Klaviyo just put a BFCM planning hub inside the app. If you have an active ecommerce integration and your account is in English, it's already there under the "Grow with Klaviyo" section. Klaviyo announced it on September 29, with French, German and Spanish versions coming.
I like it. Most of the BFCM problems we get called in to fix aren't strategy problems, they're "nobody checked" problems. A checklist inside the tool people already open every day helps with that.
But a readiness score tells you whether the account is set up. It doesn't tell you whether the plan makes money. So here's what the Hub covers, and the four things I check right next to it before I'd call a brand ready. Black Friday is November 27 this year, which puts us about eight weeks out.
What's actually in the Hub
From Klaviyo's announcement, the Hub has four parts:
- A readiness score and BFCM checklist. It shows how prepped the account is and ranks the highest-impact steps, so you know what to tackle first.
- Personalized Academy content. It's matched to your experience. If it's your first BFCM you get the fundamentals, and if you've run a few you get more advanced tactics.
- BFCM Fast Track. A five-video guided program for newer teams covering planning, list growth, what to send and how to use Composer.
- A Community Strategy Exchange. A spot to compare notes with other Klaviyo marketers and Klaviyo Champions.
My take is to run through it this week, not in November. The checklist works best as a punch list while there's still time to fix what it flags. If you're already working with someone on the account, send them your score. It's a fast way to get everyone looking at the same gaps.
1. The offer math
This is the one I'd put first. No setup checklist can do it, because it isn't a setup question.
Every point of discount has to be paid back with extra orders. If your gross margin is 60% and you run 25% off, each order makes 35 points of margin instead of 60. You need about 1.7x the orders just to make the same gross profit you'd make at full price. At 30% off it's 2x.
That's simplified. It ignores bigger carts, the orders you'd have gotten anyway at full price, and the customers BFCM brings in for the rest of the year. But I'd still want a brand to see that number before picking a discount. A lot of BFCM offers get set by copying last year's or matching a competitor, and then everyone's surprised that revenue went up and profit didn't.
The question I ask is what lift you actually saw last year at that depth, by segment. Each brand's customers react differently, and that history is in your Klaviyo account already.
2. The segment plan, by engagement tier
Sending more over BFCM is fine. Sending more to everyone is where it goes wrong.
Before the week starts I want a written plan for who gets what. Roughly:
- Recently engaged (opened or clicked in the last 30-60 days): they get the full calendar, early access, reminders and the last-call send.
- Lightly engaged (60-120 days): the big moments only, like launch day, Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
- Unengaged: I'd hold most of them out. If you want to try them, do it in small batches early in the week, not on the peak days.
The windows depend on your send volume and how long your buying cycle is, so treat those as starting points. If your sending reputation still needs work, I wrote up the 60-day deliverability runway separately. That one has its own deadline, and it's close.
3. Which flows to pause or reword for the week
Flows don't know there's a sale on. That's how you end up with a welcome email offering 10% off on the same day the whole site is 25% off, or an abandoned cart email adding a code on top of a sitewide discount.
So I go through every live flow and decide one of three things for sale week:
- Leave it. Order confirmation, shipping and most post-purchase stay as they are.
- Reword it. Welcome and abandoned cart usually just need to point to the sale instead of their usual incentive.
- Pause or filter it. Winback and sunset flows usually aren't worth stacking on top of a heavy campaign week, at least for people already getting the sale sends.
This is a good job for Composer, honestly. Klaviyo's own BFCM prompt for Composer asks it to review whether your flows are set up for the BFCM rush and compare them to last year. I'd run it and use the output as a first pass. Then a person still decides what changes, because Composer can see the flow but not your margin or your offer plan.
4. What happens to the new customers in January
BFCM brings in a lot of first-time buyers, and most brands treat the sale as the finish line. It isn't. That cohort is usually the biggest group of one-time buyers you'll have all year, and the second order is where most of the year's value gets decided.
So before BFCM I want the post-purchase path for those people built and tested. That means a thank you that isn't another discount, product education where it makes sense, and a second-order push timed off real reorder behavior. Klaviyo's expected date of next order is useful there once you have enough order history.
Where this leaves you
Use the Hub. Get the score up, work the checklist, watch the Fast Track if it's your first big season. It's already in your account, and it'll catch setup gaps that would otherwise show up the morning of Black Friday.
Then do the four things it can't. Run the offer math, write the segment plan, decide what each flow does that week, and build the January path for new customers. The score tells you the account is ready. These four tell you the plan is.
