5 Sneaky Klaviyo Segments To Boost Customer Retention

Most brands treat their email list like an Uluru.

If you don’t know what I’m talking about, the Uluru is a gigantic rock in Central Australia.

It’s massive and 550 million years old. 

A lot of brands just blast the same marketing messages to one big mass, week after week. 

The problem with that strategy is, no two customers on your email list are ever the same.

A customer who buys at a heavy discount on Black Friday behaves very differently from someone who happily pays full price for a best-seller. 

Yet, when you keep sending these two people the same emails, you risk tuning out the more valuable customer who doesn’t need discounts. 

Your email list is more like Stonehenge. 

If you Google’d Stonehenge right now, you’d notice it’s not a single rock —  it’s dozens of stones, each in its own place.

The same goes for your segmentation strategy. 

Rather than seeing your list as one huge monolithic rock, you should see it as a collection of unique stones — each representing customers with distinct behaviors, interests, and purchase patterns.

Below are 5 massively underrated segments in Klaviyo that will level up your retention strategy:

1. Potential VIP segment

Your VIP customers are your biggest spenders, and one of the early signs of a potential VIP is a high first-purchase AOV. 

Mind you … when I mention VIPs, I mean customers who’ve purchased at least four times from you (there are other ways to define loyalty, but for the sake of this article, let’s say it’s 4x buyers).

You can create a separate post-purchase flow for these high spenders and present them with upsells you wouldn’t normally offer.

For example, for someone with a top 10% first purchase AOV, you can offer annual membership discounts, or buy more; save more types of deals. The key here is to send personal, founder-led emails and encourage volume shopping.

Conditions:

• Placed order at least once

• 1st purchase AOV > 10%

2. Unconverted Leads Segment

These are leads who recently joined your email list and went through your welcome sequence without buying anything.

Considering your window to convert these leads is pretty tiny (less than a month), it makes sense to re-market to them aggressively. 

What I like to do here is create a “second” welcome series with a slightly different offer. Use urgency, social proof and storytelling for a one last attempt at converting these leads. 

You should probably send an email per day to this segment. It makes no sense to be timid here. Worst case scenario is you don’t convert them and you have to delete them from your email list (if they haven’t done so themselves).

Conditions:

• Joined email list at least X days (the length of your welcome sequence) ago

• Has placed order zero times in the last X (the length of your welcome sequence) days

3. Zero-Party Data Segment

For this segment, you need to collect zero-party data. In more simple terms, you need a quiz on your email sign-up form where prospects can proactively give you meaningful info about their purchase intent. 

The easiest way to set this up is to connect your Shopify store with Alia.

Some questions you could ask website visitors, depending on what you sell:

• Who are you shopping for today? (if your item is giftable)
• What is your biggest concern (your product solves)?
• What is your main (product category) challenge?

The most popular use case for this segment is to create a personalized welcome sequence based on the answer they give. If the customer says their biggest skin-care challenge is acne, then the first 2–3 emails in your welcome flow should focus on acne-specific routines, social proof from customers with acne, and the best product to start with.

A less popular (but still highly effective) use case is to create a separate post-purchase sequence and cross-sell another product with a percentage discount targeting the same problem. 

Conditions: 

• Properties about someone equals X (the variable you created in Alia)

4. Disengaged Segment

These are subscribers who, for one reason or another, aren’t engaging with your emails anymore. When a customer has tuned out of your emails, there’s a good chance they’ve tuned out of your brand altogether.

You can create three different segments here: 30 day unengaged, 60 day unengaged, and 90 day unengaged.

You don’t need to create an automated flow here, but you can manually test sending pattern-breaking email campaigns to these segments.

These emails must be disruptive, meaning they have to be different from your weekly campaigns. Plain text emails with short, punchy, and curiosity-driven (but not clickbaity) subject lines can work well here.

Create a “we miss you” offer (percentage discount is the easiest) and drive urgency around that offer. Add social proof and customer testimonials. 

If they still don’t engage or buy from you, just delete them from your list and save some money on your ESP subscription.

Conditions:

• Can receive email marketing

AND

• Opened email zero times in the past 30/60/90 days

5. First Purchase Churn

These are people who bought from you recently, but have exceeded something that Alexandra Greifeld calls the first-purchase cliff — the number of days it takes, on average, for a customer to come back for a second purchase. Once they’re past that point, the risk of churn jumps above 50%.

To set up this segment, you need to figure out what your re-purchase cliff is. You can use a tool like RetentionX or Lifetimely to do this. It might cost you some money, but it’s 100% worth it. 

For example, if I know it takes 44 days for the average customer to come back and place another order, then I know that on day 45, I should hit the marketing emergency button. 

You can direct these customers to an automated email series where you ask for feedback on their original purchase. In the second email, you can highlight a key product using insights you collected from zero party data. The final email should offer an incentive to make another purchase. 

Conditions:

• Has placed order at least once in the last X (re-purchase cliff) days

AND

• Placed order is less than 2 in the last X (re-purchase cliff) days

Conclusion

Now you know how to segment your email list more strategically. 

Just remember, your email list is Stonehenge, not Uluru.