How we made email and SMS the most profitable channel for a DTC skincare brand.
9-month engagement (ongoing)·Klaviyo email + SMS
A DTC clean skincare brand had 85,000 subscribers, a tanking sender reputation, and email contributing 14% of revenue when it should have been doing 30-plus. The previous agency had been blasting the full list weekly with promotional content and watching open rates collapse. We triaged deliverability (which meant shrinking the list before growing it), rebuilt the full lifecycle flow architecture, added SMS as a complementary channel, and stood up a quarterly hygiene cycle. Nine months later, email and SMS combined drive 38% of revenue, inbox placement is back in primary, and the brand stopped depending on paid social to carry every new product launch.
38%
Revenue from email + SMS
up from 14%
5.4x
Email-attributed revenue
$84K → $456K / mo
Primary
Inbox placement recovered
from the promotions tab
We were one warning away from getting Klaviyo to drop us. Six months later email is our most profitable channel and we trust the numbers.
What we walked into
The brand was three years old, doing roughly $600K/month in revenue, with a Klaviyo account that had been on autopilot for two years. Email had been someone’s part-time job since launch and looked like it.
Five findings from the first-week audit:
Deliverability was in active crisis.
Gmail was placing 84% of sends in the promotions tab. Apple Mail Privacy Protection was hiding open data, but the underlying engagement signals (clicks, replies, manual moves to primary) showed sender reputation at the bottom of the Google Postmaster Tools scale. Microsoft SNDS showed the IP at "Yellow" trending toward "Red." One more bad week of sends and they would have been blocked outright.
The full list was being mailed every send.
All 85,000 subscribers got every campaign, including 31,000 contacts who hadn't opened anything in over 12 months. Mailing dead addresses is the single fastest way to destroy sender reputation, and they were doing it twice a week.
Flow architecture was 30% of what it should have been.
The "welcome series" was one email sent immediately at signup, then nothing. The abandoned cart flow fired once at 60 minutes and never followed up. No browse abandonment, no post-purchase series, no replenishment flow, no win-back, no sunset, no birthday. Skincare is a replenishment category and they had no replenishment flow.
Zero segmentation.
Same email to a first-time visitor, a 30-day-old customer, a 6-time VIP buyer, and a churned subscriber from 2023. The platform was capable of segmentation; the previous agency wasn't using it.
SPF/DKIM/DMARC were misconfigured.
DMARC was set to p=none (monitoring only), DKIM was using a default 1024-bit key, and SPF had three redundant includes that were close to hitting the 10-lookup limit. To Gmail's authentication checks, the domain looked sketchy.
The previous agency had been billing $4,800/month for “email marketing management” and the only deliverable was a weekly promotional blast to the entire list. The brand was effectively training subscribers and inbox providers to ignore them.
What we did
Deliverability first. Lifecycle infrastructure second. Send less, earn more.
Deliverability triage
Before sending another campaign, stop the bleeding. This part of the engagement looked counterintuitive to the client because we shrank the list and slowed the send cadence in week one, which feels backwards to most founders.
- Authentication rebuild. DMARC moved through p=none to p=quarantine over 30 days, with reports actively monitored. DKIM rotated to 2048-bit keys. SPF cleaned up to two includes. BIMI configured for visual brand verification in Gmail and Apple Mail.
- List validation pass. Ran all 85,000 contacts through Kickbox. Results: 21,000 invalid or risky addresses suppressed immediately, another 12,000 flagged for re-engagement-or-suppress.
- Engagement-based suppression. Subscribers with no opens, clicks, or site visits in 120+ days were moved to a re-engagement segment. After a 3-email re-engagement series with a 14-day window, non-responders were suppressed from regular sends (kept on the list for compliance but excluded from the engaged sending audience).
- List ended month 1 at 52,000 active subscribers. Down 39% from the starting count. We had this conversation with the client on day one and they trusted the math.
- Reputation monitoring stood up. Google Postmaster Tools, Microsoft SNDS, and a third-party reputation tool tracked daily during the recovery period.
Sender reputation moved from “Bad” to “Medium” within three weeks. Inbox placement recovered to primary tab on roughly 60% of Gmail sends by end of month one, up from 16%.
Lifecycle ladder rebuild
This is the core of the engagement. A lifecycle ladder is the set of automated flows that catch a subscriber at every behaviorally meaningful moment in the customer journey. Each flow is a small automated revenue stream that compounds over time, and unlike campaigns, flows don’t require constant content production once they’re built.
The full ladder we built:
| Flow | Trigger | Length | Channel | Purpose |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Welcome series | Email signup | 6 emails / 14 days | Email + SMS (opt-in) | Brand story, ingredient education, first-order incentive |
| Browse abandonment | Product page view, no add to cart | 3 emails / 5 days | Recover research-stage visitors | |
| Abandoned cart | Add to cart, no checkout | 4 emails + 1 SMS / 5 days | Email + SMS | Recover purchase-intent visitors |
| Abandoned checkout | Reached checkout, didn’t complete | 3 emails / 48 hours | Email + SMS | Recover highest-intent abandonment |
| Post-purchase series | Order placed | 5 emails / 60 days | Shipping confirmations, product education, review request, replenishment setup | |
| Replenishment flow | Days-since-purchase based on product cycle | 3 emails / 14 days | Email + SMS | Replenish at the moment of need |
| Win-back | No purchase in 90 days | 3 emails / 21 days | Recover lapsing customers | |
| VIP / loyalty | 3+ orders or $300+ LTV | Quarterly | Email + SMS | Early access, loyalty rewards, named recognition |
| Sunset | No engagement after re-engagement attempts | 1 final email | Confirm unsubscribe before suppression | |
| Birthday / anniversary | Date-based | 1 email | Email + SMS | Personal moment, gift incentive |
Two flows did the heaviest lifting:
Welcome seriesmoved from 1 email to 6 over 14 days. Open rate on welcome 1 jumped to 64% (vs. 22% for promotional campaigns), and the welcome series alone generated $0.94 in revenue per subscriber over the 14-day window — more than the previous setup’s entire flow revenue per subscriber over their full lifecycle.
Replenishment flow is the move that DTC skincare brands routinely miss. Most products in this category have a 30–60 day usage cycle. We timed replenishment emails to land at the 25-day, 45-day, and 65-day marks for first-time buyers, with product-specific messaging. The flow recovered 18% of one-time buyers into repeat buyers within 90 days of first purchase.
Segmentation framework
Email performance is downstream of segmentation. Same content, different segment, different result. We built segmentation around four axes:
- RFM (Recency, Frequency, Monetary). Segmented the customer base into VIP, loyal, at-risk, and lapsed tiers. Each tier gets different offers, different cadence, and different content mix.
- Predictive CLV.Klaviyo’s predicted CLV model identified high-value prospects early, routing them into VIP flows before they hit the order-count threshold.
- Behavioral signals. Browse history, product views, add-to-cart without purchase, and email engagement (opens, clicks) all fed into dynamic segments that updated in real time.
- Engagement bands. 30-day engaged, 60-day engaged, 90-day engaged, 120-day+ unengaged. Campaign sends only go to the engaged bands. Unengaged contacts only receive re-engagement flows.
Result: campaign sends dropped in volume but rose in revenue per recipient. Fewer, more relevant emails to the right segments outperformed bigger blasts on every metric.
Quarterly list hygiene cycle
This is the workflow that protects everything else. Without it, the deliverability work from month one decays back to the original state within six months.
Every 90 days:
- 1Validation pass. Run the active list through Kickbox or NeverBounce. Suppress new invalids.
- 2Engagement-based suppression review. Move 90-day non-openers to a re-engagement segment, run the re-engagement series, suppress non-responders.
- 3Reputation audit. Pull Google Postmaster and Microsoft SNDS data, check for warning signals.
- 4DMARC report review. Catch any unauthorized senders using the domain (often a sign of phishing attempts or a forgotten legacy tool still sending mail).
- 5Authentication health check.Confirm DKIM keys haven’t rotated unexpectedly, SPF still resolves clean, DMARC alignment is holding.
The list size oscillates as a result. After month one’s contraction to 52K, the list grew back to 64K by month 3 (clean acquisition), dipped to 58K after the month-3 hygiene pass, and ended month 9 at 78K active subscribers. Smaller than the original 85K. Vastly more engaged.
SMS as the complementary layer
SMS was not added as a separate channel. It was added as a layer on top of email, surgical and time-sensitive only.
- Opt-in collection. Welcome series included an SMS opt-in moment at email 3, with a clear value exchange (early access to product launches, restock alerts, shipping updates). 14% of email subscribers opted into SMS over time.
- Use cases limited to four. Abandoned cart recovery (high urgency), abandoned checkout (highest urgency), shipping/order updates (transactional), restock alerts (subscriber-requested). No promotional SMS blasts.
- Compliance built in. TCPA-compliant opt-in language, easy STOP handling, no surprise messages, quiet hours respected. The brand was never going to take a compliance shortcut to drive a 2% revenue lift.
By month 9, SMS was contributing roughly 6% of total revenue on top of email’s 32%, for the combined 38% headline.
Campaign content shift
Campaigns (the manual sends on top of the automated flows) got restructured too:
- Cadence. Moved from 2 blasts per week to 2–3 segmented sends per week to engaged segments only. Total send volume dropped; revenue per send rose.
- Mix. 60% educational/brand content, 30% product and promotional, 10% community and UGC. The previous setup was 90%+ promotional.
- Send time optimization. Klaviyo’s Smart Send Time tested and rolled out across campaigns, lifting open rates another 3–4 points above the segmentation-driven baseline.
The previous setup was 90%+ promotional. Subscribers had been trained to either delete on sight or unsubscribe. Rebalancing the mix took roughly 60 days for engagement metrics to recover meaningfully.
The math
| Metric | Baseline | Month 9 | Δ |
|---|---|---|---|
| Total monthly revenue | $600K | $1.2M | 2x |
| Email + SMS share of revenue | 14% | 38% | +24 pts |
| Email revenue (monthly) | ~$84K | ~$384K | 4.6x |
| SMS revenue (monthly) | $0 | ~$72K | New channel |
| Combined email + SMS revenue | ~$84K | ~$456K | 5.4x |
| Active subscriber list size | 85,000 | 78,000 | −8% |
| Revenue per recipient (campaign) | $0.18 | $1.42 | 7.9x |
| Open rate (engaged segments) | 14% | 38% | +24 pts |
| Click rate (engaged segments) | 0.8% | 3.2% | 4x |
| Spam complaint rate | 0.41% | 0.04% | −90% |
| Flow vs. campaign revenue split | 30% / 70% | 55% / 45% | Inverted |
| Repeat purchase rate (90-day) | 18% | 34% | +89% |
On the list shrinkage. This is the metric most clients flinch at. A smaller list is the right outcome when the starting list was full of dead addresses tanking your sender reputation. Revenue per recipient is the metric that matters; total list size is not. RPR moved 7.9x, which is the underlying story.
On the flow vs. campaign split inversion. Healthy email programs in DTC are flow-heavy, not campaign-heavy. Flows are the always-on revenue engine that runs without weekly content production. The split moved from 30/70 to 55/45 because the flow infrastructure went from incomplete to comprehensive, not because we sent fewer campaigns (campaigns also grew in absolute revenue).
On the 90-day repeat purchase rate. The replenishment flow is the lever here. Skincare buyers run out of product on a predictable cycle and a well-timed email at the 30–45 day mark recaptures them at the moment of need. This single flow is responsible for roughly 40% of the repeat purchase rate improvement.
What we’d flag to anyone reading this
This worked because four things were already true. They aren’t always.
The category had real replenishment economics.
Skincare, supplements, pet wellness, coffee, and household consumables all share this property: customers run out of product on a predictable cycle. Categories without replenishment economics (apparel, furniture, one-time purchases) get a different email playbook with different math. We're upfront about which type of business this applies to.
There was an existing customer base to nurture.
The brand had roughly 35,000 past purchasers when we started. Email and lifecycle marketing work on existing relationships first, acquisition second. Brands with under 5,000 customers should be focused on acquisition, not lifecycle, for a different 6 months.
The product was good enough to support repeat purchase.
Skincare review profile averaged 4.7 stars. Replenishment flows fail when the product fails. We've turned down email engagements where the review profile told us the replenishment math wouldn't work.
The brand committed to content production.
The 60/30/10 content mix requires actual educational and brand content, not just promotional offers. Brands that want to stay 90% promotional can't get to 38% revenue contribution because subscribers stop opening.
And a fifth thing worth naming: deliverability recovery is reversible if discipline lapses.
The quarterly hygiene cycle is non-negotiable. Brands that take their foot off the hygiene pedal after results come in watch deliverability decay back to the original state within 6–12 months. We treat this as a permanent operational practice, not a one-time fix.
Engagement details
- Team on the account
- 1 strategist, 1 lifecycle lead, 1 email designer, 0.5 copywriter, 0.25 deliverability specialist
- Tool stack
- Klaviyo (email + SMS), Kickbox (list validation), Google Postmaster Tools, Microsoft SNDS, DMARC report parser, Shopify
- Content cadence
- 2–3 campaign sends per week to engaged segments, all automated flows running 24/7, quarterly hygiene reviews
- Reporting cadence
- Weekly flow performance summary, monthly executive review, quarterly QBR with hygiene cycle reporting
- Contract structure
- 3-month minimum, month-to-month after that
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