With the rate of change in digital marketing these days, it would be a full-time job just keeping on top of the latest platform releases and functions and knowing which to leverage in your campaigns.

Luckily for our clients, we spend our days working those platforms to find new opportunities for growth. Our email team, for instance, does a ton of work to stay on top of new features from major ESP partners, including the one in focus for this post: Klaviyo.

In this post, I’ll give you my prioritized list of five under-utilized features (some new, some that have been around for a while) from Klaviyo and explain the benefits and best practices of leveraging each.

There are many other features to test, but these are the ones I would start with. My strong recommendation is to start testing them now, with plenty of run time before Q4 that will let you compile data to refine personalization and smarter segmentation that will pay off when purchase intent is high.

Without further ado, let’s talk about…

Smart Send Time Testing

What it does: The oldest feature on this list, Smart Send Time Testing takes a minimum audience list of 12K and delivers emails evenly over a 24-hour period, then uses machine learning to analyze the engagement of the full list to determine an estimated optimal send time. (Note: this takes about five days for Klaviyo to deliver. For big lists, one 24-hour send should give the platform all the data it needs; smaller lists may need two or three sends to do the trick.)

After the first stage, the next time you deliver email using Smart Send Time, Klaviyo will deliver the email in three segments: 1) two hours before the estimated optimal time; 2) the estimated optimal time; 3) two hours after the estimated optimal time.

You’ll likely have to repeat the second stage a few times, but when the platform has collected enough data, it’ll provide you with a firm optimal send time to use going forward.

The benefits: You’ll not only get a modest bump in engagement (depending on the KPI you choose to optimize), you’ll get to stop throwing darts and guessing what the best day/time to send your campaigns might be.

Best practices for use: Go a level or two deeper and segment your audience lists before you run them through Smart Send Time Testing. Split your audiences into, say, 30-day engaged vs. 90-day engaged, promotional vs. nurture, etc., and test each of those separately.

This accomplishes a couple of things: it removes variables from Smart Send Time Testing, which isolates time more cleanly as the one variable to optimize, and it lets you get more specific insights from each individual audience.

Flows Previews

What it does: This one came out in Q4 2024, but it’s still very much under the radar; I almost never see new clients using it when they come to us. Before this release, you didn’t have a way to preview the journey for an automated series in Klaviyo.

Now, Flows Previews lets you start with an entry source and go through a preview to see how users experience their email journey as they choose whether or not to engage. Let’s say a user purchases an item; you can preview the journey to see where the path takes them after that purchase.

The benefits: You can conduct a richer, more immersive QA process that increases confidence in your UX and the data you’re using to define it.

Best practices for use: This one’s pretty easy; the best practice is to give yourself a reason to use this feature in the first place. Brands who aren’t taking advantage of audience segmentation and flows to begin with don’t need to use Flows Previews. This feature opens an opportunity for them to set up more complex campaigns including audience-based conditional splits and trigger-based splits within flows.

Flow Monitoring

What it does: This is one of Klaviyo’s newest features: it’s essentially an AI-powered dashboard that alerts you to issues within your flows, e.g. flows with email sends set to manual, flows with invalid email addresses that are getting skipped, etc.

The benefits: The biggest benefits here are peace of mind and time savings. Referenced regularly, Flow Monitoring will surface major issues more quickly than any manual checks, no matter how diligent.

Best practices for use: Assign an owner (with a backup for when that owner is unavailable) to check the Flow Monitoring dashboard for any issues and steer them to resolution.

Segmentation Count Previews

What it does: One of my favorite features, Segmentation Count Previews lets you enter criteria and gives you a count of your audience both for that specific criterion and within the full segment of all included criteria.

For instance:

Place an order (2M users).

Place an order and receive email marketing (1M users).

Receive email marketing and open an email (300,000 users).

Receive email marketing and open an email in the last 120 days (90,000 users).

The benefits: Using this feature makes it easy to isolate criteria and adjust them until you get your desired audience size – for instance, if you wanted to send to 100,000 users, you could adjust “120 days” to “150 days” and see the size of that segment.

Best practices for use: Decide which criteria are most important and set up the others to flex as needed to build your desired audience size.

SMS Conversation Automations

What it does: This feature automates responses on SMS – for example, you text “Help” and get an automated response with four options you might need help with. You can now set up that kind of messaging in Klaviyo; our clients often use it for polls, questionnaires, etc.

Think of an accessories brand; you can ask if someone’s more interested in getting content on jewelry, belts, or purses. Whatever the user replies, you can segment the next question to get even more info – for example, do you prefer black or brown leather?

Those answers are recorded in the user’s profile in Klaviyo and can be used in email and SMS campaigns going forward. You can then say, OK, [user name] likes brown belts. The next email they get will be about shoes that pair perfectly with brown belts.

The benefits: This feature gives you a lightweight way to engage users and collect more data for use at the profile level. Klaviyo’s SMS functionality means that instead of using Klaviyo for email and another platform for SMS, you can send emails and SMS in the same set up, with a unified view of the way a customer flows through both channels.

Best practices for use: I recommend that marketers using Klaviyo for email adopt this feature to consolidate customer communication and aggregate data. Siloed approaches to email and SMS can result in too many messages to the user and risk data loss between channels.

Whether it’s Klaviyo or a competing ESP, I’m guessing there will be more new features released between the time I’m writing this post and the time you’re reading it. If you’re interested in scheduling some time with an email/CRM expert who can advise you on features to prioritize testing in your campaigns, reach out to info@dmipartners.com.