Klaviyo glossary

You will learn

The glossary below defines foundational Klaviyo specific acronyms, as well as industry-specific terms.

A

Accepts Marketing: a custom property that is determined when a customer checks, or does not check, the Accepts Marketing box when starting or completing a checkout. Klaviyo syncs the Accepts Marketing value when available through the Shopify integration; this value will either be True or False if it is assigned. This property applies only to email and not SMS consent. NOTE: The Accepts Marketing property exists independent of whether or not someone separately subscribes to receive emails through a signup form. This means that someone could elect not to check the marketing box upon checkout, but then decide to subscribe to your mailing list separately through a signup form. This person would end up on your subscriber list, but still have an Accepts Marketing property value of False. 

Active on Site: metric tracked when a contact is active on your site; this metric is only tracked when Klaviyo Web Tracking is enabled. SEE ALSO: Web Tracking

Active profile: any profiles in Klaviyo that can be messaged and who are not suppressed. These contacts can be added to your account through a variety of methods, including integrations and manual list uploads. Since these contacts do not necessarily live on one specific list, it's unlikely that the number of Active Profiles in your account will match the number of people on your newsletter list. To see a count of the number of Active Profiles you have in your account, navigate to the Profiles tab. Learn more.

Activity Feed: a live feed of what’s happening with your customers and site visitors reflecting data coming into Klaviyo in real-time. Your Dashboard has an Activity Feed that gives you one central source of all customer data across all metrics. Each Contact Profile also has an Activity Feed specific to that customer's activity.

C

Campaign: a single, targeted email sending effort; a one-time send to a pre-established group of contacts.

Capture rate: also called opt-in rate. The rate at which website visitors subscribe to marketing, often through a Klaviyo signup form. This can be found with the following calculation: the number of new subscribers divided by the number of website visits (or number of forms shown).

Cancelled Order: this metric is tracked when a customer creates an order in your store but then cancels the order before fulfillment. NOTE: This metric is only available for certain integrations.

Cart abandonment rate: the percentage of people who place an order on your website and subsequently abandon their cart, leaving items unpurchased. It is found by calculating Placed Order count divided by Started Checkout count.

Conversion rate optimization (CRO): making changes to a website in order to increase the rate at which visitors take the desired action (typically making a purchase).

Conversion tracking: a conversion is defined as a recipient opening or clicking an email or SMS and then taking another action within the conversion period. By default, the conversion period is five days; however, this setting can be adjusted in your account settings. You do not need to decide in advance which metric is the conversion metric, Klaviyo automatically computes conversion analytics for all metrics. 

Customer lifetime value (CLV): the historic and predictive amounts that a customer may spend. Historic CLV is made up of all of the past purchases, while Predicted CLV is the amount the customer may spend and how many orders they may make in the next year. 

Custom properties: fields that you can use to gather information about the contacts in your account. Some examples are: additional information about your contacts (such as gender, size, age), preferences (such as email/SMS frequency, type of content, etc.), and responses to a questionnaire.

D

Dashboard: a key tab in your account that has several subsections:

• Performance: Klaviyo's Performance Dashboard helps you analyze the conversion metrics that matter most to your business while visualizing how your emails and SMS messages are performing.
• Analytics: metric charts on key metrics; customizable by metric and timespan.
• Lists and Segments: collection of all starred lists and segments.
• Activity Feed: a central source of all contact data across all metrics; sortable by metric.

Deliverability: a term that refers to inbox placement once an email is successfully delivered. This term is often used interchangeably with delivery, which refers to whether a recipient's inbox accepts the message you’ve sent. Only after an email is successfully delivered does deliverability comes into play.

Delivery: When the request to send an email is accepted by the server for a recipient. Note that it does not mean that the message reached the inbox; only that it reached the server. 

Domain name system (DNS): this system is essentially the "phone book of the Web." When you update your DNS records, you can consider this the equivalent of updating your address in the web's phonebook so that it's possible to verify who you are when you send an email.

E

Email service provider (ESP): a service or platform that can send commercial and transactional email on your behalf. Klaviyo is one example of an ESP. 

Event: also known as metrics. When a customer does an action, it is called an event. Events can be used to trigger flows or place a customer in a segment. 

F

Flow: an automated series of steps triggered by an activity or behavior. Flows are autoresponders that can contain one or more emails and text messages and can be configured to send to contacts after a range of different tracked events occur.

Fulfilled Order: this metric is tracked when a customer's order is marked Fulfilled in your ecommerce store.

H

Hard bounce: occurs when an email cannot be delivered due to a permanent reason. This could be caused by a variety of reasons, including a misspelled email. Klaviyo will automatically remove emails that hard bounce, and then exclude them from future emails. You can see these emails by navigating to the Profiles tab, clicking on Suppressed List in the upper right, and choosing Bounced Emails. SEE ALSO: Soft Bounce.

I

Integration: a means to automatically sync user and customer data to Klaviyo from another software platform or application.

IP Address: a unique string of numbers (separated by periods) that identifies a device on the Internet.

Item: a single product purchased within an ecommerce order.

L

List: A collection of opted-in profiles in Klaviyo, maintained in the Lists & Segments tab, that are added through a signup form, subscribe page, third-party integration, the Klaviyo API, or manually through upload or copy/paste.

N

Needs review: If your flow message is or was previously in manual mode, Needs Review lists the total number of people who are ready to receive your flow message but the message needs to be reviewed first. When a message is or was in manual mode, this means that they will not receive messages automatically — you will need to review the emails and SMS before they are sent out.

M

Merged profile: this metric is recorded on a profile after it is part of a profile merge. When two profiles are merged together, one merges “into” the other and the remaining single profile will have the Merged Profile event tracked.

O

Ordered Product: this metric is tracked when a customer places an order. NOTE: One Ordered Product event is tracked for each item purchased. If someone purchases three items in a single purchase event, there will be one Placed Order event and three corresponding Ordered Product events recorded.

Owned Marketing: an approach to marketing where a company focuses strategically on channels that they control (including their website, email, and app if applicable), utilizing the data they have in order to create and strengthen customer relationships. The experiences that are created with this data are critical to the overall success. A contrasting strategy might involve relying heavily on selling through Amazon, driving purchases through Google or Facebook ads, and utilizing third-party data to facilitate those marketing actions.

Owned Media: published content that a company has created on channels that it controls, including their own website, app, and social media channels.

Owned Revenue: the revenue attributed to emails and text messages sent through Klaviyo. If someone engages with a message and makes a purchase within the attribution window (a set number of days after), that purchase is attributed to the email or text message. Klaviyo users can adjust the attribution window(s) for their account. 

P

Placed Order: this metric is tracked when a customer completes the checkout process and creates an order in your ecommerce store. To view the event data Klaviyo tracks for each order, navigate to your Dashboard, click on Activity Feed, and sort by Placed Order. Click on the timestamp of any order and an Event Details window will pop up featuring all event data variables. NOTE: One Placed Order event is tracked for each purchase event.

Product feed: Blocks that automatically generate product recommendations by pulling product information from ecommerce integrations. Product Feeds can be used in flow/campaign emails via the drag and drop "Product Feed" block. NOTE: Product feeds are available only these integrations: BigCommerce, Magento, Shopify, Spree, WooCommerce. 

Profile: a Klaviyo profile is a comprehensive record maintained for every contact in your Klaviyo account. This record contains a live feed of all tracked activity, as well as all available information pertaining to a given person. You can find the profile for any contact by searching for this person using the search bar at the top of your account.

Q

Quiet Hours: are the hours during the day you should avoid sending your SMS or MMS messages to your subscribers. Under the TCPA in the US and as a best practice in many other countries, text messages should not be sent before 8 am and after 9 pm in the recipient's time zone. NOTE: Some individual US states (like Florida) have more restrictive rules, so it’s important to understand the rules applicable to the states and countries your recipients are located in.

R

Refunded Order: this metric is tracked when a customer completes the checkout process in your store and a payment is made, but the customer requests the payment to be returned. NOTE: This metric is only available for certain integrations.

Return on investment (ROI): the ratio of how much a customer spends on Klaviyo compared to how much Owned Revenue (see above) they generate. For example, if they pay $1,000 a month and generate $35,000 in KAV, their ROI is 35x. 

Revenue per recipient (RPR): a calculation that measures the success of a campaign or flow. The calculation is the revenue from a campaign or flow divided by the number of recipients in that campaign or flow.

Root domain: A root domain (sometimes referred to as parent or main domain) is the name after the @ in your email address not including any subdomains; this is usually your brand's name. For example, if you send emails from hello@email.retailbrand.com, the "retailedbrand.com" part would be your root domain after removing the subdomain "email.".

S

Segment: A collection of profiles in Klaviyo, maintained in the Lists & Segments tab, that is defined by a set of conditions, e.g., everyone who's ever purchased, everyone who was on the website last week, everyone who opened a specific email, everyone who clicked a certain SMS, etc. Rather than a fixed list of people, a segment will grow as new people meet the conditions and shrink as people no longer meet the conditions.

Shopify Tags: Any custom tags assigned to a customer in Shopify (e.g., wholesale or VIP) that are passed through to Klaviyo through our Shopify integration.

Smart Sending: If Smart Sending is enabled, Klaviyo will automatically check to see if a recipient has already received an email or SMS from you within a specified period. If this person has received another email or SMS from you too recently, the current email or SMS to him/her will get skipped. The windows for SMS and email are separate, so you can still send an SMS to someone who recently received an email. This is a good way to prevent contacts from receiving too many messages via the same channel. You can enable or disable Smart Sending for emails sent by both campaigns and flows.

Social links: A block in Klaviyo's email drag-and-drop editor that allows you to provide the links to your social sites in your emails. You can add a maximum of four links, e.g., Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube. In Klaviyo's Setup Wizard, you can set these four links and have them automatically appear in the footer of all email templates.

Soft bounce: a soft bounce is always caused by a temporary reason, such as a full inbox or the recipient email server being down momentarily. For soft bounces, Klaviyo will try sending emails for up to 48 hours. After the 48-hour period, attempts to send will cease but the recipient will not automatically get suppressed in your account. The next time you try to send to this person again, we will try for another 48 hours. SEE ALSO: Hard bounce.

Started Checkout: the event triggering this metric varies depending on how data is coming to Klaviyo:

• Shopify and Magento: This metric is tracked when a customer enters their contact and shipping information on the first page of the checkout process and clicks continue.
• BigCommerce: this metric is tracked when a customer enters their contact and shipping information on the page before the payment page in the BigCommerce checkout process and clicks continue.
• WooCommerce: this metric is tracked when a customer is logged into their account, has added something to their cart, then views the checkout page; or, when a customer adds something to their cart, views the checkout page, enters billing email address.

Subscribed to List: this metric is recorded when a contact subscribes to a Klaviyo list directly via a Klaviyo form. If someone gets added to a subscriber list in any other way, such as clicking Accepts Marketing when checking out or getting added manually, no Subscribed to List event will be recorded.

Suppressed: The status of a contact once they unsubscribe from an email, an email sent to them hard bounces, or they are manually added to the Suppression List. Once someone is suppressed, they are considered inactive in your account. Klaviyo will automatically remove all suppressed users from any flow or campaign send. View your account's suppression list.

T

Transactional: type of message sent as a function of the purchasing process; for example, an order confirmation email or a shipping notification sent via SMS. Someone must be an SMS subscriber to receive transactional SMS messages, but they don't need to opt in for transactional emails. 

U

Unique visitors: also called "unique website visitors" or "uniques," these are the number of different people who did something. For example, a company may have 10,000 total website visits in a week, but 3,500 unique visitors during that time because many went back more than once.

UTM parameters: identifying text added to a URL that aids in attribution later on. When creating a campaign or a flow email, you can have Klaviyo automatically add UTM tracking parameters to links so you can see the results in Google Analytics. For SMS messages, you must add UTM parameters manually. (The name UTM comes from Urchin Tracking Model; Urchin was acquired by Google in 2005 and became Google Analytics). 

W

Web tracking: by adding specific code to your site, you can automatically track visitors and their activity; this is called web tracking. You can enable web tracking through Klaviyo's Setup Wizard, or you can set it up anytime through the Getting Started tab. There are two key types of tracking: homepage tracking (with the Active on Site metric) and product page tracking (with the Viewed Product metric). NOTE: Instructions to set up Web Tracking will be specific to your specific website/store. Product page tracking is not currently available for all ecommerce platforms.