How To Make It Easier For Customers To Give You Money (2)

Most brands focus way too much on email revenue.

But if you want to know whether your email strategy is actually working...

You need to know your retention rate.

Check out the video here.

🧵 Here’s how we calculate it inside Klaviyo for the brands we scale past $1M+:

Retention rate (in this case) =
% of customers who bought once 6–12 months ago
and came back to buy again in the last 6 months.

It tells you how well your emails are driving repeat purchases — not just one-off wins.

Here’s how to build it:

Step 1: Segment A – 6 to 12 month buyers

People who placed an order:
✅ At least once in the last 365 days
❌ Zero times in the last 182 days

This is your base. Customers who bought a while ago, but haven’t come back.

Step 2: Segment B – Repeat buyers

People who placed an order:
✅ At least once in the last 182 days
✅ AND at least once between 183–365 days ago

These are your retained customers.

Step 3: Do the math

Retention Rate =
(Repeat Buyers ÷ 6–12 Month Buyers) × 100

So if 17 customers came back out of 99:
(17 / 99) × 100 = 17% retention rate

That’s your benchmark.

Why it matters:

Most of your revenue should be coming from people who’ve bought before.

If your retention rate is low, your email flows and campaigns aren’t doing enough to bring people back.

You can build both segments in Klaviyo in under 10 minutes — and track this month over month.

It’s one of the first things we audit when we take on a brand doing $100K+/month.

Because if your retention sucks, you're stuck constantly chasing new customers just to keep up.

Check out the video here.

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