punchier subject line, reserved for big hero moments once or twice a month. And a follow-up to people who clicked but did not purchase, softer reminder or stronger offer, because they were one step from the finish line. Keep these under 10 to 15% of total sends. For the right brand and offer they add 10 to 15% incremental revenue on top of your normal campaigns.

Clean the list every month

Suppressing subscribers feels like throwing away revenue. It is not. You are protecting the rest of your list and lowering your bill. Klaviyo charges per active profile whether they engage or not, so 50,000 dead-weight profiles is 50,000 people you pay for who never buy.

We run this monthly for every client. Build three suppression segments, run a final win-back through each, then suppress whoever does not engage:

1. Never engaged.
2. Unengaged in the last 365 days.
3. Never clicked or purchased in the last 365 days.

The process is the same for all three. Build the segment. Run a final win-back with your strongest offer. Suppress anyone who does not respond before the next billing date. Repeat monthly.

Common Mistakes

1. Sending every campaign to one "Engaged 90" segment. Split into tiers and match send frequency to engagement.
2. Discounting repeat customers to win them back. Codes go to people who never bought. Repeat buyers get none.
3. Never suppressing the truly cold. Run one last win-back at 120+ days, then suppress to protect your sender reputation.
4. Ignoring category behavior. Click and purchase data is free personalization. Use it to segment content, not just offers.
5. Building static lists. Use dynamic segments so membership updates itself and your sends stay accurate.
6. Treating first-time and repeat buyers the same. The next action you want is different, so the email should be too.

Get Expert Help

Our team builds and maintains this segment structure inside Klaviyo for brands doing $10M and up, so every campaign lands on the right list automatically. If your account is still one segment getting every send, we will map the tiers and buyer splits that fit your catalog and revenue.

We have run email and SMS for 50+ DTC brands over six years, from brands just starting out to multi-billion dollar public companies. Brands that work with us typically see a 10 to 35% lift in revenue, a 10x average return in the first 90 days, and most stay with us past a year and a half. The same principles carry across Mailchimp, Omnisend, Sendlane, HubSpot, and Salesforce. The button names change, the logic does not.

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