Klaviyo list vs segment: what's the difference, and which should you send to?

This is for Shopify founders who've been hitting "send to everyone" and want to know what to do instead.

What's the difference between a Klaviyo list and a segment?

Here's the plain version.

Lists are static. Per Klaviyo, membership isn't determined by conditions. People join through sign-up forms, or get added by hand or through an import, and you can remove them. Nobody lands on a list because of something they did on your site.

Segments are dynamic. A segment isn't a fixed group of people. It's a set of conditions, like "has placed an order at least once" or "clicked an email in the last 60 days." Per Klaviyo, segments grow as people meet the conditions and shrink as they stop meeting them, updating in close to real time. And it only works one way: you can't add people to a segment by hand, import them into it, or point a sign-up form at it. Those jobs belong to lists.

That's the key difference: you decide who's on a list, but the conditions decide who's in a segment.

Should you send Klaviyo campaigns to a list or a segment?

Send to segments.

Your main list is everyone who ever signed up. That includes the person who bought last week, the person who's never bought, and the person who stopped clicking two years ago. Sending all of them the same email at the same time is the easiest way to get a muddy result.

Here's the clearest example I have. At a sports training tech brand, an engaged send to 7,145 people earned $0.19 per person. A full-list blast to 49,475 people earned $0.04 per person. The engaged send went to about a seventh as many people and earned almost 5x as much per person.

Tightening the audience moves other numbers too. A flavored diffuser brand tightened who its campaigns went to, and its open rate went from 22% to 44%.

This is also how I think about the months after a brand's flows are built. Once there's real data, campaign send lists get condensed: fewer people, more revenue, more qualified readers. That's a segment decision, not a list decision.

The other problem with blasting the whole list is that you can't learn from it. If every send goes to the same giant group, you can't tell whether the subject line, the offer or the audience made the difference. Revenue per person is the number to watch here, not open rate. I explain why in revenue per recipient.

What are Klaviyo lists still good for?

Lists aren't the bad guy. They do a job segments can't.

• Collecting subscribers. Your sign-up forms feed a list.
• Starting your welcome series. A welcome flow triggered when someone joins your main email list is the common setup. Klaviyo recommends a single main list per channel, which keeps that simple. Keep that list on single opt-in so new subscribers enter the flow right away. I explain why in Klaviyo double opt-in.
• Freezing a moment in time. Klaviyo lets you turn a segment's current members into a static list (Manage segment, then Create list of current members), while the segment itself keeps updating. Handy when you want to remember exactly who got a launch email.

One consent detail matters more than it sounds. Per Klaviyo, segments pull from all profiles in your account, including people who have not opted in to marketing emails. And being on a list doesn't by itself mean someone consented either. So when you build a segment for email campaigns, add the condition "If someone can or cannot receive marketing," set to can receive email marketing, joined with AND. That way every campaign only goes to people who can actually receive it.

Which Klaviyo segments should you build first?

You don't need 40 segments. You need a few that match how people actually buy from you. I walk through the starter set in email segmentation for ecommerce: engaged subscribers, first-time buyers, repeat buyers, lapsed customers, and people who've never bought.

The one to build today is the engaged segment. The window I'd use is people who clicked or bought in the last 60 to 90 days, which also pulls back customers who've drifted a little. For brands selling something people reorder, I also keep a segment of customers with no order in the last 60 days, so I can bring them back into an educational cycle instead of letting them drift.

Two more are worth building early.

VIPs. Set the VIP line by spend, and set it brand by brand, because spend means different things in different stores. $300 might be a once-a-year customer for a brand selling $90 jars, and a ten-order regular for a brand selling $30 bags. Here's how I build a VIP email segment.

Unengaged subscribers. People who haven't clicked or bought in a long time. Don't keep blasting them, and don't delete them on day one either. Send them through a sunset flow first.

What happens to subscribers who never engage?

They go through a Klaviyo sunset flow: a short series that asks if they still want to hear from you and gives them a reason to come back. Anyone who engages stays. Anyone who doesn't gets suppressed, so you stop paying to email people who aren't reading.

Judge engagement on clicks and orders, not opens. Apple Mail's privacy feature auto-opens emails, which makes people look engaged when they're not. Across 4 consumable brands, auto-opens pushed open rates past 85% on some segments.

A word on list cleaning: remove the obviously bad profiles, but don't obsess over it. Most founders spend more energy cleaning their list than building better ways to capture good subscribers. Segments do most of the protecting for you, because the unengaged people simply stop getting campaigns.

Once that's handled, you can often send to your engaged segment more than you'd guess. Across those same 4 consumable brands, 3 of the 4 saw no rise in unsubscribes when they sent more. More on that in how many emails per week.

How do lists, segments and flows work together?

Segments decide who gets campaigns. Inside flows, the same kind of sorting happens with splits. I send customers and non-customers down different paths, because a first-time browser and a three-time buyer shouldn't get the same abandoned cart email. I break that down in customer vs non-customer email flows.

So the full picture is simple: the list collects people, flows talk to them based on what they do, and segments decide who gets each campaign.

Where these numbers come from

The $0.19 vs $0.04 comparison is from a single sports training tech brand, and the 22% to 44% open rate is from a single flavored diffuser brand. The auto-open and unsubscribe figures come from 4 consumable brands and 2,897 campaigns. That's a small sample, so treat it as directional. For the bigger set of numbers, see my CPG email marketing benchmarks.

FAQ

WRITTEN BY Jack White

Founder of Bardown Digital, a Chicago-based Klaviyo email and retention agency for Shopify brands. He's worked with brands doing $500K to $100M a year, with $100M+ in email-attributed revenue across them.

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