Email campaigns: choose the audience before the subject line
The emails you choose to send, on a day you pick. Flows cover the moments customers create. Campaigns are where you say something new, and choose who hears it.
- 012Campaigns
- One-time email sends that target a specific audience or segment at a scheduled time. Campaigns are often used for announcements, promotions, product launches, or seasonal sales. Unlike flows, campaigns require manual scheduling and are not triggered by customer behaviour.
- Sent by
- You, on a date you pick, to a segment you choose
- Lives in
- The Campaigns tab in Klaviyo, apart from your flows
- Judge it on
- Clicks, orders and revenue per recipient, read by segment
- Watch alongside
- Unsubscribes and spam complaints from the same send
A campaign is a decision, a flow is a reflex
A flow fires because a customer did something, like signing up or leaving a cart. A campaign goes out because you decided this week had something worth saying. So campaigns carry the news. The launch, the restock, the story behind a product, the sale.
Neither can do the other's job. A campaign reaches somebody who abandoned a cart days late, and only by accident. A flow can't announce a range you haven't launched yet. You need both, and they're judged differently.
Who should get this week's campaign
Not everyone who ever signed up. Your standing audience is people who've opened or clicked in recent months. Mailing people who stopped reading teaches Gmail and Outlook that your mail isn't wanted, and Google's sender guidelines tell bulk senders to keep spam complaints low. That cost lands on every send after this one.
- Engaged in recent months: most sends, most weeks
- Bought from that range before: launches, restocks, care guides
- Viewed it and didn't buy: the second send about the same product
- The whole list: a site-wide sale, or news that touches every customer
Sending to fewer people isn't timid. It's how the email that matters next month still reaches the inbox. Here's when emailing the whole list is the right call.
A campaign calendar that isn't just discount codes
If every campaign carries a code, your list learns that waiting pays. The calendar needs sends people would open with no offer in them, and plenty of those still sell.
| The job | An example | Who gets it first |
|---|---|---|
| Announce something | A launch or a restock | Buyers and browsers of that range |
| Teach the product | How to use it, or look after it | Recent buyers of that product |
| Prove it | One customer's story, told properly | Engaged subscribers who haven't bought |
| Sell | A sale or a bundle | The engaged list, everyone only for site-wide news |
Calendar looking thin? Start with campaigns that don't need a discount code.
How to tell a campaign worked, once the week is over
Not on opens. Apple's privacy feature loads a lot of mail without anybody reading it, so the open rate flatters every send. Clicks, placed orders and revenue per recipient tell you whether the email did anything.
Read them by segment, next to the unsubscribes and complaints from the same send. A campaign that made money from your regulars and annoyed everyone else hasn't worked. It's borrowed against next month.
Related terms
FAQs
How many email campaigns should we send a week?
There's no number that holds across shops. Cadence is something you measure, not something you pick. Add sends to your engaged segment and watch unsubscribes, complaints and revenue per recipient for a month. If they hold, keep going. If complaints climb, step back. Quieter subscribers can get fewer sends while your regulars get the full calendar.
Should we resend a campaign to people who didn't open it?
Sparingly. Apple's privacy feature counts some unread emails as opened, so your non-openers list is missing people who never saw it. Resends also land hardest on your least engaged subscribers, the likeliest to complain. Keep them for sends that matter, like a launch or the last day of a sale, with a new subject line, and only to people who've engaged recently.
Do campaigns still matter if flows bring in most of our email revenue?
Yes. Flows only fire when people do something, and campaigns give them a reason to. A launch email sends people to the site, where your browse and cart flows can catch them. Campaigns are also the only place your news goes out. Stop sending them and your flows soon have fewer people to work with.
Rather we explained it on your own account?
Bring your Klaviyo account to a growth consultation. We'll walk through what this means for your numbers, in plain English, and what we'd fix first.
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