388 - Can You Actually Trust Your Email Marketing Numbers?
Release Date: 06/28/2026
Marketing With Laryssa
Every SMS marketing platform is pushing something called RCS right now, telling you it's the future of texting your customers. And the upgrade is real - but the pitch is leaving out a few things worth knowing before you make any decisions. RCS, which stands for Rich Communication Services, isn't actually new technology. It was standardized back in 2007. The reason everyone is suddenly talking about it in 2026 is that Apple only added support for it in iOS 18, which came out in fall 2024. Once iPhone users were covered, rich messaging across both major platforms became possible for the first...
info_outlineMarketing With Laryssa
390Julie Cole said something in our conversation that I haven't stopped thinking about. Social media, content, followers - all of it can disappear tomorrow. The only thing she actually owns is her email list. Julie is the co-founder of Mabel's Labels, the brand behind those indestructible labels you've seen on kids' water bottles and lunchboxes - the ones that survive the dishwasher, the microwave, and everything in between. She started the company 23 years ago in her sister's basement with three co-founders, none of them technical, trading a foosball table for their first website. It's since...
info_outlineMarketing With Laryssa
Klaviyo has been rolling out something called Composer in beta - an AI agent that promises to build entire marketing campaigns from a single prompt. Audience, copy, design, segmentation, all of it. The promise is impressive. So I got access on a real client account and tested it myself. And my honest take is more nuanced than the hype - and more useful than the skeptics would have you believe. The short version: Composer is less an autonomous agent and more a really well-informed assistant. It knows your account data better than any outside AI tool could. It just still needs you. Where it...
info_outlineMarketing With Laryssa
$6,000 in Klaviyo. $600 in Google Analytics. Same campaign. Same week. Real numbers from a real account my team took over. If you've ever stared at two reports that should say the same thing and thought - is someone lying to me? - this episode is for you. Nobody is lying. But what's actually happening is something every ecommerce brand sending marketing emails needs to understand. Those two tools aren't giving you different answers because one of them is wrong. They're giving you different answers because they're asking completely different questions. Klaviyo is asking how much did the...
info_outlineMarketing With Laryssa
The moment someone signs up for your emails is the highest attention moment you will ever have with that subscriber. They just said yes. They're interested. They're engaged. And most brands are using that window to send two, maybe three emails - and then calling it done. That's a problem. Because the subscribers who buy from email one were already close to purchasing anyway. The discount and the timing just pushed them over the edge. The rest of your welcome series exists for everyone who wasn't ready yet - the people who need more trust, more context, more touchpoints - and that group is...
info_outlineMarketing With Laryssa
Segmentation sounds like the answer to everything. The right message to the right person at the right time - that's the dream. And to be clear, I'm a segment stan. Smart segmentation is one of the most powerful things you can do for your email program. But the conversation around it is almost always one-directional: more segments, more targeting, more personalization. And at a certain point, that stops being true. I see brands build 12, 20, who even knows how many segments - and end up spending more time managing those segments than actually sending good campaigns. The result is a...
info_outlineMarketing With Laryssa
The call to action is the last thing someone reads before they click - or don't. And for something that important, it gets surprisingly little strategic thought in most email programs. What I see instead is one of two extremes. Either the CTA is completely ignored - "Shop Now" slapped on every button, same wording across every email, no thought given to whether it's actually doing its job. Or it's wildly overthought - someone spent 20 minutes trying to make the button sound clever and ended up with copy that nobody instantly understands. Both are a problem. And the fix is simpler than most...
info_outlineMarketing With Laryssa
Popups have a reputation. We've all landed on a site, barely had a second to look around, and been hit with a full-screen form asking for an email address before we even know what the brand sells. That's not a popup problem - that's a strategy problem. A well-timed, well-designed popup is one of the most effective list growth tools an ecommerce brand has. Avoiding them because you don't want to seem pushy doesn't make your site feel more premium - it just means fewer people are entering your email ecosystem every single day. But here's the question I want to ask if you already have one: when...
info_outlineMarketing With Laryssa
Most brands have heard of domain warmup. When you're setting up a new Klaviyo account, you don't just blast your entire list on day one - you start small, build gradually, and let inbox providers get to know you as a sender. That part tends to make sense to people. What doesn't get talked about nearly enough is what comes after that. Warmup isn't a one-time thing you do at the beginning and then forget about. It's a tool you can come back to - and for a lot of brands, it's something their account needs right now and they don't even know it. If your open rates have been sliding for months, if...
info_outlineMarketing With Laryssa
A big email list feels like proof of something. Momentum. Years of work finally paying off. And that number sitting at the top of your Klaviyo dashboard can feel like a badge of honor - especially when you remember all the pop-up forms, giveaways, collaborations, and events that built it. But what if that number is giving you a completely false picture of how many people actually want to hear from you? I recently started working with a skincare brand that had built their list to 45,000 subscribers. On paper, that's genuinely impressive. When we got into the account, the real engaged audience...
info_outline$6,000 in Klaviyo. $600 in Google Analytics. Same campaign. Same week. Real numbers from a real account my team took over.
If you've ever stared at two reports that should say the same thing and thought - is someone lying to me? - this episode is for you. Nobody is lying. But what's actually happening is something every ecommerce brand sending marketing emails needs to understand.
Those two tools aren't giving you different answers because one of them is wrong. They're giving you different answers because they're asking completely different questions. Klaviyo is asking how much did the people who engaged with this email go on to buy. Google Analytics is asking how much was purchased in the single visit that started from clicking the email. Same campaign, different questions, different numbers.
Once you understand that, the gap stops being scary - and starts being expected.
But there's more to it than just the attribution philosophy. There are specific settings inside Klaviyo that most brands have never looked at, and those settings have a massive impact on the revenue numbers you're seeing every month. If you've never checked your attribution window or thought about whether open-based attribution makes sense for your account, this episode is going to be eye-opening.
In this episode, I walk through exactly why these numbers differ, what to check first when you see a shocking gap, and how to actually reconcile your data so you can make real decisions instead of nervous ones.
✨ In this episode, you'll learn:
- Why Klaviyo and Google Analytics report completely different revenue for the same campaign - and why neither one is lying
- The first thing to check when you see a big discrepancy (it tells you immediately whether something is broken or not)
- How Google Analytics decides which channel gets credit for a sale - and why it's the most conservative number you'll see
- What Klaviyo's open-based attribution actually means and why it inflates revenue compared to other tools
- Why Apple Mail Privacy Protection may be affecting your open counts - and what to do about it
- The pros and cons of switching to click-only attribution in Klaviyo
- Why your Shopify store is the only real source of truth - and how to think about every other tool's numbers
- Why understanding this protects you in conversations with agencies, employees, and anyone else reporting on email performance
When you can explain the gap, it stops being something that makes you feel like someone's pulling one over on you — and starts being something you can actually use.
Work with Joy Joya: https://joyjoya.com