Every founder we work with comes to us with the same quiet suspicion. The Klaviyo account is doing something, but it is probably not doing everything it should be. The campaigns are going out. The flows are running. The dashboard shows activity. But somewhere underneath the surface, money is being left on the table.
The honest truth is that this suspicion is almost always correct. The vast majority of founder built Klaviyo accounts have at least three significant issues hiding in plain sight, and most have closer to six or seven. The fixes are not difficult once you know where to look. The hard part is knowing what to look for in the first place.
This is the 12 point checklist our team runs on every new client account. It is the same audit we use whether the brand sends $5,000 a month in email revenue or $500,000. Work through these one by one against your own Klaviyo account. The findings will surprise you.
1. List Growth Rate Over The Last 90 Days
The first thing to check is whether your list is actually growing, and at what pace. Pull your subscriber growth chart for the last 90 days. Is the line trending up, flat, or down? Is the rate of growth consistent with your traffic and your signup form performance, or is something off?
A healthy ecommerce list grows by a meaningful percentage every month from organic traffic alone, assuming you have a signup form that actually converts. If your list is flat despite real traffic coming through your store, your signup capture is the first thing to fix. Without list growth, every other email metric will eventually stall.
2. List Health By Engagement Window
A growing list means nothing if a shrinking share of it actually engages. Build segments for subscribers who have engaged in the last 30 days, the last 90 days, and the last 180 days. Compare the size of each against your total list.
In a healthy account, your 30 day engaged segment should be a meaningful share of your total list, not a small sliver of it. If your 30 day engaged audience is below 20 percent of your total list, you are accumulating subscribers faster than you are keeping them engaged. That gap will eventually catch up with you in the form of deliverability issues.
3. Active Flows And Their Real Send Counts
Open your flows tab and check every single one. Confirm that each flow you intend to be running is in live mode, not draft. Then look at the actual send count for each flow over the last 30 days.
This is where we routinely find the most embarrassing mistakes. Beautifully built welcome flows in draft mode. Abandoned cart flows that show zero sends because the trigger broke months ago. Post purchase flows running on filter logic that excludes most actual purchases. The flow looks healthy in the editor and quietly does nothing in production.
4. Flow Exclusion And Filter Logic
For each active flow, dig into the filter logic. Is the abandoned cart flow excluding people who completed the purchase? Is the welcome flow excluding existing customers? Is the browse abandonment flow excluding people already in the abandoned cart flow? Are unsubscribed profiles being filtered out everywhere they should be?
This is where the largest revenue leaks usually hide. A welcome flow that sends to existing customers, an abandoned cart flow that does not exit on purchase, or a post purchase flow with the wrong filter on order count can all quietly damage the customer experience and reduce revenue at the same time.
5. Segmentation Strategy And Real Use Of Segments
Look at your segments tab. How many active segments do you have? More importantly, are you actually using them? Many accounts have a long list of segments that were built once and never sent to.
A healthy account has a clear segmentation strategy. Engagement segments at minimum, ideally layered with RFM, behavior, and category segments. Your campaign sending should regularly use these segments, not just blast everyone every time. If most of your campaigns over the last 90 days went to your full list, you are leaving meaningful revenue on the table.
6. Email Template Quality And Brand Consistency
Open a recent campaign and a flow email side by side. Do they look like they came from the same brand? Do they reflect your current visual identity, or are they running on a template you set up two years ago and never updated?
Branded, consistent design has measurable impact on engagement and conversion. Emails that look polished and intentional perform better than ones that look like they were thrown together. Audit your templates regularly and update them as your brand evolves.
7. Subject Line Strategy Across Campaigns And Flows
Pull the last 20 campaign subject lines and the subject lines from your core flows. Read them as a sequence, as if you were the subscriber receiving them all.
Is there variety, or do they all sound the same? Is there a voice, or are they generic? Are you testing different angles, or sending the same kind of subject line every time? Subject lines are the gateway to every send, and most accounts have far less variety and far less testing than they should.
8. Send Time Patterns And Smart Send Time Status
Check when your campaigns are typically sent. Is there an actual strategy behind the timing, or are sends happening whenever the founder gets to them? Is Klaviyo’s smart send time optimization enabled where it should be?
For larger lists, smart send time can lift engagement at essentially zero cost. For all lists, having a consistent send rhythm helps train subscribers when to expect you, which improves engagement over time.
9. Deliverability Foundation And Sender Reputation Signals
Open your deliverability dashboard inside Klaviyo. Look at your sender reputation, your complaint rate, your bounce rate, and your overall engagement trends.
Confirm that your sender domain is properly authenticated with SPF, DKIM, and DMARC. Confirm that you are sending from a recognizable domain that matches your brand. Confirm that complaint rates are well below 0.1 percent and bounce rates are below 1 percent.
This is the single most important section of any audit. A weak deliverability foundation undermines everything else.
10. Revenue Attribution And Flow Versus Campaign Contribution
Look at your total email attributed revenue for the last 90 days. Break it down between flows and campaigns. In a healthy ecommerce email program, flows generate close to 40 percent of total email revenue from a small share of total sends.
If your flow contribution is much lower than that, your automation is undersized or under performing. If it is much higher than that, your campaign program may be under invested. Either way, the ratio tells you where the next round of attention should go.
11. A/B Testing Activity Over The Last 90 Days
Check whether you have run any A/B tests in the last 90 days, on either campaigns or flows. If the answer is no, that is itself a major finding.
Klaviyo has solid built in testing tools. There is no good reason to be making campaign and flow decisions by guesswork when the data is available with a few clicks. Subject line tests, content tests, and offer tests should be running continuously. The cost is nothing. The compounding benefit over a year is significant.
12. Sunset Policy And Suppression Of Long Term Disengaged Subscribers
Finally, look at how you handle subscribers who have not engaged in 6, 9, or 12 months. Do you have a structured winback flow followed by suppression for non responders? Or are these subscribers still sitting in your main list, costing you in Klaviyo fees and slowly dragging down your deliverability?
A clean account has a defined sunset policy. Subscribers who do not engage with multiple winback attempts are suppressed. The list stays focused on people who actually want to hear from you, which protects your sender reputation and your costs at the same time.
What The Findings Usually Look Like
When we run this audit on a founder built account, the results are remarkably consistent. We typically find at least one flow in draft mode that should be live. Multiple flows with incorrect or missing filter logic. A list growth rate that is well below what the store’s traffic should support. A heavily under used segmentation library. A deliverability foundation that has never been properly authenticated. And a near total absence of A/B testing.
Each of these is fixable. Often a single focused week can resolve most of them. The combined effect on revenue is usually significant, because each fix multiplies the effectiveness of every send.
Use This Checklist On Your Own Account
You can run this audit yourself with no agency involvement, and we recommend you do. Open your Klaviyo account, work through each section, and write down what you find. The act of looking carefully at each area in turn will surface most of the issues that are quietly limiting your channel.
If you would like an experienced second set of eyes, this is also the work we do at EHABY for every new client. Our discovery and audit phase walks through these 12 points in detail along with several deeper sections specific to your category and stage. We hand you a written audit document, a clear list of priorities, and a roadmap for what should be fixed first.
Book a free Klaviyo strategy call if you want us to do this work with you. Even on the first call, we can usually identify the two or three issues that are costing the most revenue, before you have committed to anything beyond the conversation itself.