A digital marketing strategy is the path to profitability. Optimum7 can help you set the right goals, offer and implement creative and technical strategies, and use data and analytics to review and improve your business’s performance.
Founded in 1989, BUDK has grown into a national eCommerce retailer selling knives, swords, tactical gear, licensed collectibles, and survival products across a catalog of thousands of SKUs.
With a large product catalog and a promotional calendar built around frequent offers, BUDK has long relied on email as a major marketing channel. The company sends multiple promotional campaigns each week across a large subscriber base, which ties deliverability, audience selection, and campaign timing directly to email program performance.
The move to Klaviyo included a new sending structure to support BUDK’s campaign volume, plus rebuilt engagement signals, lifecycle automation, and transactional communication in the new platform.
We rebuilt BUDK’s email marketing operation in Klaviyo to restore deliverability, establish a healthier sending structure, and create the lifecycle infrastructure needed to support ongoing campaign performance.
Klaviyo did not inherit Cordial’s historical engagement context. Early sends reached too many unengaged subscribers, pushing open rates down to 2-3% and weakening sender reputation.
BUDK entered Klaviyo without active lifecycle flows. Abandonment, post-purchase, winback, review, and re-engagement sequences all needed to be built for the new platform.
All 11 transactional emails were outdated, unbranded, and not optimized for mobile. Order confirmations, shipping updates, delivery notices, password resets, and other account emails needed updated branding, responsive layouts, and Klaviyo Liquid variable integration.
BUDK’s large subscriber base could not be moved immediately into full-volume sending. The broader audience needed to be reintroduced gradually based on engagement and deliverability performance.
BUDK depended on frequent promotional email, so campaign activity could not stay restricted for long. Expanding too quickly, however, risked further damaging sender reputation inside Klaviyo.
We used engagement-based segmentation and controlled audience expansion while rebuilding the automation and transactional infrastructure needed to support the program long term.
The Klaviyo rebuild focused on controlled sending, lifecycle automation, and stronger customer communication, with deliverability performance guiding how quickly campaign volume could expand.
The campaign initially focused on Klaviyo’s 30-Day Engaged segment. The Cordial 180-day and VIP audiences were producing 2-3% open rates, so those segments were paused while sender performance stabilized. As engagement improved, broader audiences returned in smaller batches, with open rates, bounce rates, and complaint rates reviewed between waves before volume increased further.
All 11 transactional emails received updated BUDK branding, responsive layouts, and Klaviyo Liquid variables. The work covered backorder and credit card decline notices, password and account emails, API and SFCC order confirmations, shipping updates, delivery notifications, and related order communications.
The new templates kept dynamic customer and order information intact while bringing these messages into the same Klaviyo environment as the broader email program.
Rebuilt transactional templates with BUDK branding, responsive layouts, and Klaviyo Liquid variables.
We designed and deployed a full suite of Klaviyo flows covering key customer behaviors: Abandoned Cart, Abandoned Checkout, Browse Abandonment, Search Abandonment, Site Abandonment, Post-Purchase Cross-Sell and Upsell, Winback, Anniversary, Sunset, Review Request, and Review Posted. Together, these flows expanded automated coverage across abandonment, post-purchase, retention, re-engagement, and review activity.
13 unique promotional codes were created across the flow program to improve conversion tracking. The campaign calendar included 13 sends across Core Engaged, Cordial 180-Day, and VIP audiences.
BUDK’s Klaviyo program launched in a focused 30-day build. The outcomes below cover that first month. The section that follows shows how the program is performing roughly 90 days in.
Open rates recovered from 2-3% to 66.2% after campaign sends were concentrated on the Core Engaged audience, and BUDK’s deliverability performance stabilized significantly inside Klaviyo.
With sender performance stabilizing, we could begin expanding campaign reach gradually, using engagement and deliverability data to determine how quickly broader audiences returned to regular sends.
Klaviyo deliverability score after the engagement-based warm-up.
Alongside the deliverability recovery, BUDK completed the core Klaviyo infrastructure needed to support campaigns, automation, and customer communication within the first 30 days.
| Deliverable | Status |
|---|---|
| Transactional emails modernized | 11 complete |
| Signup form with age-gating | Live |
| Automated flows live | 14 of 15 live |
| Promotional campaigns executed | 13 |
Roughly 90 days after the initial build, the program has moved well past recovery into steady performance. Email drives 39.2% of BUDK’s store revenue, up 7.1 points month over month, and 42.77% of total store revenue is attributed to the Klaviyo program across email and SMS. Open rate holds at 67.6%, and the list grew a net 2,101 contacts.
Program snapshot: revenue share from email, list growth, and open rate.
Of the revenue Klaviyo drives, flows account for 65.5% and campaigns for 34.5%, with email carrying 93.7% of attributed revenue. Lifecycle automation now generates the majority of the program’s revenue outside the promotional calendar.
Klaviyo attributed revenue and channel mix across email and SMS.
The program delivered 805.7K emails and generated 544.4K unique opens, holding a high open rate as sending volume expanded well beyond the tightly engaged audience of the warm-up phase.
Deliverability at scale: delivered volume, unique opens, and open rate.
BUDK now has a Klaviyo program built around the way its email channel operates: frequent promotional campaigns, a large subscriber base, behavior-based automation, and transactional communication managed within one connected system. Email now drives 39.2% of store revenue, with lifecycle flows generating the majority of that total outside the regular promotional calendar and campaign reach expanding as engagement performance allows.
We delivered the core infrastructure within 30 days. As Klaviyo builds a deeper history of subscriber engagement, BUDK can keep expanding its reachable audience, refining segmentation, and improving lifecycle performance without rebuilding the email program around each new stage of growth.
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A digital marketing strategy is the path to profitability. Optimum7 can help you set the right goals, offer and implement creative and technical strategies, and use data and analytics to review and improve your business’s performance.