Guide to Email Marketing
Email marketing is the highest-ROI channel available to businesses and brands, especially e-commerce brands. We built this guide to be your go-to reference for everything you need to know about email marketing. Whether you are brand new to email marketing, trying to get more out of Klaviyo, or looking to build an email marketing program that runs on autopilot, you will find practical, straightforward resources here covering everything from the basics to advanced email marketing strategy.
1What is Email Marketing?
Email marketing is one of the oldest digital marketing channels, and it is still one of the most effective. At its core, email marketing is the practice of sending targeted messages directly to the inboxes of people who have chosen to hear from you. Unlike social media, where an algorithm decides who sees your content, email gives you a direct line to your audience — no middleman, no pay-to-play.
For businesses of all types — from service providers and brick-and-mortar retailers to e-commerce brands — email is how you stay top of mind, build real relationships with your customers, and drive consistent revenue. Done well, it is less about sending emails and more about sending the right message to the right person at the right time.
The resources in this section will give you a clear picture of what email marketing is, how it works, and why it belongs at the center of your marketing strategy.
2Getting Started with Klaviyo
If you have made the decision that Klaviyo is the right platform for your e-commerce store or business, congratulations! You’ve made a great decision for email marketing for your business. Now the next step is building a strong foundation and setting up Klaviyo correctly from the start. Klaviyo is built specifically for e-commerce, and while the platform is powerful, it is also simple to follow and it is an approachable platform for brand new users. The setup process is straightforward, but the decisions you make from the beginning, from how you connect your store to how you organize your list, will shape how well everything else performs down the road.
Getting started with Klaviyo is not just about flipping a switch and importing your contacts. It is about building a foundation that makes your flow automations, your email campaigns, and your audience segmentation work the way they are supposed to. Whether you are setting up Klaviyo for the first time, migrating from another email marketing platform, or trying to figure out where to begin with list growth, the articles below walk you through everything from connecting Klaviyo to your Shopify store to migrating your existing list to growing your audience from the ground up.
3List Growth & Segmentation
A large email list means nothing if the wrong people are getting the wrong messages. The most sophisticated strategy in the world will not perform if there are not enough quality subscribers in your account to work with. And the most sophisticated strategy in the world will not perform if there are not enough quality subscribers in your account to work with.List growth and segmentation are two sides of the same coin, and getting both right is what separates email programs that generate consistent revenue from ones that plateau.
The articles in this section cover what you should know about email list growth and segmentation, including how to grow your list with popups and forms, how to use lead magnets to attract high-quality subscribers, and how to build segments in Klaviyo that let you personalize at scale, including RFM segmentation for your most advanced targeting.
4Flows & Automation
While many brands only send marketing messages when time permits, automated flows fundamentally transform that approach and transform your business. At its core, an automated email flow is a series of pre-built emails that trigger automatically when a subscriber takes a specific action on your website, whether they just joined your list, viewed a particular product, abandoned their shopping cart, or haven’t engaged with your brand in a while. Instead of needing a human to send a manual follow-up to hit the subscriber at the perfect moment, email automations handle the heavy lifting for you. This ensures your business is always present during the highest-intent moments of a customer’s journey, delivering a seamless experience without constant manual oversight.
This transition is where email marketing moves from a manual task on your daily to-do list to a scalable revenue system that runs in the background. For the majority of e-commerce brands, these automated flows generate the lion’s share of email-related revenue because they are designed to send the right message to the right person at exactly the right time. The resources in this section will guide you through the essential flows every store should have in place, from your Welcome Series and Abandoned Cart recovery to Browse Abandonment, Post-Purchase sequences, and Winback Strategies.
5Campaigns & Copywriting
While flows handle the automation side of your email marketing program. Campaigns handle everything else. A campaign is an email you intentionally plan and send to your list, or a segment of it, on a specific date. Promotional sends, seasonal announcements, new product launches, content emails, flash sales are all campaigns. And unlike flows, which run the same sequence for every subscriber who triggers them, campaigns give you the opportunity to be timely, creative, and responsive to what is happening in your business right now. The key is being consistent.
The articles in this section cover the building blocks of a strong campaign program: how to write subject lines that improve open rates, email design best practices for Klaviyo templates, how often to send, how to plan a monthly email calendar, and how to be consistent with your email sends.
6Analytics & Deliverability
Most brands spend the majority of their time thinking about what to send and not nearly enough time thinking about whether it is actually working. Analytics change that. Klaviyo gives you a detailed picture of your email program's performance, from the revenue each flow and campaign generates to the open rates, click rates, and conversion data behind every send. Understanding what those numbers mean and knowing which ones to pay attention to is what allows you to make smarter decisions about where to invest your time and energy next.
Deliverability is a different kind of metric, and one that sits underneath everything else. It refers to whether your emails are actually reaching your subscribers' inboxes, rather than landing in spam or getting blocked before they arrive. You can have the best subject lines, the strongest offer, and a beautifully designed email, and none of it will matter if your deliverability is poor. For brands that have been sending for a while, or that have seen a drop in engagement without an obvious explanation, deliverability is often where the answer lives.
The articles in this section cover how to read and use your Klaviyo dashboard, the metrics that actually matter and what they are telling you, and a full breakdown of email deliverability including authentication, list health, spam complaint rates, and how to protect your sender reputation over time.
7Advanced: Expanding Beyond Email
Once your email program is running well, the next question is what else your Klaviyo data can do for you? You’ve invested in the platform, so now it’s time to unlock all it can be used for. Most brands think of Klaviyo as an email service provider. It is, and it is a very good one. But it is also a customer data platform sitting on detailed, permission-based information about who your customers are, how they shop, what they spend, and how likely they are to come back. That data is valuable far beyond the inbox.
The brands seeing the strongest results from Klaviyo are the ones using it as the foundation for their larger marketing strategy. They are syncing their customer segments to Facebook and Google to build smarter ad audiences, adding SMS as a second channel that reaches subscribers email cannot, and using Klaviyo's predictive analytics to identify their highest-value customers before those customers even know they are loyal. These are not complicated moves, but they do require a solid email foundation first, which is why they belong at the end of this guide.
The articles in this section cover Klaviyo SMS marketing and how to add texts without overwhelming your subscribers, how to use your Klaviyo data to improve the performance of your Meta and Google ad campaigns, and how to put Klaviyo's AI-driven predictive insights to work for your store.