A brand came to us a few months back, frustrated with their unsubscribe numbers.

Unsubscribe rate was up +70% year-on-year, and they couldn't figure out why so many of them were people who had just bought from them.

Why were they buying, then leaving the list almost immediately after?

Subscribers were turning into customers, so it wasn’t subscriber quality.

We were stumped.

So we went into the account.

Within the first hour, we found it.

A customer would place an order and within minutes they were receiving

Two, three, sometimes four emails hitting the same inbox within minutes of each other.

Recipe for disaster.

Some subscribers usually think “Look, I don't really care about the emails but I’ll stay on the list in case they send a sale“ nd put up with all the emails in between.

But when they get bombarded with 3-4 emails back-to-back-to-back, it seems superrrrr chaotic and they say vamos faster than the roadrunner with really bad bubble guts.

Now this wasn’t some agency sabotage, the flows were just built without the FULL funnel in mind.

The subscriber who just bought from you, who is at the highest point of trust they've ever had with your brand, was being immediately overwhelmed. And they did what anyone would do.

They unsubscribed.

There are three things worth auditing inside your account this week.

1️⃣ Map the full post-purchase experience for a single profile.

Go into Klaviyo and pull a recent purchaser. Look at their activity timeline and count how many emails they received in the 48 hours after their order.

If the answer is more than two you have a timing problem worth fixing.

2️⃣ Add filters or time delays to every post-purchase email.

Every flow that fires after a purchase should have a time delay, flow filter, or smart sending enabled to make sure your subscribers aren’t getting blasted with emails post-purchase.

The right timing depends on your send volume/frequency but as a starting point no subscriber should be receiving more than two emails in a 24 hour period and make sure they get the transactional emails FIRST.

3️⃣ Exclude purchasers from your welcome flow.

If your welcome flow doesn't have a filter excluding profiles who have placed an order it is almost certainly firing on top of your post-purchase sequence for a meaningful percentage of your new buyers. Add the exclusion.

It takes two minutes and it immediately removes one of the most common sources of post-purchase unsubscribes we see across new accounts.

We came into this account and did a full overhaul of their sign-up form, sender infrastructure, and a complete rebuild of their flow filters and timing logic.

Within 90 days, their list grew +52% and DECREASED their unsubscribes by -50%.

Not because we reinvented the wheel.

We literally just paid attention.

We went back through every existing flow, added proper filters, staggered the timing, and made sure the customer who had just bought from them had a post-purchase experience that felt considered rather than chaotic.

Go into your Klaviyo account and pull your unsubscribe rate broken down by flow.

If your post-purchase flows (cross-sell, thank you, engagement, order confirmation, etc) have a materially higher unsubscribe rate than your other flows, that's your signal.

The content might be fine. The timing probably isn't.

Fix the setup before you rewrite a single word of copy.

If you want a second pair of eyes on how your post-purchase sequence is set up and whether your flows are conflicting with each other, reply with the word “SUB” and I'll tell you exactly what I'd look at first.

— Anthony

P.S. The brand mentioned above came to us because they thought they had a retention problem. They did — but the cause was four emails hitting the same inbox in the same hour. Sometimes the simplest fix has the biggest impact.