Imagine a customer getting three emails from your brand before lunch: a welcome message, an abandoned checkout reminder, and a flash sale. By the third one, they’re reaching for the unsubscribe button. Now for the uncomfortable part: that brand could be yours.
If you’ve noticed skipped emails in Klaviyo, you might assume something is broken. But Klaviyo skips emails for several reasons, and many of them are exactly what you want. The goal isn’t zero skips. It’s making sure the skips in your account are intentional.
What does a skipped email in Klaviyo mean?
A skipped email means someone was in line to receive a message, but Klaviyo didn’t send it because a rule or setting stopped it. That’s different from a bounce, which happens after an email is sent and is rejected.
Some skips protect both the customer experience and your deliverability. Say someone enters your abandoned checkout flow, then places an order before the second reminder goes out. If your flow is filtered to exclude people who have purchased since entering, Klaviyo skips that reminder.
Good! The alternative is telling someone they left something behind right after they bought it.
Klaviyo may also skip people who have unsubscribed, hard bounced, or marked your messages as spam. Don’t try to work around those protections. And if you’ve deliberately excluded a segment from a send, those skips may be doing exactly what you intended, too.
The question isn’t “How do I eliminate skips?” It’s “Did I decide this should happen?”
Why Smart Sending skips Klaviyo emails
One of the most common reasons for an unplanned skip is Smart Sending. This setting helps prevent someone from receiving too many messages on the same channel within a set window. The default email window is 16 hours, though you can change it in your account settings.
Here’s the detail that’s easy to miss: a message skipped because of Smart Sending isn’t automatically rescheduled for later. It simply doesn’t go out.
That doesn’t mean the answer is to turn Smart Sending off everywhere. You’d just be swapping missed messages for a different problem: customers getting a pile of emails at once. Instead, decide which messages deserve priority and which ones can step aside.
Email and SMS have separate Smart Sending windows, so an email doesn’t count as an SMS send for this purpose. You can review the details in Klaviyo’s Smart Sending guide.
When to use Smart Sending for Klaviyo campaigns
For most campaigns, I recommend leaving Smart Sending on. Campaigns go to a group on your schedule, while flows respond to something a particular person has done. If a subscriber just received a welcome email or an abandoned checkout reminder, they probably don’t need a campaign 20 minutes later, too.
There are exceptions. A major business announcement or your single biggest sale day of the year might warrant turning Smart Sending off for that specific campaign. The decision should be deliberate, not automatic.
And be honest with yourself: if every sale is “the big one,” none of them are. Save the exception for a very small handful of sends each year.
How to prioritize Klaviyo flows and Smart Sending
Flows need a more nuanced approach. The right setting depends on how urgent the message is and whether the customer is expecting it. Here’s how I’d think about the tradeoffs:
- First abandoned checkout email: I’d usually turn Smart Sending off. Someone who made it to checkout is showing strong intent, and I’d rather they get that reminder than miss it because a newsletter went out that morning.
- Back-in-stock alert: Consider turning it off. The customer specifically asked to hear when the product returned. If that alert gets skipped, you may be breaking a promise.
- First welcome email: If it contains a discount code someone just signed up to receive, it usually deserves to go out. They may be waiting for it before placing an order.
- Later welcome emails: These can often respect Smart Sending. If someone joins your list and abandons a cart an hour later, welcome email number two doesn’t necessarily need to land on top of the cart reminder.
- Sunset flow: I’d consider turning Smart Sending off. The point is to give someone a genuine last chance to re-engage before you treat them as unengaged. If the message is skipped, you haven’t really given them that opportunity.
- Browse abandonment, winback, and post-purchase cross-sell: These are often lower priority. If someone already received an email from you today, it may be perfectly reasonable for one of these messages to be skipped.
The pattern: the more urgent a message is, or the more explicitly someone requested it, the more likely it deserves to override Smart Sending. More general, nice-to-have messages can take a back seat.
This hierarchy applies between flows, too. If someone is in your abandoned checkout flow, you may not want them receiving browse abandonment messages at the same time. Smart Sending can help prevent collisions, but flow filters can be a cleaner way to make the lower-priority flow step aside.
Other reasons Klaviyo skips emails and SMS
Smart Sending isn’t the only setting worth checking. A few other issues can affect whether messages reach the people you expect:
Uploaded coupon codes can run out. If a message relies on a pool of uploaded codes and the pool is exhausted, that message may not be able to go out. Check your supply before a period of rapid list growth, especially with Black Friday and Cyber Monday approaching.
SMS requires marketing consent. A message may be skipped if someone hasn’t consented to receive SMS marketing. That’s a protection you want. If you see a lot of these skips, though, take a closer look at how you’re collecting phone numbers and consent. A phone number alone isn’t the same thing as permission to send marketing texts.
Campaign audiences can be determined when you schedule. If you don’t select the option to determine recipients at send time, the audience can be fixed when the campaign is scheduled. People who join afterward may not be included. That’s an audience-timing issue rather than necessarily a skipped-recipient reason, but it’s worth checking when a campaign reaches fewer people than expected.
How to find skipped recipients in Klaviyo
Klaviyo gives you a breakdown of skipped recipients and the reason for each skip. When you review your end-of-month data, spot-check a few campaigns and flows alongside your opens, clicks, and revenue.
- Open the campaign or flow you want to review.
- For a flow, select the message and open its performance details. For a campaign, open its analytics.
- Go to Recipient activity, then select Skipped.
- Use the Type dropdown to review the reasons and affected profiles.
- For each reason, ask: Did I decide this should happen?
If the answer is yes, great. You may not need to change anything. If the answer is “Wait, I didn’t even know that was happening,” dig into the relevant setting, filter, consent status, or coupon supply before making a change.
Klaviyo has separate walkthroughs for skipped campaign recipients and skipped flow messages if you need help finding a specific reason.
Make Klaviyo skips part of your email marketing strategy
“Skipped” shouldn’t be a scary word. Often, it means Klaviyo is following a rule that protects your subscribers from irrelevant or excessive messages. The problem is when the rule is making a decision you didn’t realize you’d made.
Keep Smart Sending on for campaigns in most cases, with rare exceptions for truly important sends. Make a message-by-message decision for flows based on urgency and customer expectations. Then check the skipped tab regularly so you know whether your email marketing is working the way you intended.
If you want another place to start, I subscribed to 362 real ecommerce brands to see what happened after someone joined their email list. Nearly half never sent a welcome email. You can get the free study and a step-by-step audit checklist at joyjoya.com/frontdoor.
Want help growing your ecommerce brand through email and SMS? Explore how Joy Joya can help.
