Retainers / Lifecycle Marketing
Your flows were built once. Your customers changed twice.
Almost every Klaviyo account we inherit was set up properly and then left alone. The flows still fire, so nobody looks — meanwhile the catalogue was restructured, three tags were renamed, two flows now overlap on the same trigger, and the welcome series still references a collection that was retired last spring. Lifecycle marketing is not a build. It is a maintained system.
- What it is
- An ongoing lifecycle marketing retainer — monthly management of your Klaviyo flows, campaigns, segments and deliverability, with templates coded in your brand system rather than assembled in a drag-and-drop editor.
- Who it's for
- Brands whose email is running on autopilot and has not been audited in six months or more, or who are sending campaigns but have never had the flows properly built behind them.
- What runs monthly
- Campaign calendar built and shipped · one flow rebuilt or added · segment and suppression hygiene · deliverability monitoring · a written report of revenue per recipient by flow.
- Platforms
- Klaviyo primarily. Also Attentive and Postscript for SMS, and Brevo where a brand is already committed to it.
- Why coded templates
- Drag-and-drop templates drift from the brand and break in Outlook. We build coded, tested templates in your type and palette that render the same everywhere.
- Investment
- From $3,500 per month. Included from the Growth tier when bundled. Three-month initial term, then rolling monthly.
- What it is not
- Not a one-off flow build, and not list buying or cold outreach. We market to people who chose to hear from you.
The decay
Nothing broke. It just stopped being true.
Email decays differently from a website — it keeps working perfectly while quietly becoming wrong.
What we find in an unmanaged account
Every one of these was in an account the owner believed was fine
- Two flows firing on the same trigger, sending near-duplicate emails hours apart
- A welcome series referencing a collection retired last year
- Segments built on tags that were renamed in a catalogue tidy-up, silently matching nobody
- Suppression handled differently in flows, campaigns and the storefront, so unsubscribes still receive mail
- A browse-abandonment flow never triggering because the event stopped being sent after a theme update
- Sending to the whole list every time, dragging deliverability down for the people who actually engage
What managed looks like
The same account, six months into a retainer
- Flow logic de-conflicted and documented, one trigger with one owner
- Content reviewed against the live catalogue every month
- Segments rebuilt on the current data model and re-validated after catalogue changes
- Consent and suppression unified across flows, campaigns and the storefront
- Events monitored — a flow that stops firing raises an alert rather than a quarterly surprise
- Engagement-tiered sending, so inbox placement is protected and the engaged list stays engaged
The flow stack
What actually earns its keep.
Flows do the majority of the revenue and almost none of the work once built properly. Campaigns are the visible part; this is the part that compounds.
Welcome & first purchase
The highest-intent moment you will ever get. Segmented by how they arrived and what they looked at, not a single generic greeting.
Abandoned browse, cart & checkout
Three distinct intents that most accounts collapse into one. Timing and message differ sharply between someone who browsed and someone who entered payment details.
Post-purchase & replenishment
Shipping, care, review request and the next order timed to actual consumption rather than a flat 30 days.
Win-back & lapsing
Triggered on a per-category purchase interval rather than a single site-wide guess, so a 90-day product and a 12-month product are not treated identically.
VIP & loyalty tiers
Recognition that reflects the whole relationship, wired to your loyalty programme rather than running beside it.
Back-in-stock & price drop
The two highest-converting transactional triggers in ecommerce, and the two most often left switched off in the account.
Deliverability
A beautiful email in the promotions tab is a beautiful email nobody read.
Deliverability is the part clients rarely ask about and the part that silently caps everything else. These are the checks that run monthly.
| Signal | What we watch | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| Authentication | SPF, DKIM and DMARC aligned on a dedicated sending domain. | Gmail and Yahoo enforce this for bulk senders. Misalignment sends you straight to spam regardless of content. |
| Engagement tiers | Sending weighted toward recently engaged recipients. | Mailbox providers score you on how the last 30 days behaved. Blasting the whole list punishes the whole list. |
| Complaint rate | Kept well under the 0.3% threshold providers act on. | A single bad campaign can suppress placement for months afterwards. |
| List hygiene | Sunsetting the never-engaged, catching typo and role-based addresses at capture. | Dead addresses cost sending reputation and pay for nothing. |
| Consent trail | Where and when each subscriber opted in, kept auditable. | It is both a compliance requirement and the fastest way to diagnose a sudden complaint spike. |
| Render testing | Coded templates tested across major clients including Outlook. | A template that breaks in Outlook is broken for a large share of exactly the demographic that spends most. |
The month
What actually happens each month.
Campaign calendar agreed against your merchandising plan, then built and scheduled — coded templates, not editor blocks.
One flow rebuilt, added or split each month, working down a backlog ranked by revenue per recipient.
Segments revalidated, suppression checked, events monitored for silent failure, deliverability signals reviewed.
Revenue per recipient by flow, campaign performance, deliverability trend, and what changes next month.
Investment
Priced on the programme, not on sends.
Lifecycle Marketing retainer
Campaign calendar built and shipped, one flow rebuilt or added each month, segment and suppression hygiene, deliverability monitoring, and a monthly report of revenue per recipient by flow.
A starting point for scoping rather than a quote — it depends on list size, send volume, how many flows are in scope and the state of the account when we inherit it. Klaviyo licence costs are billed by Klaviyo directly and are not included.
Questions we get
Straight answers.
How is this different from your email marketing service page?
The email marketing service is a fixed-scope project — building or rebuilding your flow architecture from scratch, migrating platforms, designing a template system. This retainer is the ongoing management afterwards: campaigns every month, flows maintained against a changing catalogue, deliverability watched. Most brands do the build once and the management continuously.
Do you write the copy as well as build?
Yes. Copy, coded template, segmentation and QA are all in scope — that is the point of a managed retainer rather than a production service. We work from your brand voice and your merchandising calendar. If you have an in-house copywriter, we will build to their copy instead and price accordingly.
What if our Klaviyo account is a mess?
That is the normal starting point and month one is largely the audit: mapping every flow and trigger, finding the overlaps and the silent failures, checking segment logic against the current data model, and reviewing deliverability. That audit produces the backlog we then work through in priority order. It is also why the initial term is three months rather than one.
Do you do SMS as well as email?
Yes — Attentive, Postscript or Klaviyo SMS. SMS is usually the smaller channel by volume and the larger one by irritation, so we tend to use it narrowly for high-intent moments like back-in-stock and shipping rather than for broadcast campaigns. See also the SMS marketing service.
Will you send to our whole list?
Rarely, and we will push back if you ask us to. Mailbox providers score you on recent engagement, so sending everything to everyone drags inbox placement down for the people who actually buy. Engagement-tiered sending almost always produces more revenue from fewer sends, which is a difficult argument until the second month of data makes it for us.
Can we keep our existing templates?
If they are coded and render properly, yes. If they were assembled in the drag-and-drop editor, we will usually rebuild them as coded templates over the first two months — editor templates drift from the brand, break in Outlook, and are slow to iterate on, which quietly caps how much testing we can do.
Next step
Find out what your flows are quietly missing.
The free audit includes a Klaviyo review — overlapping flows, dead segments, deliverability risk and the events that stopped firing. Yours whether or not you take the retainer.
