u/GabbyFromKlaviyo

I'll die on this hill. Abandoned cart is one of the highest-revenue flows most accounts already have running. Most blame the copy when it's not converting, when it's actually timing and exclusions holding it back.

First email goes out early, somewhere in the one to four hour range after someone leaves without checking out. Wait longer than that and you're reminding someone of a decision they've already decided against making.

SMS fits in the gap between the two emails, not stacked on top of either one. It has a hard 48 hour compliance window and caps at one message per recipient, so somewhere around the 18 to 20 hour mark works well for anyone who hasn't converted yet. Send the second email around the 24 hour mark for anyone still sitting on it after both touches.

The part people skip is the exclusion filter. Set it to placed order zero times since entering the flow, otherwise you'll email someone who already checked out and it reads like nobody's watching the account.

What send windows are you finding actually working right now?

Hi everyone, I'm Gabby and I work at Klaviyo. I figured I should introduce myself since you may have seen me posting or responding to you. I wanted to make it clear that I work there, but I do not actually work for this subreddit or as a support person.

What I can say is I've spent a good chunk of time talking to brands directly and going through case studies. I've spent time trying to figure out where people were actually losing revenue versus where the dashboard said they were. Those two things don't always line up.

If you've got a Klaviyo question, or just want someone to bounce some ideas off, I'm around.

Last year Klaviyo surveyed 1,500+ marketers with a segment specifically in hotel and travel, and I thought it was striking that 70% of hotel marketers say guest acquisition costs have gone up over the past year, meanwhile only 7% say lifetime value is their main way of measuring success.

Personally, that feels like a mismatch. If bringing in new guests keeps getting more expensive, you'd think lifetime value and re-booking rate would be the priority. But based on our survey findings, most are still learning on things like engagement rate (25% said that's their top metric).

For those of you running a hotel, does that line up with what you're seeing? Is it hard to bet buy-in internally to report on your repeat-booking rate instead of something more immediate like opens or clicks? Or is it more that the data to measure it well just isn't there yet?

A lot of the B2C underperformance I see comes from brands treating their campaigns like B2B ones, with long cycles that get nurtured for months. Contract renewals keep a B2B customer around. For B2C the cycle is shorter and more fragmented. It's discovery through search and social, email and SMS once someone engages, and loyalty mechanics after the first purchase.

I got to dig into Garrett Popcorn's numbers recently. They had ecommerce data flowing in but were still sending one broad campaign to everyone. Splitting that into 15 engagement segments dropped spam complaints 40% year over year, and a segment built around predicted next-order date alone pulled in over $12k in a month, 4x the revenue per recipient of their regular campaigns.

Fifteen's a lot and most brands don't need that many. Regardless of scale, I've seen a lot of B2C brands make noticeable shifts when they stop treating B2C like a single audience.

For anyone running B2C who came up in B2B, what was the hardest habit to unlearn?

SMS performs very differently when it's actually conversational versus when it's just a shorter email blast. Klaviyo recently ran a survey of 8,000+ consumers and found 86% made two or more purchases through SMS in the last year. Another 65% said their latest SMS-driven purchase was something they'd planned to buy weeks later and the message was what clinched it.

The brands getting the most out of these tools are using it to actually engage and learn something about the customer. If you're evaluating a conversational SMS platform, here's what it should be able to do:

Store what customers tell you. Responses should live on the customer's profile and carry across email, SMS, and paid channels. The customer shouldn't have to repeat themselves.

Understand how people actually text. That means typos, shorthand, casual phrasing. If it only responds to exact keyword matches, it's going to break constantly.

Let people answer like humans. Not "Reply A, B, or C” but "We have Chinese, pizza, and sushi tonight, what sounds good?" Open-ended answers stored as data.

Trigger real flows, not canned replies. One response should be able to kick off a multi-step sequence, not just fire back a single message.

Connect to your other channels. If SMS responses don't inform email and retargeting, you're running parallel conversations with the same customer and starting from scratch every time.

I know most brands are using SMS now but how many can hold their own in a real conversation?

Email segmentation generally splits into four buckets. Demographic covers traits like age and gender. Behavioral looks at what someone actually does i.e. opens, clicks, purchases. Psychographic is built around interests and values. Geographic comes down to location.

Huda Beauty's a good real-world example. Phuong Ngo, their CRM and loyalty manager, noticed a list in the millions where click-through had gone flat and churn kept creeping while the brand slid year over year. They cut the dead weight from the list and rebuilt around engagement.

Anyone active in the last 120 days got regular campaigns, while everyone else was left alone except for big sales like BFCM. They also leaned into storytelling around founder Huda Kattan and post-purchase flows.

Subscribers climed past 55% year over year and revenue nearly doubled off the back of it, with placed order rate up another 50%.

Has anyone else seen a similar jump from being pickier about who gets emailed?

48x is the kind of number that makes people roll their eyes, but the breakdown is actually more interesting than the headline.

It ultimately traces back to email no longer being the only channel carrying the relationship. When the same customer profile drives SMS, push and behavioral flows that branch on real behavior instead of just whether someone opened something, you're compounding touch points that used to be siloed.

The data retention piece is underrated too. A lot of platforms purge event-level data after 30-90 days, so your segmentation resets on a timer. If it sticks around indefinitely, your lists get sharper the longer someone's on them instead of starting over.

How much of your stack is still living in email alone? And for anyone who's actually consolidated, did the ROI show up where you expected it or did it come from somewhere you didn't plan for?

90 days after turning on Customer Agent, one brand was resolving 86% of support tickets automatically. 

Composer is all the talk this week, but the Customer Agent updates are the ones I'm super excited about and and want to shout from the rooftops about. Across the beta it cleared more than 300,000 tickets on its own, and on average it resolves about 65% of questions automatically.

From my perspective, what will really make a difference with the latest features is that you can build for it without an engineer now. You describe what you want in plain language, and it builds the skill for you. A warranty flow or a loyalty lookup that used to sit in a dev backlog is now something a CX person can set up alone. It works across web, email, SMS, WhatsApp, and Instagram, with the full customer profile already loaded, so nobody's re-explaining their order three times to get an answer.

Ideally, Composer and Customer Agent work as a marketing and service power duo that runs on the same customer profile, fueling each other. That powers your marketing, so support stops being disconnected from everything else you know about the customer, and those conversations start feeding back into the profile.

If you're on Klaviyo for email and SMS already, turn it on and see how it handles your volume. What's eating the most support time for you right now, the usual order-status pile or something messier?