Klaviyo retention strategy is often used as shorthand for email flows, SMS campaigns, and segmentation. But Purdy & Figg’s reported results point to a more useful definition: building a connected customer journey that turns product interest, first purchase, replenishment, and seasonal excitement into measurable relationships.

The UK home-care brand says it achieved 72% year-over-year ecommerce revenue growth and 102% year-over-year growth in Klaviyo-attributed revenue after using the platform to unify customer data and coordinate multichannel marketing. Those are impressive vendor-case-study figures, but the deeper lesson is not that a new CRM automatically creates growth. It is that brands scale retention when they can see customer behavior clearly enough to make each message more timely, specific, and valuable. (klaviyo.com)

The Purdy & Figg case study in context

Purdy & Figg is not selling cleaning as a purely functional purchase. Its current positioning emphasizes natural formulas, essential-oil fragrances, refillable bottles, and a flexible refill subscription. In other words, the brand is trying to make a low-glamour household chore feel more like a sensory home ritual. That distinction matters because it changes what retention marketing needs to do. (purdyandfigg.com)

A conventional cleaning-products retailer might focus its CRM program on discounts, replenishment reminders, and bulk-buy offers. A challenger brand with fragrance-led products has more narrative material to work with: scent discovery, limited editions, seasonal routines, collector items, home-care education, gifting, and membership benefits. The customer is not only buying a surface cleaner; they are buying into a more elevated way of maintaining their home.

According to Klaviyo’s customer case study, Purdy & Figg had been using the platform for more than five years when CRM and Retention Lead Matt Davis described the value of having customer and campaign data together. The published case study also reports that the company has more than 1.2 million active email profiles. That is important scale context: a fragmented data setup that may be manageable at 10,000 contacts becomes a serious operational and commercial liability when the audience reaches seven figures. (klaviyo.com)

The core problem Davis describes is familiar to many growing ecommerce teams. They may have data, but not a usable view of the person behind the data. Website behavior lives in analytics, orders live in the commerce platform, subscription status lives elsewhere, support history sits in another tool, and campaign engagement appears inside the email platform. Teams can export spreadsheets and build reports, but the time lag makes the data less actionable.

Purdy & Figg’s reported “aha moment” was not simply seeing more dashboard metrics. It was being able to follow the onboarding journey and observe retention and Net Promoter Score movement. That is a far more mature use of CRM: connecting messages and experiences to changes in customer quality, rather than judging every campaign only by opens and clicks.

What a Klaviyo retention strategy actually means

A Klaviyo retention strategy should not begin with a list of automations. It should begin with the commercial questions a brand wants customer data to answer.

For a consumer brand, those questions usually include:

Which acquisition source produces customers who return, rather than simply customers who convert once?
Which first product or starter kit predicts a second purchase?
How long does a typical customer take to use a product and reorder?
Which customer groups respond to new-product launches without needing a discount?
What experience causes a buyer to become an advocate, subscriber, or high-value repeat customer?
Which customers are becoming inactive before they disappear completely?

The platform is the execution layer. The strategy is the decision system behind it.

Purdy & Figg’s account of its migration and expansion suggests a shift from disconnected campaign activity to a lifecycle model. Instead of asking, “What newsletter should we send this week?” the team could ask, “What should a new customer see after they buy a starter kit, and what behavior tells us they are ready for a refill, a fragrance launch, or a member offer?”

That distinction produces better work because the messages are anchored to customer context. A first-time buyer needs confidence, usage guidance, and a reason to experience the product fully. A repeat buyer may want a new scent or a subscription incentive. A lapsed customer could need a reminder of why they purchased in the first place, not another generic 20%-off code.

Centralization is useful only when it changes action

“Single customer view” is one of the most overused phrases in marketing technology. It becomes meaningful only when a team can use customer signals to alter who receives a message, when they receive it, and what they see.

In practical terms, a centralized profile should allow a retention team to combine information such as:

Identity and consent: email address, phone number where applicable, signup source, locale, and marketing permissions.
Commerce events: viewed product, added to cart, started checkout, placed order, refunded order, order value, and product purchased.
Lifecycle information: first order date, number of orders, estimated replenishment window, subscription status, and predicted customer value where available.
Engagement signals: email clicks, SMS interactions, campaign recency, support interactions, reviews, and survey responses.
Product affinity: favorite scent family, preferred category, starter-kit ownership, refill purchases, or interest in limited editions.

The point is not to collect every conceivable data point. Excess data creates clutter, privacy risk, and unreliable segmentation. The point is to identify a small number of signals that make a different marketing decision possible.

Why onboarding is the retention engine, not a welcome-email checkbox

Purdy & Figg’s emphasis on onboarding is especially revealing. Many ecommerce brands treat welcome flows as an acquisition mechanism: capture a subscriber, offer an incentive, and drive a first order. That is useful, but it is incomplete.

The higher-value question is what happens after the initial transaction. The first few days after delivery are when a customer decides whether the product solved the promised problem, whether it fits their routine, and whether they feel they made a smart purchase. For a refillable, fragrance-led cleaning product, that period is an opportunity to teach usage, set expectations, and make the sensory experience memorable.

A stronger onboarding sequence might include the following stages:

Pre-purchase education: Explain the product format, core ingredients or product principles, surfaces it is designed for, and how refills work.
Order confirmation reinforcement: Restate the value proposition and reduce buyer’s remorse with simple instructions about what arrives and how to get started.
Delivery-day activation: Give the customer a short, visual setup guide rather than assuming they understand a concentrated-refill system.
First-use inspiration: Offer specific use cases, scent stories, cleaning routines, or before-and-after content that encourages a successful first experience.
Feedback request: Ask for an honest rating or NPS-style response after sufficient time to use the product.
Replenishment preparation: Introduce refill options and membership or subscription benefits before the product is likely to run out.

This is where many brands accidentally lose repeat revenue. They send an order confirmation and then disappear for 45 days, only returning with a hard-sell replenishment email. The customer may have forgotten how to use the product, failed to get the expected result, or simply placed it in a cupboard. A thoughtful onboarding flow prevents inactivity from taking hold.

Klaviyo’s 2026 benchmark material supports the broader case for lifecycle automation: it says flows generate nearly 41% of total email revenue from just 5.3% of sends in its dataset, while campaigns account for most send volume. The same analysis says flows achieve materially higher click and placed-order rates than campaigns. That does not mean every brand should build dozens of flows; it means behavior-triggered communication tends to outperform calendar-driven volume when the underlying customer experience is sound. (klaviyo.com)

NPS should shape the journey, not sit in a slide deck

Davis links the onboarding journey to rising NPS and retention. That is a valuable pairing because NPS by itself is not a revenue metric. It is an indicator of willingness to recommend, and it can help identify friction or delight at specific lifecycle moments.

For example, if NPS drops among first-time customers who bought a starter kit, the issue could be unclear setup instructions, shipping expectations, scent mismatch, pricing surprise, or product efficacy. If NPS rises after a customer’s second refill purchase, that may signal the customer has successfully formed a habit. Those are different operational problems and opportunities.

The practical move is to connect survey responses to segmentation. Promoters can receive referral requests, review invitations, early access, or user-generated-content prompts. Passives may be invited to educational content or relevant product recommendations. Detractors should not be dumped into another promotional campaign; they should enter a service-recovery workflow that gives the team a chance to understand and resolve the issue.

The Christmas launch: why waitlists beat last-minute blasts

The standout moment in the Purdy & Figg story is its Christmas launch. Davis says the company built anticipation through a waitlist, used multiple channels, and generated more than £1 million in sales in a single day. The public case study supports the broader growth figures but does not provide a complete campaign breakdown, so marketers should view it as a directional lesson rather than a reproducible formula. (klaviyo.com)

Still, the campaign architecture is worth studying because it is fundamentally different from a typical seasonal promotion.

A last-minute holiday blast begins with inventory and a sales target. It tells the full list that a product is available, often adds urgency, and hopes demand arrives quickly. A waitlist-based launch begins much earlier. It turns attention into an identifiable audience, gives the brand a measure of demand before launch, and creates a group that has explicitly raised its hand.

What the waitlist accomplished

A well-designed waitlist does at least five jobs:

It captures high-intent shoppers before the product is available.
It lets the brand estimate demand and plan stock, staffing, and customer support.
It creates a clear segment for early-access messaging.
It provides a reason to tell an unfolding product story over several weeks.
It generates useful behavioral data: signup timing, channel source, referral activity, and engagement with previews.

For a brand positioned around fragrance and home ritual, that narrative runway matters. A Christmas range can be framed as a gift, a limited seasonal scent, a host present, a festive home reset, or a collectible object. Each angle can appeal to a different group without requiring the same message to go to everyone.

A sophisticated launch sequence could segment contacts into at least four audiences: prior customers who have already demonstrated product affinity; waitlist subscribers without a purchase; engaged email subscribers who have not joined the waitlist; and inactive contacts who should either receive a lighter-touch reactivation message or be excluded. The creative, offer, and send cadence should differ across those groups.

The campaign’s multichannel component matters too. Email is strong for explanation, imagery, product comparison, and browseable collections. SMS can be useful for a short early-access alert, restock notice, or final-hours reminder for customers who have expressly opted in. Onsite messaging can turn anonymous traffic into waitlist members. Paid social can retarget viewers or waitlist non-buyers. The important point is coordination: customers should receive a coherent story, not the same urgency message repeated across every channel.

Multichannel does not mean message duplication

The phrase “multichannel marketing” can sound like a justification to send more messages everywhere. That is not what the Purdy & Figg case suggests. The useful benefit of having channels and customer data in one place is being able to sequence communications based on what a customer has already done.

Consider a shopper who joins a holiday waitlist from Instagram, opens an email preview, clicks a particular scent, but does not buy on launch day. A poor multichannel experience sends the same launch announcement by email, SMS, and paid retargeting within an hour. A better experience uses each touchpoint differently:

Email can explain the scent profile, gifting options, and product format.
SMS can notify the subscriber that early access is closing, if consent and frequency rules allow it.
Paid retargeting can show the exact collection or category they browsed.
The website can surface social proof, delivery deadlines, and relevant bundles when they return.

This orchestration requires suppression rules as much as it requires triggers. A customer who buys should leave the acquisition and urgency sequence immediately. A customer who has received an SMS should not necessarily receive another email 15 minutes later. A subscriber who has not engaged in months should not be treated like a high-intent waitlist member.

The same restraint matters after a launch. The highest-value post-launch communication is often not another sale announcement. It may be shipping reassurance, gift-use inspiration, customer reviews, a complementary product suggestion, or a replenishment path for customers who discovered the core range through a seasonal purchase.

Reading the revenue claims without falling for attribution theater

Purdy & Figg’s reported numbers are notable: 72% year-over-year ecommerce revenue growth and 102% year-over-year growth in Klaviyo-attributed revenue. But these figures should be interpreted carefully. They are reported in a vendor-published customer case study, not an independently audited causal analysis. (klaviyo.com)

That does not make them unhelpful. It means marketers should distinguish between attributed revenue, incremental revenue, and total business growth.

Attributed revenue is revenue a platform assigns to a channel or message according to its attribution settings and measurement window. It is useful for operational decisions: which flow is producing orders, which campaign generates post-click conversions, and which segments respond. But it is not identical to proof that the message alone caused every order.

Incremental revenue asks a harder question: how much revenue would not have occurred without the marketing activity? That requires experiments, holdout groups, geo tests, or other forms of causal measurement. Total business growth is broader still. It can be influenced by product quality, inventory, pricing, creative, paid media, retail expansion, seasonality, brand awareness, website conversion, and customer service.

A practical measurement hierarchy

A retention team should avoid treating one dashboard number as the whole truth. Instead, use a hierarchy:

Business outcomes: repeat purchase rate, customer lifetime value, gross margin after marketing costs, subscription retention, refund rate, and cohort revenue.
Lifecycle outcomes: first-to-second-purchase conversion, time to second order, replenishment conversion, win-back conversion, and active-customer rate.
Channel outcomes: revenue per recipient, click rate, conversion rate, unsubscribe rate, SMS opt-out rate, and deliverability health.
Campaign diagnostics: subject-line performance, creative engagement, landing-page behavior, offer uptake, and segment-level response.

This order prevents a common mistake: optimizing for email opens while the business is quietly training customers to wait for discounts or increasing unsubscribe rates among its best buyers.

Klaviyo itself provides benchmarking tools that compare campaign performance across revenue bands and average-order-value ranges. Those benchmarks can be useful context, but they should never replace a brand’s own cohort analysis. A median revenue-per-recipient benchmark cannot tell you whether your welcome flow produces customers who reorder six months later, or whether a holiday launch created profitable demand rather than pulled forward existing purchases. (help.klaviyo.com)

What smaller ecommerce teams can copy now

Purdy & Figg has a large active email audience and a mature CRM operation. A smaller brand should not try to imitate its scale. It should copy the underlying operating model.

Start by mapping the five moments that matter most in your customer lifecycle: signup, first purchase, first successful use, replenishment or second purchase, and lapse. For each moment, identify the customer question, the proof they need, and the next action that benefits both the customer and the business.

Here is a practical 90-day retention plan:

Days 1-30: repair the foundations

Audit every signup source and ensure consent is captured accurately.
Standardize key events from the ecommerce store: viewed product, cart activity, checkout started, order placed, subscription started, refund issued, and review submitted.
Build a simple customer data dictionary so the marketing, support, and analytics teams use the same definitions.
Validate form inputs and maintain list hygiene; teams can verify new subscriber addresses before letting bad data damage deliverability and reporting.
Review suppression settings to ensure buyers leave sales sequences after converting.

Days 31-60: build the high-intent flows

Prioritize a welcome flow, cart or checkout abandonment flow, post-purchase onboarding flow, replenishment or cross-sell flow, and win-back flow. Do not launch all of them with generic copy. Write each around the specific obstacle it is designed to remove.

For example, an abandoned-cart flow should not immediately lead with a discount. The first message can answer a product question, show social proof, or remind the shopper what they selected. A post-purchase flow can focus on setup and results. A replenishment flow can use consumption timing, product education, and bundle logic rather than a blunt “buy again” prompt.

Days 61-90: introduce segmentation and experiments

Create a simple high-value customer segment, a recent first-time buyer segment, an active repeat-buyer segment, and an at-risk segment. Then test one variable at a time: launch access, educational content, a product bundle, a subscription invitation, or a customer-story angle.

The experiment should have a business hypothesis. For instance: “Giving repeat purchasers early access to a limited scent will increase launch conversion without lowering average order value.” That is much more useful than: “Let’s see whether this subject line wins.”

The overlooked role of product storytelling

Retention technology is often discussed as though it exists separately from brand. Purdy & Figg’s positioning shows why that is a mistake. Its product range is built around fragrance, home atmosphere, refills, and a less clinical relationship with cleaning. Those concepts give CRM campaigns a reason to exist between transactions. (purdyandfigg.com)

If a brand only communicates when it wants an order, customers learn that every message is a sales message. If it teaches, inspires, reassures, or helps customers get more value from a purchase, it earns more attention over time.

For a home-care brand, useful non-promotional content might include room-by-room cleaning routines, scent-pairing ideas, care instructions for different surfaces, seasonal hosting checklists, refill-storage tips, or customer-created rituals. For a skincare brand, it might be routines and ingredient education. For a software product, it might be activation guides and use-case playbooks. The category changes, but the retention principle does not: customer education is part of the product experience.

This is also why product-market fit comes before automation. No CRM workflow can sustainably compensate for unclear value, poor delivery, weak customer support, or a product that fails to earn a second purchase. Automation magnifies what is already there. If the experience is strong, it makes relevance scalable. If the experience is weak, it makes disappointment scalable.

The limits of the published case study

There were no supplied community comments or independent reactions to analyze, and the available material is primarily a Klaviyo-produced customer story. That means the strongest claims should be treated as company-reported outcomes, not neutral industry benchmarks.

Several details would be needed to fully evaluate the economics behind the performance: the exact date range, attribution window, share of revenue from email versus SMS, paid-media contribution, discounting level, gross-margin impact, list growth, and whether the Christmas launch compared like-for-like inventory and availability. None of those omissions invalidate the lessons, but they do limit what can be concluded.

The sensible takeaway is not “install Klaviyo and expect 72% growth.” It is “build a retention system capable of seeing customer behavior, improving the first-use experience, creating anticipation before launches, and measuring outcomes beyond clicks.” The platform is important because it reduces friction between data and action. The operating discipline is what makes the platform valuable.

A better retention playbook for 2026

The retention landscape is getting harder in two ways. Customers have more inbox fatigue, and brands have more tools promising AI-generated campaigns, personalization, and automated optimization. Klaviyo now markets AI-assisted campaign creation and orchestration capabilities, but faster content production does not eliminate the need for sound customer strategy. (klaviyo.com)

The winning approach is likely to be less about maximum automation and more about trustworthy automation. Brands should know what data they collect, obtain appropriate consent, maintain clean lists, set thoughtful frequency limits, and make automated decisions explainable to the team running them.

A practical 2026 retention program should aim for four qualities:

Connected: Customer, commerce, product, and consent data can inform a shared profile.
Contextual: Messages respond to lifecycle stage and actual behavior rather than only calendar dates.
Creative: Campaigns carry a distinctive brand story instead of relying solely on discounts and countdown timers.
Causal-minded: Teams use attribution for optimization but run tests to understand true lift.

Purdy & Figg’s case study is a good illustration of that framework. Its growth story combines a differentiated product narrative with lifecycle visibility, onboarding, multichannel coordination, and a pre-launch waitlist. Remove any one of those pieces and the Christmas result is less likely to be repeatable.

Conclusion: retention is a system, not a campaign calendar

The most useful lesson from Purdy & Figg is that a Klaviyo retention strategy should be built around customer progress, not campaign volume. The brand reportedly used unified data to understand what customers had seen, clicked, and purchased; used onboarding to improve retention and NPS; and used a waitlist-led Christmas launch to turn anticipation into a major sales day. (klaviyo.com)

For founders and marketers, the next step is not to copy a large brand’s exact flow chart. It is to identify where your own customer journey breaks down. Are subscribers converting but never buying again? Are first-time buyers unclear about product setup? Are launches announced before demand is built? Are repeat customers receiving the same message as prospects?

Answer those questions with cleaner data, sharper segments, useful education, and disciplined measurement. That is how retention becomes a genuine growth engine rather than an email-marketing afterthought.

FAQ

What is a Klaviyo retention strategy?

A Klaviyo retention strategy is a lifecycle marketing plan that uses customer behavior and purchase data to improve repeat purchases, subscriptions, loyalty, and customer lifetime value through email, SMS, onsite messaging, and segmentation.

How did Purdy & Figg use Klaviyo?

According to Klaviyo’s published customer case study, Purdy & Figg used the platform to centralize customer data, follow customers from onboarding through purchase behavior, coordinate multiple channels, and support a waitlist-led Christmas launch. (klaviyo.com)

What results did Purdy & Figg report?

The case study reports 72% year-over-year ecommerce revenue growth, 102% year-over-year growth in Klaviyo-attributed revenue, and more than 1.2 million active email profiles. These are company-reported figures published by Klaviyo. (klaviyo.com)

Which retention flows should an ecommerce brand build first?

Most ecommerce teams should begin with a welcome flow, cart or checkout abandonment flow, post-purchase onboarding flow, replenishment or cross-sell flow, and win-back flow. Build them around customer needs and product usage rather than generic promotional templates.

Does multichannel marketing mean sending the same message by email and SMS?

No. Effective multichannel marketing assigns each channel a role and uses suppression rules to avoid duplication. Email may carry education and product detail, while SMS can be reserved for concise, permission-based alerts such as early access or time-sensitive stock updates.

Klaviyo Retention Strategy: How Purdy & Figg Turned Customer Data Into Growth