If you are sending the same email to your entire email list every time you hit send, you are leaving a significant amount of money on the table. You are also slowly eroding the trust of the subscribers on your list, because not every email you send is relevant to every person who receives it.
Segmentation is the practice of dividing your audience into smaller, more specific groups based on user behavior on your website and with your emails. From there, you use this information to send each group the appropriate email message that actually applies to their situation. It sounds simple, and the concept is. The execution, when done well, is what separates average email marketing programs from exceptional ones.
Klaviyo is one of the most powerful segmentation tools available to e-commerce brands. It gives you access to behavioral data, purchase history, predictive analytics, and engagement signals that most platforms cannot match. It is always easy to use. This guide walks you through how to think about segmentation, the segments every store should have, and how to build and use them in Klaviyo.
Why Segmentation Matters More Than You Think
When you send the same email to everyone, two things happen. First, the people who receive something irrelevant disengage from your content. They stop opening. They unsubscribe. Some mark you as spam. All of that behavior signals to inbox providers that your emails are not worth delivering, which hurts your deliverability for everyone on your list, including the people who do want to hear from you.
Second, you miss the opportunity to speak to people at the right moment in their relationship with your brand. A first-time buyer needs something different than a customer who has ordered six times. A subscriber who has never purchased needs a different message than someone who bought last week. Sending everyone the same thing means most of your emails are either too aggressive or not relevant enough for the person receiving them.
Segmentation fixes this. When the right person gets the right message, open rates go up, click rates go up, and revenue per email goes up alongside them.
Lists vs. Segments in Klaviyo: What is the Difference?
Before building anything, it is worth understanding how Klaviyo organizes contacts, because lists and segments work differently and are used for different purposes.
An email list is a static collection of contacts. People are added to a list manually through either a file import, through a sign-up form, or through an integration. The email subscribers stay on the list until they are removed either manually or by unsubscribing. Your main newsletter list is an example of a list. Your lists are typically used as the trigger point for flows and as the base audience for your segments.
A segment is a dynamic group that updates automatically based on rules you define. Klaviyo looks at your entire contact database and includes any profile that meets the conditions you set. If someone meets the conditions, they are in the segment. If they no longer meet them, they are out. No manual management required.
For example, you could create a segment of customers who have placed more than two orders in the last 90 days. As new customers reach that threshold, they are added to the segment automatically. As customers fall outside the time window, they drop out. Your segment is always accurate, always current.
In practice, you will use lists to capture and store your contacts and segments to organize them for targeted sending.
The Core Segments Every Store Should Build
You do not need dozens of segments to get started. These are the foundational ones that will make an immediate difference in how relevant your emails feel and how well they perform.
Active Subscribers
This is your most engaged audience: people who have opened or clicked an email in the last 90 days. This is the segment you should be sending most of your campaigns to, because these people are actively paying attention. Your deliverability will be stronger, your open rates will be higher, and your conversions will reflect an engaged audience.
In Klaviyo, build this segment by filtering for contacts who have opened or clicked at least one email in the last 90 days.
First-Time Buyers
This segment captures everyone who has placed exactly one order. First-time buyers are at a critical moment in their relationship with your brand. The window right after a first purchase is when you have the most opportunity to turn a one-time transaction into a long-term customer. This segment feeds into your post-purchase flows and can also be used for targeted campaigns designed to drive a second order.
Repeat Purchasers
Anyone who has placed two or more orders is a repeat customer, and they deserve to be treated differently than someone who is still deciding if they like you. These are your most loyal buyers. They are good candidates for VIP offers, early access to new products, and referral program invitations.
Lapsed Customers
These are customers who purchased in the past but have not ordered in a meaningful window of time, typically 90 to 180 days depending on your average purchase frequency. Lapsed customers are the audience for your win-back campaigns. They already know your brand, which means the barrier to re-engaging them is lower than acquiring a new customer entirely.
Non-Purchasers
This segment includes subscribers who are on your list but have never placed an order. They opted in, which means there is some level of interest, but they have not converted yet. This group needs a different approach than existing customers. They respond better to social proof, product education, and first-purchase incentives than to loyalty offers or repeat purchase nudges.
VIP Customers
Define your VIPs based on what makes sense for your store, whether that is total spend above a certain threshold, order count, or a combination of both. These are your highest-value customers and they should be treated accordingly. Exclusive early access, special thank-you offers, and personalized outreach all perform well with this group.
How to Build a Segment in Klaviyo
Building a segment in Klaviyo is straightforward once you understand the logic. Go to Lists and Segments in your Klaviyo account, click Create Segment, and give it a name that clearly describes who is in it.
From there, you use Klaviyo’s condition builder to define your rules. You can filter by properties about someone (like location, email subscription status, or custom profile properties), what they have done or not done (like placing an order, opening an email, or visiting a specific product page), and predictive properties (like predicted lifetime value or churn risk).
Conditions can be combined with AND and OR logic. For example, a lapsed customer segment might read: “Has placed at least one order AND has not placed an order in the last 120 days.” Once you save the segment, Klaviyo calculates who qualifies and keeps it updated automatically.
Name your segments clearly and consistently. You will build more of them over time, and a messy segment library becomes difficult to navigate quickly.
Using Segments in Campaigns and Flows
Segments are only useful if you actually use them to send targeted content. Here is how they fit into the two main parts of your Klaviyo program.
In campaigns, you select your recipient list when you are setting up the send. Instead of choosing your full newsletter list every time, choose the segment that makes sense for the content of that specific email. A promotion for repeat buyers should go to your repeat customers segment. A re-engagement campaign should go to your lapsed customers. A first-purchase incentive should go to your never-purchased segment. Each of these will perform significantly better than if you had sent it to everyone.
In flows, segments can be used as filters inside an existing flow to branch the experience based on who is going through it. They can also be used as flow triggers directly, so that entering a specific segment kicks off an automation. For example, when a customer crosses into your VIP segment, a flow can trigger automatically to acknowledge their loyalty.
A Note on Segment Hygiene
Segmentation is not a one-time setup task. As your list grows and customer behavior changes, your segments evolve. It is worth auditing your segments every quarter to make sure the definitions still make sense, the size of each segment looks right, and you are not sending to segments that have become stale or inaccurate.
Also make sure you are suppressing unengaged contacts from your main campaign sends on a regular basis. Even with strong segmentation, a large pool of inactive profiles can drag down your overall deliverability. Klaviyo makes it easy to identify and suppress contacts who have not engaged in six months or more.
Good segmentation is one of those things that pays off quietly and consistently over time. Once your core segments are in place and you are using them deliberately, the improvement in engagement and revenue tends to compound, and it becomes one of the clearest examples of email marketing working the way it is supposed to.
If you want help setting up your segmentation strategy or auditing what you currently have in place, we would love to dig into it with you.
Continue reading: RFM segmentation in Klaviyo: A practical walkthrough and The 6 Klaviyo flows every e-commerce store needs.