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 an identified contact is active on your site; this metric is only tracked when Klaviyo Web Tracking is enabled. SEE ALSO: Web Tracking
Active profile: profiles in Klaviyo that can receive email marketing and are not suppressed for email. An active profile has not necessarily explicitly opted in to email marketing. 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 Audience > Profiles. Learn more.
Activity Feed: a feed of what’s happening with your customers and site visitors as their activity reaches Klaviyo. Navigate to Analytics > Metrics and select Activity feed to view activity across metrics. Each contact profile also has an activity feed specific to that customer.
C
Campaign: a one-time, targeted marketing send to a pre-established group of contacts, using a channel such as email, SMS, or mobile push. Available channels depend on your account’s setup.
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 shopping carts that are abandoned without a completed purchase. Calculate it as (abandoned carts ÷ carts created) × 100. For a checkout-only abandonment rate, use (1 − completed checkouts ÷ started checkouts) × 100, counting completions from the same set of started checkouts.
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: connects a recipient’s action, such as placing an order, to a message within an attribution window. Qualifying interactions and windows differ by channel: email can use opens or clicks, while SMS can use delivery or clicks. You can adjust attribution settings 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 report that brings together performance metrics for your business. Find dashboards and related views in these locations:
- Analytics > Dashboards: analyze the conversion metrics that matter most to your business while visualizing how your emails and SMS messages are performing.
- Analytics > Metrics: view charts for individual metrics and choose a timespan.
- Audience > Lists & segments: view and manage your lists and segments.
- Analytics > Metrics > Activity feed: view contact activity across metrics and filter 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 mail server accepts the message you’ve sent. Only after an email is successfully delivered does deliverability come 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: a single occurrence of an action, such as a customer placing an order. A metric groups events of the same type, such as Placed Order. 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, behavior, or date. For example, a flow can start when someone joins a list or segment, places an order, or reaches a date stored on their profile. Flows can contain messages such as emails and text messages.
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 address. Klaviyo automatically suppresses email addresses that hard bounce and excludes them from future emails; it does not delete the profiles. To find them, navigate to Audience > Profiles, select View suppressed profiles, and filter Reason by Email bounced. 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 numerical address that identifies a device on an IP network. IPv4 addresses use numbers separated by periods; IPv6 addresses use groups of hexadecimal characters separated by colons.
Item: a single product purchased within an ecommerce order.
L
List: A collection of profiles in Klaviyo, maintained under Audience > Lists & segments, that are added through a signup form, subscribe page, third-party integration, the Klaviyo API, or manually through upload or copy/paste. List membership alone does not establish marketing consent.
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.
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.
O
Ordered Product: this metric is tracked when a customer places an order. NOTE: 1 Ordered Product event is tracked for each item purchased. If someone purchases 3 items in a single purchase event, there will be 1 Placed Order event and 3 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 (the configured period after that interaction), 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. NOTE: 1 Placed Order event is tracked for each purchase event. To view the event data Klaviyo tracks for an order:
- Navigate to Analytics > Metrics and select Placed Order for your ecommerce integration.
- Select Activity feed.
- Open the 3-dot menu beside an order and select Activity details to view its event properties.
Product feed: a set of rules that selects products from your catalog for recommendations. Use a feed in campaign or flow emails by adding a Product block and choosing Dynamic content. Product feeds work with supported ecommerce catalogs, including BigCommerce, Magento, Shopify, Spree, and WooCommerce, as well as custom catalogs.
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 refund is processed for an order in your store. NOTE: This metric is only available for certain integrations.
Return on investment (ROI): the ratio of Owned Revenue (see above) generated to the amount spent on Klaviyo. For example, if you pay $1,000 a month and generate $35,000 in Owned Revenue, your 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 "retailbrand.com" part would be your root domain after removing the subdomain "email".
S
Segment: A collection of profiles in Klaviyo, maintained under Audience > Lists & segments, 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 them 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 links to your social sites in your emails, such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube. Use Add icon to add a social link, then enter its Link address. Include the block in a base template to reuse it in campaign and flow emails.
Soft bounce: a soft bounce is 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. A single soft bounce does not automatically suppress the address, but Klaviyo suppresses it after 7 consecutive soft bounces within the past 2 years. A successful delivery resets that count. If the address remains eligible for email, a future send can be attempted for another 48 hours. SEE ALSO: Hard bounce.
Started Checkout: called Checkout Started in some integrations. The event triggering this metric varies depending on how data is coming to Klaviyo:
- Shopify: Checkout Started is tracked when Klaviyo receives checkout information with a valid email address or phone number. Customers do not always need to finish the shipping step first; timing depends on the checkout setup.
- Magento 1: 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 Klaviyo receives a cart containing at least 1 item and a valid customer email address. For a logged-in customer, this can happen when they add an item to their cart, before they reach the payment page.
- 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 completes a subscription associated with a Klaviyo list. This can come from a Klaviyo form or another subscription method, such as an integration. Adding a profile to a list without subscribing them does not by itself record this event.
Suppressed: The email status of a contact who has unsubscribed, hard bounced, reached the repeated soft-bounce threshold, or been manually suppressed. Klaviyo excludes suppressed profiles from email marketing campaigns and flows. Email suppression does not change SMS consent. Transactional email follows separate sending rules. View your account's suppression list.
T
Transactional: Type of message sent in response to an action, such as a purchase or password reset; 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. Flow emails designated as transactional in Klaviyo can be routed through a transactional sending domain, a branded sending domain configured for transactional email traffic. See Understanding transactional messages for details on designation.
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 flow message, you can have Klaviyo automatically add UTM tracking parameters to links so you can see the results in Google Analytics. Automatic UTM tracking is available for both email and SMS. For SMS, enable UTM tracking and use Klaviyo’s link shortening. (The name UTM comes from Urchin Tracking Module; 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 identified visitors and their activity; this is called web tracking. Set it up through your ecommerce integration or by manually installing Klaviyo’s onsite tracking code, following the instructions for your platform. There are 2 key types of tracking: website activity (with the Active on Site metric) and product page activity (with the Viewed Product metric). NOTE: Instructions to set up web tracking are specific to your website or store. Product page tracking is not available for all ecommerce platforms.