How to Audit Your Klaviyo Account: The 43-Point Checklist

Forty-three checks, one fixed order, and the pass and flag thresholds we grade every Klaviyo account against.

What Is a Klaviyo Account Audit?

Most Klaviyo accounts fail their own audit.

A Klaviyo account audit is a structured, binary checklist that scores an ecommerce email program across four pillars: deliverability, list growth, flows, and campaigns. The version WebMedic runs on client accounts has 43 checks, in a fixed pillar order, scored as checks passed divided by 43.

We ran this exact audit on a real Shopify store doing $1.8M in trailing revenue. Email brought in $358k of that. That works out to 19%.

Anywhere under 30% gets flagged on this scorecard. Best-in-class accounts sit closer to 42%. This store had the traffic. It had a sizeable list. It had just never been systematically checked.

That's the pattern in almost every account we open cold: traffic solved, list built, program never audited end to end.

The order below is not a suggestion. It comes straight from the audit methodology: run the account health snapshot first, then deliverability, before reading a single email for copy or design.

Order	Pillar	Checks
0	Account health snapshot	6
1	Deliverability	8
2	List growth	11
3	Flows	12
4	Campaigns & design	6
	Total	43

Skip ahead to flows before clearing deliverability, and you'll spend an hour optimizing an email that was never going to land in the inbox anyway.

Why Is Deliverability Audited Before Flows or Campaigns?

Deliverability gets checked before anything else.

Deliverability is audited first because inbox placement decides whether any email gets read at all. The pass bar on this auditor's scorecard: campaign open rate above 45%, welcome email 1 open rate at 60% or higher, and a Klaviyo deliverability score holding in the 65-75+ range.

The mechanical logic is simple. The best-written flow in your account is worth zero if Gmail routes it to spam. So you verify inbox placement signals before you judge a single word of copy.

There's one check in this pillar that does double duty as a diagnostic: your welcome series' first email.

A welcome flow sends to brand-new subscribers. That means Gmail and Outlook are evaluating your sender reputation against someone with zero mail history from you. If that first email's open rate collapses, it's rarely a copy problem. It's almost always a deliverability problem, because a fresh recipient with no prior signal is the hardest test your sending reputation faces.

The read: pull the welcome Email 1 open rate on a 90-day window, then cross-check the last 30 days. If the 30-day number has dropped hard against the 90-day baseline, deliverability is sliding right now, not just historically.

One caution on this threshold, worth stating plainly rather than papering over: our sibling post, klaviyo email deliverability, cites a healthy Klaviyo deliverability score band in the 80s to 90s. This audit's own pass criteria puts healthy at roughly 65-75+. Both numbers are real. They come from different auditors scoring the same Klaviyo metric differently. Treat each as that auditor's own pass bar, not a single universal line, and don't average them.

A second place two sources disagree: click rate. Klaviyo's own in-app guidance recommends a 1.2% click rate and flags 0.9% as merely "fair." This audit's pass criteria overrides that: 0.9% and above is treated as fine, and only a genuinely low click rate gets flagged. We list both so you can judge which bar your brand wants to hold itself to.

Confirm your sending domain is authenticated before trusting any of these numbers. A fresh or unauthenticated sending domain will tank the welcome-email probe regardless of what your flow says. Klaviyo's branded sending domain guide covers the setup.

What's the Full Threshold Table for a Klaviyo Audit?

Here's the scorecard in one place.

Every row below is one auditor's pass and flag criteria from a single $18M-a-month account audit, not an industry-wide benchmark. Use it as a starting bar to test your own account against, then watch whether your numbers trend toward or away from it over time.

Metric	Pass / target	Flag threshold
Email % of total store revenue	30-40% (best ~42%)	Under 30%
Campaign vs flow revenue split	Balanced	Worse than 80/20
Campaign open rate	Above 45%, ideally above 50%	Under 45%
Welcome Email 1 open rate (90-day)	60% or above	Under 60%
Klaviyo deliverability score	~65-75+, stable or rising	Low or falling
Click rate	~0.9% or above is fine	Only flag if very low
Bounce rate	Under 1%	1% or above
Spam complaint rate (overall)	As low as possible	0.3% or above
Sign-up form submit rate	6% or above, target 6-12%	Under 6%
Welcome series length	6-7 emails	4 is low
Abandonment recovery rate	15-20% of abandoned carts/checkouts	Low single digits per email
Abandonment discount timing	No discount before email 4-5 / day 4-5	Discount in email 2 / day 1
Email cadence, any flow	Max 1 email per day	2 or more same day
Campaign send frequency	3-4 per week to engaged segment	More than 4 per week
Main campaign segment	~90-day engaged	Whole-list blasts

Source: one auditor's pass criteria from a live $18M-a-month Shopify account audit.

The one most store owners get wrong first: spam complaint rate. It's the metric ranked most important on this scorecard, ahead of open rate or click rate, because it directly damages sender reputation with Gmail and Outlook. A complaint rate at or above 0.3% overall is treated as too high, full stop.

Does your Klaviyo account pass this scorecard? Find out where you're leaking revenue, free. Take the Revenue Score. 3 minutes. No pitch.

Is Your "Abandoned Cart" Flow Actually Catching Abandoned Carts?

Here's the single highest-value finding in this audit.

Klaviyo's default flow is literally named "Abandoned Cart," but out of the box it triggers on Checkout Started, not Added to Cart. That means most stores running the default think they have cart-abandonment coverage when they only have the smaller checkout-abandonment slice.

This isn't a naming quirk. It's a revenue leak, and it's the most common misconfiguration we find in client audits.

Most shoppers who abandon do so at add-to-cart, before they ever reach the checkout step. A flow gated on Checkout Started never sees them. It only catches the smaller group who got as far as entering checkout and then left. You need both triggers running as separate flows to cover the full funnel: a true cart-abandonment flow on Added to Cart, and a checkout-abandonment flow on Checkout Started. Klaviyo's Shopify flow connector docs list both events.

This single trigger mismatch was the top finding in the $18M-a-month audit this checklist is built from: the account's #3 revenue flow was labeled "Abandoned Cart" but triggered on Checkout Started. No true cart-abandonment flow existed. Checking your own flow's trigger event, not just its name, takes two minutes in the flow builder.

The flows pillar checks coverage against eight core flow types:

Core flow	Trigger	Why it matters
Welcome series	Subscribed to list/form	Highest-engagement window you'll ever get with a subscriber
Site-abandonment	On-site, not on a product page	Slow, steady earner; acts as a shop assistant
Browse-abandonment	Viewed a product page, no add-to-cart	Highest-traffic flow; the "window shoppers"
Cart-abandonment	Added to Cart	The commonly-missing one, per the trigger trap above
Checkout-abandonment	Checkout Started	Captures only the smaller checkout-starting slice
Post-purchase	Placed order	Should split first-time vs. returning buyers
Customer winback	Lapsed customer	Re-engages before a profile goes cold
Sunset / un-engaged	Disengaged profile	Protects deliverability by trimming dead weight

Two more gaps show up constantly alongside the trigger trap: duplicate flows of the same type live at once (two post-purchase flows firing double emails at the same buyer), and a post-purchase flow missing a canceled-order exclusion filter, so someone who canceled still gets the "thanks for your order" sequence.

If you want the full build-it-right version of these flows rather than just the audit lens, our ecommerce email automation flows post covers all seven revenue flows in depth. For the smaller, specific misconfigurations beyond this trigger trap, see Klaviyo flow mistakes.

How Do You Read "Email Share of Revenue" Without Being Misled by It?

Email percent of revenue is an indicator, not the goal.

A store's email-attributed revenue share can rise even while its email program gets no better, simply because total traffic grew and fed a basic welcome flow more volume. Total year-on-year revenue growth matters more than the percentage alone, but a share stuck under 30% reliably signals real room to optimize.

In the $1.8M account from the opening example, total revenue grew 143% year on year. Email revenue grew too, up 14.9%. On the surface that looks healthy.

Look closer and the story changes. Email revenue grew mostly because overall traffic grew, which meant more people entered a basic welcome flow and bought something from it. The email program itself hadn't gotten any smarter. Growth in raw dollars didn't clear the 19%-share flag, because the share was shrinking relative to how fast the rest of the business was moving.

This is why the snapshot pillar checks both numbers, not just one. Total revenue trending up is good news. Email revenue trending up for the wrong reason, meaning it's riding traffic growth rather than program improvement, is a flag disguised as a win.

If you want a deeper read on measuring this properly across channels, see email marketing ROI for ecommerce.

How Do You Score a Klaviyo Audit, and What's a Realistic First Score?

The scoring is binary, and brutally simple.

Each of the 43 checks is scored pass or fail, no partial credit. Final score is checks passed divided by 43. Most stores running their first full audit land well under half, closer to 15-20 of 43, because flows, forms, and deliverability toggles accumulate gaps silently over years of nobody looking.

That low starting number isn't a failure. It's the normal starting point. A Klaviyo account that's been live for two or three years without a structured audit has had that long to accumulate silent gaps: a form missing a teaser, a flow missing an exclusion filter, a discount firing one email too early. None of these show up unless someone checks for them specifically, in order.

A score in the high 20s to low 30s out of 43 is a solidly healthy account. Anything above that, and you're in the top tier of accounts we see. A perfect 43/43 is rare even among accounts that have been actively managed for years, because campaigns and design checks (above-the-fold layout, footer links) tend to drift as a store redesigns its templates.

What Should You Fix First When Your Score Is Low?

Fix in pillar order, not in whatever order feels urgent.

The fix priority follows the same order as the audit: deliverability first, then list growth, then flows, then campaigns. Fixing a flow before fixing deliverability wastes the work, because a well-built flow sent to a damaged sender reputation still lands in spam.

This trips people up because the instinct is to fix the thing that looks most broken, usually a flow or a campaign. Resist it.

If deliverability checks are failing, close those first: authenticate your sending domain, build bounce segments if bounce rate is elevated, add a preferences center if complaints are elevated. Only once deliverability is clean does fixing a flow's trigger or exclusion filters actually pay off, because now the email you fixed can reach an inbox.

If deliverability passes but list growth is weak (sub-6% form submit rate), fix that next. A better flow sequence sent to a smaller list earns less than a mediocre sequence sent to a list growing twice as fast. Submit rate improvements compound: moving from a 2% to a 6% submit rate roughly triples the people entering your welcome flow, which can nearly triple welcome-series revenue with zero changes to the flow itself.

Only after deliverability and list growth are sound does flow-level work (the cart-vs-checkout trigger fix, welcome series length, post-purchase splits) earn its full value. Campaigns and design checks come last, not because they don't matter, but because they're the smallest lever of the four pillars on this scorecard, at six checks out of 43.

How Do These Thresholds Change for a 20K List vs. a 200K List in Malaysia and Singapore?

List size changes how much you should trust any single number.

A 20,000-contact list hits statistical noise far faster than a 200,000-contact list. One underperforming campaign can swing a small list's open rate by several points, while the same campaign barely moves a large list's average. Read thresholds on a smaller list as directional trends over 3-4 sends, not a verdict from one send.

This matters specifically for MY and SG stores, where list sizes in the 15k-50k range are common for an 8-figure-revenue DTC brand still consolidating its channels. On a list that size, don't panic over one 42% open rate campaign against a 45% target. Look at the trend across your last three to four sends before deciding deliverability has actually slipped.

Sending patterns around Raya and Chinese New Year also change the read. Both periods bring a spike in campaign volume as stores push seasonal offers, often well past the 3-4-per-week pass bar for weeks at a stretch. That's not automatically a flag. It becomes one if spam complaints or unsubscribes climb alongside the volume spike. The audit-week move during these windows: check your deliverability score and welcome Email 1 open rate more often, not less, since this is exactly when a strained sending cadence first shows up as a dip.

If your Klaviyo setup itself, not just its performance, is still a question, our Klaviyo for Shopify post covers setup, core features, and pricing.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a Klaviyo account audit?

A Klaviyo account audit is a binary, 43-check scorecard covering account health, deliverability, list growth, flows, and campaigns, run in a fixed pillar order starting with deliverability. Score is checks passed divided by 43. WebMedic's version of this audit runs the same 43 checks used across client Shopify accounts.

How much of my revenue should come from email marketing?

This audit's pass band is 30-40% of total store revenue, with best-in-class accounts closer to 42%. A 19% share, like the flagged example account in this post, signals real room to optimize, even if total revenue is growing. Treat it as an indicator, not the single goal.

Why isn't my abandoned cart flow catching cart abandoners?

Klaviyo's default "Abandoned Cart" flow triggers on Checkout Started, not Added to Cart, so it only catches shoppers who began checkout, not the larger group who added to cart and left earlier. Check your flow's actual trigger event in the builder; most stores running the default have this gap.

How often should you run a Klaviyo account audit?

WebMedic's client audits typically run quarterly, or immediately after a major list-growth push or seasonal sending spike like Raya or CNY. Flow and form configurations drift silently over months, so a gap found at month nine is usually cheaper to fix than the revenue lost finding it at month eighteen.

What is a good Klaviyo deliverability score?

This audit's pass criteria holds 65-75+ as healthy; a different WebMedic audit of deliverability specifically cites an 80s-90s band as healthy. Both are real, scored by different auditors against the same Klaviyo metric. Treat either as a directional bar from its own source, not one universal number.

Keep Reading

• Klaviyo Flow Mistakes That Are Costing You Revenue
• Klaviyo Email Deliverability: The Full Guide
• Ecommerce Email Automation: 7 Flows Every Store Needs