The 15-minute weekly Klaviyo dashboard check for founders

Set up your Klaviyo dashboard once

Do this the first week and you won't have to again.

Klaviyo's help center says every account starts with a pre-built Overview dashboard, and you can create up to 10 dashboards. Everyone on the account sees the same ones, so your team and anyone helping you are looking at the same numbers.

The default Overview dashboard comes with these cards:

• Conversion summary card (revenue attributed to flows and campaigns)
• Campaign performance card and campaign performance detail card
• Flows performance card and flow performance detail card
• Performance highlights card
• Email deliverability card

I'd add two more from the card library: the subscriber growth card and the forms performance card. Then set the date range to the last 7 days compared with the previous period. For ranges of 30 days or less, Klaviyo shows daily bars, which makes a bad day easy to spot.

How to check your Klaviyo dashboard in 15 minutes

Here's the order I'd go in. Set a timer if it helps.

1. Revenue split: flows vs campaigns (2 minutes)

Start with the conversion summary card. How much did flows make this week? How much did campaigns make? How does that compare to last week?

Then open Shopify and note total sales for the same 7 days. Email revenue divided by total sales is your rough email share for the week. Across the brands I work with, the average is about 32%. One week will bounce around, so you're looking for big swings, not small ones.

2. Flows: is anything quiet that shouldn't be? (4 minutes)

Open the flow performance detail card and look down the list.

• Any flow at $0 or way down? Check that it's still live and the trigger is still firing. A flow sitting in draft or manual earns nothing.
• Is welcome email #1 still earning? Across 4 consumable brands, it earned about $4.50 per person. If yours drops off a cliff, look at the signup form and the first email.
• Is the reorder reminder pulling its weight? If your product runs out, this should be one of your best earners. In the same 4-brand sample, replenishment flows earned about $2.23 per person.

Flows are where most of your email revenue should come from over time, so this is the biggest chunk of the 15 minutes.

3. Campaigns: what earned and what broke (3 minutes)

Open the campaign performance detail card. For each send this week, look at three things: click rate, revenue and revenue per recipient.

Two red flags:

• Clicks but no sales. A fitness gear brand's restock email got a 0.40% click rate, double its other sends, and made $0. Something between the click and the checkout was broken.
• Sales but zero clicks. That usually means click tracking is broken, so the numbers can't be trusted.

Ignore open rate here. Apple Mail auto-opens pushed open rates past 85% on some segments in my data, and for one brand, more opens actually meant less money. More in open rate vs click rate.

4. Deliverability: any alerts? (2 minutes)

Check the email deliverability card, then open the Deliverability hub under Analytics > Deliverability > Email if anything looks off.

Klaviyo gives you a deliverability score from 0 to 100, based on open, click, bounce, unsubscribe and spam complaint rates over the last 30 days. Klaviyo labels 90 to 100 Excellent, 75 to 89 Good, 50 to 74 Fair and under 50 Poor. The hub also flags alerts like high spam complaint rate, high bounce rate and high unsubscribe rate.

For spam complaints, Gmail says to keep the spam rate in Postmaster Tools below 0.10% and avoid ever reaching 0.30%. If you see an alert, start with why Klaviyo emails go to spam.

5. List growth: are people still signing up? (2 minutes)

Look at the subscriber growth card and the forms performance card. Did new signups drop off a cliff this week? If so, check that your popup is still showing on the site. Forms break quietly when a theme or app changes.

6. Next week's sends: click every link (2 minutes)

Open whatever's scheduled. Send yourself a test and click every link. Make sure each send has a reason to buy in it. Content warms people up, but somebody has to ask for the sale.

Then write down three lines: what looked good, what looked broken, what you're fixing. Those notes become the "what changed" section of your monthly email marketing report.

What the dashboard is telling you

Here's a quick cheat sheet for what you see and where to look first.

What to skip in your weekly check

Open rate. Already covered. It's the least useful number on the dashboard.

Peer comparisons. The performance highlights card compares you to peers. That's useful, but not weekly. Klaviyo's benchmarks report, under Analytics > Benchmarks, compares you to roughly 100 similar companies and updates on the 10th of every month. Look at it once a month alongside your CPG email marketing benchmarks.

One bad week. Don't rewrite a flow because of seven days. Look for the same drop two or three weeks in a row.

Where these numbers come from

The welcome, replenishment and click-vs-open numbers come from 4 consumable brands I work with, 2,897 campaigns and $17.7M in email revenue. It's a small sample, so treat them as directional. The 32% is the average across the brands I work with.

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.

Instagram @jackintheinbox LinkedIn