If you have a Shopify brand, chances are pretty good that you use Klaviyo (or a tool like it) for your email marketing.
After auditing dozens of 6, 7, and even 8-figure ecommerce brands’ Klaviyo accounts this year, almost every store my team comes across has at least one of 6-7 sneaky issues hidden in their Klaviyo account.
Before diving into more complex or involved email work, focusing on fixing any/all of these account issues can often result in big quick wins in revenue and customer experience - with very little effort.
In fact, it likely will take you less than one day of work - but can add thousands to your MRR without new traffic or customers (depending on your store’s size).
Let’s dive in by taking a look at six of the most common Klaviyo account issues you can fix today to increase your sales fast.
1) Smart Sending Issues
This is by far one of the most common mistakes we see in accounts we audit.
Klaviyo defaults to turning Smart Sending “On”, but this setting very often sabotages the performance of abandonment automations (browse abandonment, cart abandonment, checkout abandonment, etc).
Picture this - someone opts into your email list via a welcome popup, receives your welcome email, clicks through to your site, and adds something to their cart. However, they do buy.
In this scenario, you’d want that potential customer to get your abandonment flows, right? Well, if smart sending is on, they won’t - all because they received the welcome email on the same day.
Go comb through your abandonment automations and turn Smart Sending off on all of your emails inside unless there’s an intentional reason not to.
2) Not All Metrics Firing Correctly
If you’ve already set up your Shopify <> Klaviyo integration previously, you might assume that everything is firing perfectly in the account. However, if you’ve done any big updates to your store’s theme or backend in recent months, you may want to double check.
Updates to the store can oftentimes break the Shopify <> Klaviyo integration, causing metrics that trigger key money-making and customer experience flows to break without you knowing.
Here’s an example:
It’s important to check your metrics and activity feed regularly to ensure everything is firing correctly. You don’t want to find out that your browse abandonment flow hasn’t been firing for the last 2 months because a site update broke your integration.
3) Using Double Opt-In Vs Single Opt-In
This one is pretty simple. Klaviyo typically defaults to making new lists “Double Opt-In”. While many argue this is a good practice, in reality it’s a much less efficient way of protecting list health for larger brands.
Most importantly, the drop-off of people who sign up vs who actually confirm their subscription is massive.
Double-opt-in loses you tons of new subscribers and buyers. Much better to switch your lists to “Single” opt-in, and maintain great sending practices and engagement-based segmentation from there to protect deliverability.
4) Don't Have A High-Converting Welcome Popup
You need fresh email subscribers coming into your system every day to maintain a healthy, thriving email marketing program.
One of the most common issues we see with brands we audit is a severely underperforming welcome popup.
Typically, you want your popup to convert about 5% or more of visitors to subscribers. If it’s not doing that, you may want to check the following:
1) Are you asking for too much information on the first page of the popup? You want to reduce the number of questions or input fields asked to no more than 1 per page.
Our preference is to either ask a question on the first step, or just ask for an email address. Here’s an example popup flow 👇
2) Check your form targeting settings. Different people have different philosophies around how aggressive you ought to be with your popup settings. HOWEVER, regardless of your preferences, we very often see super underoptimized forms. Specifically around the timing that it shows, and how often it shows to folks.
Generally, for maximum email subscriptions, you’d want to show your popup within 5 seconds of a visitor landing on the page
You’d also want to get fairly aggressive showing it to them again within 1-2 days after closing
IMPORTANT - but like anything else with marketing, test this for your store. Popups like this can have negative effects on conversion rates, so be mindful about which pages you add it to as well. For example, you may want to include certain landing pages for cold traffic as exclusions from the form to protect the customer journey
5) Unnecessary Delays In Key Automations
For whatever reason, we’ll audit many accounts that have a long initial delay before the first email in flows like a Post Purchase, Abandoned Carts, Welcome series, etc.
That hurts.
While there are exceptions to the rule, you typically want your first emails in any triggered automation to go out as quickly as possible after the trigger.
For example…
-Send your first Post Purchase email immediately after the “Placed order event”
-Send your first Post Purchase email immediately after the “Placed order event”
- Send your first Post Purchase email immediately after the “Placed order event”
- Send your welcome email immediately after they join the list
- Send your first abandoned checkout flow 30 minutes - 1 hour after abandoning, not 1 day later
-Send your welcome email immediately after they join the list
-Send your first abandoned checkout flow 30 minutes - 1 hour after abandoning, not 1 day later
While there are exceptions to this rule, engaging with customers as quickly as possible after they’ve demonstrated intent and activity is a winning strategy
6) Dead Splits / Tests In Flows
One of the most common issues we see in established accounts is that an email marketer or agency previously set up tests or splits in key flows, and then proceeded to not look at them again.
So many brands could immediately boost the performance of their automations by doing a full audit of their flows, and eliminating legacy splits or tests where:
1) Very few (or no) people are going through them
2) They are making very little to no difference in revenue or engagement, or
3) They are broken or unnecessary
When it comes to automations, it’s tempting to get super fancy. But most of the time, simplicity wins the day.
7) Missing Core Flows
Building a world-class multi-channel automation system for your brand is quite difficult, and there’s a ton that goes into it.
But building an effective email automation structure that makes sales? That’s quite easy.
Most experts and agencies won’t admit to this, but a lot of the initial revenue lift from email marketing is just checking the boxes.
Do you have a welcome series for new subscribers?
Do you have a post purchase onboarding series for new customers?
Do you have both an abandoned checkout and a browse abandonment flow set up?
Do you have a back in stock automation?
Do you have a replenishment reminder automation?
The real magic is taking each one of those core automations to the next level with data collection, better segmentation for specific audiences or products, layering in additional channels and touchpoints, etc.
But if you’re missing any of the core email automations completely (as many, many brands are…even 7-figure plus stores), just setting something simple up is going to be a BIG win.
Have Our Team Audit Your Klaviyo Account
If you’re an ecommerce brand looking to:
🪄 Create incredible moments for your customers on autopilot
💸 Scale your store's profits and LTV with a robust back-end marketing system
📈 Identify quick wins and opportunities for immediate growth in your email, SMS, and direct mail program
⚡️ Learn how to better-leverage your data and marketing channels besides email
💡 Get a trusted 3rd party audit of your current CRM marketing strategy to ensure you're not stuck in an echo chamber
Book a free intro call with us today! We’d love to help you identify your brands’ next steps with email and SMS.
