6-figure lifestyle apparel brand
6-figure lifestyle apparel brand: cleaned the list, cut Klaviyo costs, and moved email from 8% to ~22% of revenue
A six-figure lifestyle apparel brand came to us with a Klaviyo account paying for 75,000 “active” profiles, most of whom weren’t engaging. Email was contributing 8% of total revenue — well below the 30% benchmark for a brand at this stage. Over the following months, we cleaned the list, rebuilt segmentation, and tightened the foundation. Email’s share of revenue more than doubled to the 20-24% range, the brand moved to a lower Klaviyo billing tier, and the channel stabilized into a healthier, more efficient operation.
8% → ~22%
email’s share of total business revenue (audit to stabilized range)
~$590/month
in Klaviyo billing savings through list tier reduction
50,000+
unengaged profiles suppressed to clean the sending list
The brand
A six-figure DTC lifestyle apparel brand with strong product, an existing customer base, and a Klaviyo account that had grown messy over time. Active in the brand’s marketing rhythm but operating on infrastructure that hadn’t been audited in a long time. The team knew the channel wasn’t performing the way it should — it just wasn’t clear which lever to pull first.
The leak
The audit surfaced a system that looked active but was working against itself.
Email at 8% of total revenue. The Klaviyo benchmark for a brand this size is 30%. Email was running, but it wasn’t contributing what it should.
75,000+ “active” Klaviyo profiles, but only ~25,000 actually engaged. The brand was paying for capacity it wasn’t using and sending to people who hadn’t opened in months.
Campaigns going to ~15,000 recipients when only 5-10k were genuinely engaged. Inbox providers see a high proportion of unopened emails and downrank the sender. Wide segments don’t just waste sends — they hurt the engaged subscribers too.
Click rates below 1%. A signal to inbox providers that the audience isn’t responding. Click rate is what most directly tells the inbox “this sender is worth delivering.”
Welcome flow at 3 emails. The most leveraged single touchpoint in the system, under-built. A healthy Welcome flow should be 6-7 emails covering brand introduction, social proof, product education, and objection handling.
Pop-up at 2.7% combined submit rate. Decent, but with no separate mobile and desktop variants there was no way to test independently.
None of this was unique to the brand. It’s the natural state of a Klaviyo account that’s been running for a few years without anyone cleaning underneath it.
The foundation we cleaned
The goal was efficiency, not expansion. Most of the work was structural.
List cleanup and suppression
The largest single project. Worked through the 50,000+ profiles that were technically active but hadn’t engaged in months. Either re-engaged them through targeted campaigns or suppressed them entirely. By May, the list was effectively cleaned — the brand could finally send campaigns to people who actually wanted to receive them.
Klaviyo billing tier reduction
Once the list was cleaned, the brand could comfortably operate in a lower Klaviyo billing tier. Monthly Klaviyo cost dropped from approximately $1,155/month (75k active tier) toward $565/month (30k active tier) — a savings of roughly $590/month, or $7,000+ per year.
Segmentation rebuild
Replaced wide time-based segments with proper engagement tiers (7-day, 30-day, 60-day, 90-day windows) and customer-journey segments. Campaigns went from blasting 15k to sending to the 5-10k who were actually engaged — improving open rates, click rates, and signal to inbox providers.
Pop-up split and optimization
Built separate mobile and desktop forms. Started running A/B tests on each independently. Submit rates climbed through the engagement, reaching 3.18% on mobile by July.
Welcome flow extension
The 3-email Welcome flow became a longer sequence covering brand introduction, social proof, and product education. Open and click rates on the rebuilt sequence stayed strong throughout.
SMS integration
Added SMS as a coordinated channel. By mid-engagement, SMS was contributing 10-26% of attributed email/SMS revenue depending on the month — a second owned channel running alongside email.
The results
Across the engagement:
Email’s share of total revenue moved from 8% (audit) to a stabilized 20-24% range across most months, with peaks above that. Roughly tripled from the audit baseline.
Klaviyo billing reduced by ~$590/month through list tier reduction. The brand stopped paying for capacity they weren’t using.
List was effectively cleaned — 50,000+ unengaged profiles either re-engaged or suppressed. The remaining list was meaningfully smaller but substantially higher-intent.
Welcome flow rebuilt with stronger sequencing and open rates that held above benchmark.
Mobile pop-up submit rate climbed to 3.18% — “Good” against Klaviyo benchmarks.
SMS list and SMS coordination built from zero. A second owned channel contributing alongside email by the second half of the engagement.
Deliverability stabilized. With cleaner segments and a smaller active list, signal to inbox providers improved across the board.
Total business revenue stayed roughly flat through this period — $8-11k per month. The email channel got healthier and cheaper to run, but the engagement wasn’t a growth story for the business as a whole. That’s an honest read of what happened.
Why it worked
The fix was structural, not creative. No new offer strategy, no aggressive discounting, no creative overhaul. We addressed list hygiene, segmentation, and billing — the layers underneath the channel that most agencies skip.
List cleaning is the highest-leverage Klaviyo move most brands never make. It cuts costs, improves deliverability, sharpens segments, and makes every campaign perform better. One project, four downstream benefits.
Smaller, engaged list outperforms a larger, unengaged one. Reducing the active profile count from 75k to ~25k didn’t reduce revenue — it improved revenue’s share of total, because the channel got more efficient at the work it was doing.
Cost reduction is a real result. $590/month in saved Klaviyo billing is $7,000/year that goes straight to the bottom line. For a brand at this stage, that’s a meaningful number — and it compounds for as long as the brand stays on the cleaner tier.
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