In this idea
The email is ready. The customer might not be.
Imagine buying a jacket on Monday, chasing a missing parcel on Thursday and receiving “Your next favourite is here” on Friday. The campaign has good photography, a working button and a perfectly respectable subject line. It also arrives while you are wondering whether your first favourite will arrive at all.
Nothing in the email has to be broken for the experience to feel wrong. The problem is what the brand knows, and whether its marketing acts on it.
Our view: choosing who should sit out a promotion is part of the creative work. Before polishing the next send, ask what has changed for the person receiving it.
01 / Email / Customer experience
The customer before the calendar.
A campaign calendar tells you what the business wants to say. An order, a return or a support conversation tells you what the customer may need to hear. Put the two next to each other.
Start with one question: would this message still make sense if the person replying to their support ticket sent it? If the answer is uncomfortable, a more charming subject line will not solve the problem.
This is especially useful before Black Friday. Welcome offers, cart reminders, daily campaigns and SMS can all be reasonable on their own. Together, they can repeat the same offer, contradict a recent purchase or interrupt an unresolved problem. Our Black Friday email and SMS plan covers the campaign calendar. This is the check to run against it.
Keep the decision specific to the message. Someone who has just bought may still want useful care advice. Someone waiting for a refund may still need a refund update. “Do not send this promotion” should never become “stop communicating”.
02 / Email / Customer experience
Help before you sell.
When there is an unresolved delivery, product or refund issue, decide whether the next promotional message should wait. Use the current status and the nature of the problem. A pre-purchase question about sizing is different from a damaged order awaiting a replacement.
Klaviyo’s Zendesk integration guidance specifically describes excluding customers with open tickets from selected campaigns and flows. That makes support context something the marketing team can act on.
There is a practical catch: “ticket opened recently” does not necessarily mean “issue unresolved now”. A customer may have several tickets. In the documented Zendesk integration, the resolved event is sent when a ticket is closed, not merely marked solved. Agree with the support team which signal is trustworthy, and check what your own integration actually supplies.
Illustrative example · A delayed order
Hold the “Complete your look” cross-sell. Continue the order updates and let the support owner send a useful response: “We’re checking the delivery status of your jacket. We’ll update you by tomorrow afternoon, even if we’re still waiting for the carrier.”
Use a promise like this only when the team can meet it. An automated apology without a next step gives the customer another thing to chase.
Keep service messages in their proper service workflow. Adding a sale banner to a delivery update does not make the promotion essential.
03 / Email / Customer experience
Wait when the reason has changed.
A purchase can make yesterday’s message irrelevant. The person who completed checkout no longer needs the abandoned-cart reminder. The person who bought a large refill pack yesterday probably does not need another replenishment prompt today.
For cart recovery, Klaviyo documents a profile filter that checks whether someone has placed an order since entering the flow. Profile filters are checked again before flow actions; metric-based trigger filters are only checked at entry. A check at the start of a journey is therefore not a substitute for checking eligibility later.
Illustrative example · The order is already placed
Skip “Still thinking it over?” once the purchase is recorded. Let the order confirmation do its job. Later, offer something useful for that product: “Three ways to get the fit right”, for example, when the customer can actually try it on.
Some messages should disappear altogether. Others need a better moment. Write down which is which. A stale countdown or an expired offer should not return just because a waiting period has ended.
04 / Email / Customer experience
One customer. Several sends.
The customer does not see your campaign and flow labels. They see everything that arrives. Review email and SMS together, then choose which message deserves priority when several become eligible at once.
Klaviyo’s Smart Sending documentation makes two distinctions worth remembering: email and SMS have separate sending windows, and messages skipped by Smart Sending are not automatically rescheduled. A frequency setting is useful, but it does not decide whether a promotion is appropriate during a service problem.
Illustrative example · The overlapping offer
A new subscriber is due their promised welcome offer while a general sale campaign is also scheduled. Check that the offers agree and choose a clear first message. If the welcome email already explains the relevant offer, the campaign may add nothing for that person.
An SMS repeating the same discount minutes later needs a reason of its own. Access to another channel is not, by itself, that reason.
For a closer look at how to coordinate the two, read Email flows vs campaigns. The useful outcome is a shared priority order, with deliberate exceptions for messages people are expecting.
05 / Email / Customer experience
Give the pause an ending.
A pause needs an owner and an exit. Otherwise, a sensible exclusion can quietly become a group of customers nobody ever contacts again.
For each rule, record the message it affects, the signal that starts it, the condition that ends it and the person responsible when the data is unclear. Keep these rules separate from unsubscribe and channel-consent status. A support ticket closing does not grant permission to market to someone.
- Unresolved issue: review relevant promotions again when the issue is genuinely resolved. Do not immediately release every message that was skipped.
- Recent purchase: retire recovery prompts that no longer apply. Make later recommendations depend on the product and likely next need.
- Competing messages: keep the higher-priority send. Reassess whether the other still adds anything after it.
Set a review point for stale support states or missing data. If the helpdesk connection stops updating, the team needs to know. A conservative decision to hold a promotion should trigger a check, not an indefinite disappearance.
Before going live, test the complete sequence with test profiles: open the issue, queue a message, resolve the issue, then check the next eligible action. Include a purchase made during a delay and a customer with more than one ticket. Inspect the actual send or skip reason.
06 / Email / Customer experience
Review the decision, not just the send.
Start with one campaign and one flow. Add the exclusions that address a clear customer problem, then inspect what happened. This is easier to learn from than switching on a large set of unexplained rules.
Track why messages were held, how long people stayed out and whether they returned to the intended journey. Look at complaints, unsubscribes, support replies and subsequent purchases alongside campaign revenue. Fewer complaints may be encouraging, but a small sample or a different audience can change the result; do not present a before-and-after comparison as proof that the pause caused an uplift.
Use these five questions in the next campaign review:
- Is there an unresolved issue that makes this promotion inappropriate?
- Has the customer already done what we are asking them to do?
- Are they receiving another message that does this job better?
- If we wait, what makes the message relevant again?
- Which useful service updates must continue?
Then make the decision: help, wait or send. When the customer is eligible, the offer is relevant and the timing makes sense, send it with confidence.
The care you put into the first order gives the second order somewhere to begin. Sometimes that care is visible in a beautifully written email. Sometimes it is visible in the space you leave.
A second thought. A next step.
Make room for better timing.
Let’s look at what your customers receive, and where a little more care could change the experience.
Talk it through with us