Guide
Email Redesign
The Breakdown
Redesigning
Your Klaviyo Emails
Short answer
Your Klaviyo emails need a redesign when they no longer look like your site, when every campaign looks different, or when flows still carry an old brand. Decide first whether you need a light refresh or a full rebuild, then redesign the flows customers see most, test new against old inside Klaviyo, and only retire the old version once the new one holds up.
What are the signs your emails look outdated?
Put your phone next to your laptop. Open your homepage on one and your last few campaigns and flow emails on the other. Then check these:
They don’t match the site. You rebranded or refreshed the store; the emails didn’t follow.
Every campaign looks different. No shared header, product layout or type style.
Flows show an old brand. Old logo, old colours, discontinued products, an old founder letter.
They’re one big image. Easy to make, but slow to load, blank when images are off, and hard for inbox apps to read.
Order and shipping emails are plain defaults. Customers expect these and go looking for them, so a bare receipt is a missed brand moment.
The tone is off. The brand has moved, say from serious luxury to something warmer, but the emails haven’t.
Image fatigue. The same product shots have run for months.
They break on mobile. Tiny text, buttons too close together, columns that stack badly.
One or two of these usually means a refresh. Several at once, especially an old brand in flows, usually means a redesign.
Do you need a refresh or a full redesign?
The two get confused, and the difference decides how much work you take on.
A refresh keeps your layouts and swaps the surface: new photography, updated colours and logo, tighter copy. Example: you shot a new season and want flows to stop showing last year’s range.
A full redesign changes the structure: new header and footer, new product modules, new type rules, rebuilt templates. Example: you rebranded, and nothing in your inbox looks like the new site.
A rebuild of the setup underneath is sometimes needed too: emails built as one-off copies with no shared blocks, so every change has to be made by hand in dozens of places.
If it’s a full redesign, build it as a reusable set of blocks rather than redesigning email by email. Our guide to Klaviyo design systems covers how that works.
What should you redesign first?
Start where customers see you most, not where the designer finds it most fun.
Welcome flow. Every new subscriber sees it, so it sets the first impression of the new look.
Abandoned checkout, cart and browse. High intent; small improvements matter.
Post-purchase. The bridge from first order to second. See how to get a second purchase.
Order and shipping notifications. Seen by nearly every buyer, and often the plainest emails a brand sends.
Campaign templates. Once the new blocks exist, move campaigns over.
Win-back and subscription flows. Lower volume, but they protect revenue you already won.
How do you redesign without losing revenue?
The risk in a redesign is switching off flows that earn money and replacing them with untested ones. A few Klaviyo-specific habits avoid that:
Write down a baseline first. When you add an A/B test to a live flow email, Klaviyo creates two new copies and tracks them separately; it stops tracking the original email. Note revenue per recipient, click rate and placed orders for each main flow before you start.
Don’t pause live flows. Test the new design against the old one, either as an A/B test on a single flow email or with a random-sample split in the flow, and promote the winner.
Be patient on smaller lists. Klaviyo only marks a flow test as statistically significant once each variation has been delivered more than 500 times, among other conditions. If volume is low, change one major thing at a time so you know what moved.
Plan around transactional approval. If your order or shipping emails are marked transactional, editing them removes that status, and they must be resubmitted; Klaviyo says review can take up to 24 hours, and sends are treated as marketing until it’s approved. Schedule those changes for a quiet day.
QA properly. Check links, discount codes, dynamic product blocks, mobile rendering and dark mode before anything goes live.
What should change, and what should stay?
A redesign is not a licence to change everything. Keep what customers already respond to, and change what holds the brand back.
Keep the offers, subject-line styles and send timing that test well. Those are strategy, not design.
Keep the structure of flows that perform, and redesign the emails inside them.
Change anything that no longer looks like the brand: logo, colours, photography, type.
Change image-only emails to live text for headlines and key copy, with fallback fonts close to your brand font.
Change cluttered layouts to one clear job per email, with one main call to action.
Check accessibility as you go: enough colour contrast, readable text sizes and descriptive alt text.
Klaviyo templates, custom HTML or a rebuild?
Klaviyo’s template library is a reasonable start for a new brand, but many brands use the same templates, so they rarely feel like yours. The drag-and-drop editor is flexible enough to build fully custom, on-brand emails, and it keeps features like product blocks and universal content working.
If your old emails were hand-coded in HTML, Klaviyo can now clone an HTML template into a drag-and-drop version. It creates a new copy and leaves the original alone, but Klaviyo notes that spacing and styling can shift, so treat it as a starting point and check every converted template before it sends.
What matters is that the finished templates are built for your brand and that your team can reuse them without breaking them.
How Swayleo approaches this
We start by sitting your current emails next to your site and listing where the brand breaks, then agree with you whether it’s a refresh or a full redesign. We note your baseline numbers, rebuild the flows that reach the most customers first and test new against old, so revenue doesn’t dip during the switch. Order and shipping emails get the same care as marketing emails. You can hire us for the redesign on its own and run sends in-house, or keep us on for the full retention program afterwards. If you’re comparing options, our shortlist of Klaviyo email design agencies is a fair place to start, and you can see how we work.
Talk to Swayleo
Want the founders to look at your emails and tell you honestly whether you need a refresh or a redesign? If you’re a 7-figure Shopify or DTC brand, book a strategy call.
Shopify & DTC brands
Quick Answers
Frequently
Asked Questions
How do I know if my Klaviyo emails need a redesign?
If your emails don’t match your website, look different every campaign, still show an old brand in flows, or are hard to read on a phone, it’s time to redesign.
Which Klaviyo flows should I redesign first?
Start with welcome, abandoned checkout and post-purchase flows, because they reach the most customers and drive first and second orders.
Will redesigning my emails hurt revenue?
Not if you keep existing flows live, test new versions against old ones and switch only when the new version performs at least as well.
Should I use Klaviyo’s built-in templates?
They’re a reasonable start, but growing brands usually outgrow them and move to custom templates built around their own brand and reused across flows and campaigns.
How often should email design be refreshed?
Refresh whenever your brand or site changes, and review your core templates at least once a year so flows don’t drift out of date.
Shopify & DTC brands