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I love interviewing founders and leaders, but I also love interviewing the people who are on the tools every day, mastering their craft, making the money. The founders get the headlines, but they're not the ones in the platform at 10pm working out why a flow isn't firing. So when Klaviyo gave us three recording slots at K:SYD, I saw a chance to do something different with one of them.
This week's episode is the second of three recorded live at the event, and I got a bit cheeky with the format. Instead of another founder or leader interview, I asked for a panel of certified Klaviyo Champions: Lachi from July, Hani from Step One, and Alice from APG & Co, who runs digital across Sportscraft, Saba and JAG. Three very different businesses, one very hot room, and a range of approaches to discounting, RFM, CDPs and where AI is taking email and CRM next. Whether you're on Klaviyo or not, there's something in this one for you.
Cheers
Bushy
EPISODE CHEAT SHEET
Inside the Emails of July, Step One and APG & Co: Three Klaviyo Champions on Why Segmentation Is Dying | The Klaviyo #632
⏭️ SKIP TO THE GOOD BITS
Why APG & Co ditched ExactTarget for all three brands at once (5:30)
The arms race: building around Klaviyo and Shopify instead of waiting (9:55)
Why flows, not campaigns, drive July's revenue (13:53)
Pavlovian discounting: solve a problem, don't plug a revenue gap (17:38)
Post-purchase flows that turn happy customers into acquisition (19:19)
RFM switch points: the moment your targeted message should land (22:44)
The case against segments: one to one as the North Star (29:46)
AI on the tools: basketball undies, travel dates and July's data lake (32:11)
💬 QUOTE OF THE DAY
"I'm in an arms race with all my providers. I'm in an arms race with Klaviyo. I'm in an arms race with Shopify, because I'm not going to wait for them to build it."
🧠 THE BIG LESSON
Stop blasting, start switching: the new rules of discounting and segmentation
Put three Klaviyo Champions from three very different businesses in one room and you'd expect three different playbooks. Instead, they converged on the same idea: the blanket discount and the static segment are both on the way out, and the brands replacing them are watching for the moment when a customer's behaviour changes.
Rule 1: Discount to solve a problem, not to plug a revenue gap
A discount should drive a specific behaviour: move old stock, get a customer to try a new category, nudge someone who is close to converting. The moment you reach for it to hit a number, you're training your best customers to wait and giving away margin to people who would have bought anyway.
The future really looks like discounting to solve a problem, not discounting to plug a revenue or profit gap.
Rule 2: Deploy at the switch points
A customer moving from loyal to at-risk is the moment a targeted message earns its keep. Set up triggers on RFM category changes so the incentive lands when it's relevant, not when the trading calendar says so.
You can get a very targeted message when they go from a loyal customer to an at risk customer, and we want to really nail that down.
Rule 3: Build for one-to-one, not for better segments
Segments are a workaround, our best current approximation of a personal message, and AI is closing the gap to true one-to-one faster than most teams are ready for. The work now is getting your data clean, connected, and strategically collected so you can use it one-to-one the moment it's available.
I think the North Star here is you don't have segments.
The proof that behaviour-led beats blast-led is already in the market. Klaviyo's Princess Polly case study, mentioned in this episode, shows that over 60% of their Klaviyo revenue comes from automated flows, with flow revenue growing more than fourfold year on year. The principle transfers to any category: stop asking how to build a better segment tree, and start asking what behaviour you want to change, and what signal tells you it's changing.
✏️ ECOMMERCE ACTION TIPS
Trigger a flow the moment a customer moves from loyal to at risk, that's when the nudge actually converts. (~23:32)
Watch 10 session recordings in Hotjar or Clarity before you spend $20k on a personalisation tool. (~29:18)
Pipe site search questions into your CRM so your abandon email answers the exact thing the customer asked. (~34:25)
Give retail staff one data point to capture at POS (July's is travel dates) and sync it to your CRM for a perfectly timed flow. (~36:24)
Track the size of your RFM segments every month, a growing at-risk group is your earliest churn warning. (~56:35)
💾 TECH MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE
Klaviyo. The platform all three guests are certified Champions on: B2C CRM, RFM via marketing analytics, and the new "moves in or out of a segment" trigger
Shopify (and Shopify POS). July's widget for capturing travel dates in store syncs through POS; APG & Co's replatform is a key part of their loyalty rebuild
BigQuery. Where Step One runs custom RFM cohort models before piping them back into Klaviyo as properties
Claude. Both Step One and APG & Co have enterprise accounts; July built "Pulse", their natural language data lake, on it with MCP connectors into Shopify, Klaviyo, Deputy, Meta and Google
Hotjar / Microsoft Clarity. The cheap session recording tools the panel recommends before any personalisation tool purchase
🎧 OTHER EPS YOU MIGHT LIKE
Who Owns Your Customer? Anna Samkova on Retail's Biggest Blind Spot | EP500
"The CDP is the tech, but what you're getting is a view of customer" was one of the best lines in this episode. Anna goes deep into why most retailers can't identify their high-value customers, and why a CDP is her non-negotiable.
Retail's Digital Shift: IAB's Gai Le Roy on Balancing Value and Privacy | EP444
Strategic data collection as a value exchange came up repeatedly this week. Gai's research shows exactly what consumers will share, including their date of birth, when they understand what they get in return.
The Secrets Behind a 48% Conversion Lift at Nutrition Warehouse | EP551
This week's panel argued one to one personalisation is the North Star. Heather is already building it: real-time segmentation during a single site visit, powered by a loyalty program designed as a data-collection engine.
💬 CONTINUE THE CONVERSATION
I expect this one to be divisive. Is segmentation actually dying, or is one to one personalisation still five years of vendor promises away? And the discounting debate is worth having: would your trading calendar survive a ban on blanket 20% off blasts? Jump in, whether you're a regular or it's your first time.
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