How to Segment Klaviyo for Gifting Season: 7 Tips From a Klaviyo Agency

By Gavin Hewitson, founder of In-box

Gifting season is when an email list is simultaneously at its most valuable and most fragile. Volume goes up, most brands are shouting about offers, and one badly-targeted blast can cost you inbox placement for the rest of the quarter.

At In-box, a Klaviyo email marketing agency, we've worked with more than 500 ecommerce brands. Notably, the brands that win gifting season aren't the ones sending the most emails; they're the ones sending a targeted email to the right segment.

The clearest example is Michael Gabriels, a lab-grown diamond jewellery brand and the example behind our guide to email marketing for jewelers. Its Black Friday Cyber Monday 2025 orders grew from 324 to 3,393, a massive 947% increase, while we cut its discount code usage by 67%. The catalyst for most of that increase was segmentation.

Here are the seven tips we'd give any Shopify brand heading into gifting season:

Source: In-box client account (Michael Gabriels)

1. Split buyers from non-buyers by default

Every campaign should go out in two separate versions: one for existing customers and one for email subscribers who haven't made a purchase yet. The content in the emails can almost be identical; the difference is the offer.

Non-buyers should get reminded of their welcome offer in every email until they actually use it. Your job here is to turn a subscriber into a first-time customer, and the margin you give away on the discounted first order usually comes back on the second, third, and fourth orders. Existing customers don't need the same push, so you protect your margin by not giving an offer to them.

For Michael Gabriels, this buyer and non-buyer split was the default for every seasonal event. Different groups got different prices, based on whether they had bought before or not.

2. Define "engaged" before the volume goes up

Gifting season is not the time to start emailing people who haven't opened in a year. Our default engaged segment includes anyone who has opened or clicked an email in the last 90 days, or been active on site or subscribed in the last 30 days, and hasn't bounced at all in the last 30 days.

Start building your engaged segment now, then send emails to those subscribers in the weeks leading up to your peak sales period. An engaged audience can usually receive around 15 emails a month without major deliverability issues, but your full list should get closer to three each month. If your open rates are already slipping, tighten the window to 60 or even 30 days until they recover.

3. Separate gift buyers from people buying for themselves

Someone buying a necklace for their mum and someone treating themselves need different messages. For Michael Gabriels, we used gift-focused framing for high-intent occasions like Black Friday and Valentine's Day, and self-reward and aspiration messaging for periods with no specific occasion.

The easiest way to identify gift buyers is by looking at their past orders. If a customer added a gift message or gift note at checkout, and your gifting app passes that information into Klaviyo as an order property, you can build a segment of people who have purchased gifts before. They are the first people you should email with reminders, gift guides, and delivery cut-off dates when the next gifting moment comes around.

4. Ask what they're shopping for when they sign up

The most useful segmentation data is the data customers give you themselves. To do this, we build two-step sign-up forms: step one asks only for an email address, and step two gauges what they're interested in.

For a jewellery brand, that might be engagement rings, wedding bands, or necklaces. After a customer answers, their interest gets saved to their profile. Then, we send them down a matching path in the welcome series.

Make sure you keep the first step to email only. Even when it is optional, adding a phone number to the same sign-up form causes 25% to 45% of people to abandon it. Instead, ask for SMS consent in a separate form later on. For the full setup, see our high-volume Shopify sign-up form strategy.

Source: In-box client sign-up form

5. Make your flows match your campaigns

One of the biggest problems we discovered at Michael Gabriels was that the campaigns and flows spoke different seasonal languages. A shopper would get a Black Friday campaign, abandon their cart, and then receive a flow email that completely ignored the offer.

Before each event, we rebuilt the flow stack to match: welcome series, abandoned cart, abandoned checkout, post-purchase, and SMS. Each segment got the same offer in a campaign as in a flow. It's extra, but worthwhile work, as it stops you from losing the shoppers who are closest to buying.

6. Use price drops, not blanket discount codes

Michael Gabriels used to rely on 25% to 30% discount codes, and its margin suffered at every peak. For Valentine's Day 2026, we replaced codes with smaller product-level price drops. As a result, discount code usage fell 67%, Valentine's Day 2026 attributed sales increased 441%, and average open rates reached 57%.

The key contributor to this success is segmentation. When you know who is a first-time buyer, who is a repeat customer, and who just needs a nudge to purchase, you don't have to give everyone the biggest possible offer.

7. Plan a content calendar for each segment

Don't build one calendar for the whole account. Your engaged segment can take the full schedule: education, gift guides, product launches, and urgency emails across a multi-day sale. On the other hand, unengaged subscribers should only receive your strongest few emails.

During most of the year, we produce roughly 60% educational content, 30% product-focused content, and 10% sales emails. Even in gifting season, education still matters. Gift guides, "how to choose" emails, and delivery deadlines help people buy, and they give you reasons to send more emails that aren't just more discount codes.

If you need layouts, our free Figma email template pack includes campaign designs you can adapt.

Where to start

Before your next gifting peak, build three segments: engaged customers, engaged non-customers, and past gift buyers. Line up your flows with your campaign offers, and decide on your cadence for each segment before your first send.

For more peak-season results, see our ecommerce email marketing case studies. And if you're interested in how gifting-heavy categories compare with others, our guide to email marketing niches is a good place to start.

About the author

Gavin Hewitson is the founder of In-box, a Klaviyo Master Gold Partner agency for ecommerce brands. Over five years, he and his team have worked with more than 500 ecommerce brands on email and SMS. See their results at in-box.com/case-studies, or download their free Figma email template pack.