Senior Public Relations Lead - Public Relations

What a real multi-vendor integration looks like: Olo, Klaviyo, and ADA compliance for a restaurant group. September 21, 2026 Most of what I write here is framed around what to ask before you sign with an agency. This one is a little different - it's what that work actually looks like once it's underway, using a real project as the example. I recently completed ADA and WCAG 2.1 AA remediation for a multi-location restaurant brand's WordPress site, and followed that with a Martech project integrating Olo's online ordering system with Klaviyo for automated marketing. Doing the compliance work first, then layering integrations on top of it, is a good illustration of how these pieces have to fit together rather than get bolted on separately. The starting problem. The site needed ADA and WCAG 2.1 AA remediation first, before any new functionality was layered on - fixing the foundation before building on top of it. Once that work was in place, the next phase was integrating Olo's ordering system and connecting Klaviyo for email marketing. Olo doesn't have a native WordPress plugin - it's typically brought into a site through its embeddable widget or API, which behaves like a third-party component dropped into the page rather than a deeply integrated WordPress feature. On paper these look like separate projects done in sequence. In practice, doing accessibility first meant every new integration afterward had to be held to the same standard rather than introduce new gaps into a site that had just been fixed. An email integration that doesn't respect how order and customer data actually structures itself in Olo produces broken segments and bad personalization. Treating later phases as disconnected from the accessibility work that came before them is exactly how a project ends up needing to be redone. How the pieces actually connected. The ADA remediation came first and covered the whole site - the usual list of alt text, contrast, keyboard traps, form labels, and skip links - establishing a baseline the rest of the project had to hold to. The Klaviyo integration, done alongside the Olo work, meant making sure customer and order data flowing from the site and from Olo reached Klaviyo in a form that actually supported segmentation and personalization - not just a name and email address, but the data that makes an email program worth running. Why this is the right way to think about these projects. When an operations manager or marketing director is evaluating an agency for a project like this, the real question isn't whether the agency has worked with Olo, or Klaviyo, or accessibility remediation individually. It's whether they understand the right order to do the work in - fixing the foundation before building integrations on top of it - and whether they recognize that a third-party ordering widget doesn't automatically inherit the accessibility or performance standards of the site it's embedded in, and has to be tested on its own terms. What i'd tell a colleague evaluating a similar project. Ask an agency how they'd sequence a project like this - which work happens first, and why. If accessibility isn't treated as the foundation that later integrations get built on, that's worth a follow-up question, because on a real project, doing it in the wrong order usually means doing some of it twice. Andrea Straughn

Pilothouse Digital named winner of the 2026 Klaviyo Rising Star Americas Partner of the Year. Sep 15, 2026, 07:05 ET Recognition marks Pilothouse Digital's excellence in 2026 Klaviyo K:Partners Awards. VICTORIA, BC, Sept. 15, 2026 /PRNewswire/ - Pilothouse Digital, an integrated growth agency for established ecommerce and DTC brands, today announced it has been named the winner of the 2026 Klaviyo Rising Star Americas Partner of the Year, presented at Klaviyo's flagship event, K:BOS, in Boston. The annual K:Partners Awards celebrate the partners helping brands get more out of Klaviyo's autonomous B2C CRM - from adopting the full platform to putting Klaviyo's agents and data to work for their customers. Winners are chosen for their innovation, creativity, and their ability to help leading consumer businesses turn customer relationships into measurable growth. Pilothouse Digital received the Rising Star Americas Partner of the Year award for rapid growth and standout contributions, especially in high-growth markets and categories, with Klaviyo's B2C CRM. "We've built an integrated growth system for ecommerce brands, and Klaviyo's B2C CRM is a core part of how that system holds together. Retention isn't a channel we bolt on at the end, it's built in from the very first order," said Madeleine Beach, Director of Marketing, Pilothouse Digital. "Our partners are helping write the next chapter of the autonomous B2C CRM, one where data, AI, and real relationships work together for every brand we serve.," said Eddie O'Brien, SVP of Global Partnerships at Klaviyo. "This year's honorees show what that future looks like: sharper strategy, faster execution, and customer relationships built to last. The K:Partners Awards celebrate the partners building that future with us." About the K:Partners Awards The K:Partners Awards highlight excellence across Klaviyo's global ecosystem of agencies, services partners, and technology partners. Winners are selected based on a combination of qualitative impact (innovation, creativity, client success stories, collaboration) and quantitative results (customer adoption, growth, and sustained performance). About Pilothouse Digital Pilothouse Digital is an integrated growth agency for established ecommerce and DTC brands. Paid media, creative, retention, and strategy sit under one team, so brands can understand and defend where their growth actually comes from. Pilothouse works with businesses between $10M and $100M in annual revenue that have hit a growth inflection point. SOURCE Pilothouse Digital

Klaviyo segmentation for stores that have been batch-and-blasting. Published: September 14, 2026 Updated: September 7, 2026 Est. reading time: 8 minutes Most of the Klaviyo accounts Tailorededgemarketing audit have one list and one habit. Every campaign goes to everyone who ever handed over an email address, two or three times a week, and the reporting looks acceptable because total campaign revenue keeps landing in roughly the same range month over month. The decline is slow enough to miss. Open rates drift, inbox placement gets worse before anyone thinks to check it, and flows that used to carry the program start converting at lower rates with no change to the flows themselves. By the time a store goes looking, the usual suspects (subject lines, creative, offer strength) get tested first, and none of them are the reason. The problem isn't the sending frequency. It's that the same undifferentiated audience receives every send, whether or not anyone in it has shown interest in the last year. What sending to everyone costs you at the inbox. Inbox providers decide placement partly by watching how recipients treat mail from your sending domain. Klaviyo is direct about the consequence, warning that continuing to mail unengaged subscribers puts both sender reputation and deliverability at risk, since providers including Google and Yahoo track how your messages get treated and classify future sends accordingly. Every batch send to the full list adds another large sample of non-responders to that record. Your engaged buyers get judged alongside them, which is why placement degrades for the people who want your email. Klaviyo frames the fix in terms of what exclusion buys you. Removing unengaged contacts ahead of a send raises open and click rates across the campaign, reduces the unsubscribes and spam complaints those contacts would have generated, and protects the reputation the rest of the program depends on. One measurement problem shapes everything you build next. Apple Mail Privacy Protection prefetches tracking pixels, which inflates reported opens for affected recipients, and Klaviyo says so in its own segmentation documentation. Any definition of engagement resting on opens alone will include people who never looked at the message, so clicks and on-site behavior carry the weight when you need to know something with confidence. Klaviyo segmentation starts with a working definition of engaged. Klaviyo's recommended engaged segment is narrow on purpose. It pairs a condition that the person can receive email marketing with recent activity (opened email at least once in the last 30 days, or clicked email at least once in the last 30 days). An optional third condition includes anyone who subscribed within the last 15 days, so new subscribers who have not been sent anything yet still qualify. Two details matter for accounts with history. Klaviyo advises a longer window, 60 days instead of 30, for stores that send infrequently. And if you migrated from another platform recently, imported contacts sit inside that segment even when their real engagement is years old, which is why the recent-subscriber condition only belongs in the definition once you have been collecting subscribers in Klaviyo for at least 15 days. Klaviyo maintains integrations with Mailchimp, Constant Contact, ExactTarget and Campaign Monitor, and when one of those is connected you can add the prior platform's open and click data to the segment so the window means what it says. Once the definition exists, campaign selection becomes a decision about tier width. The tightest window goes out most often because it produces the strongest engagement signal. Wider windows reach people whose interest is older and should be used less often. Klaviyo's guidance for regular sends is to focus on the engaged segment, and to consider expanding the audience for large promotions such as a product release or Black Friday. The suppression half of the build that batch senders skip. Klaviyo describes list cleaning as three steps. Build a segment of unengaged contacts, exclude that segment from your sends, and suppress the profiles who have never engaged at all. The published unengaged definition is a starting point to tune against your own volume. It captures profiles who can receive email marketing, have received at least 5 emails over all time, and have zero opens and zero clicks in the last 90 days. Stores sending daily or several times a week should tighten that window to 30 days, since a high-frequency sender collects enough evidence of disinterest in far less time. Excluding the segment is a per-campaign action. In the recipients step of a campaign, the "Don't send to" field takes your unengaged segment and pulls those profiles out of the send. Klaviyo is explicit that this has to continue on an ongoing basis, which is where most rebuilds come apart. One clean send repairs nothing. Flows need different handling. Lifecycle triggers like abandoned cart and re-engagement are the best chance you have of waking a lapsed subscriber, so they keep running for everyone. High-volume flows that an unengaged contact could trigger repeatedly in a month, browse abandonment being the obvious one, are worth restricting with a flow filter matching your unengaged segment. The never-engaged group is a different problem. Profiles that have never opened, never clicked, never viewed a product and never placed an order belong in their own category, separate from customers who lapsed. Klaviyo can build that segment for you from the action center under Analytics and then Deliverability, using criteria of five emails received in the last 180 days with zero opens, zero clicks, zero product views and zero orders over all time. The generated segment appears on your Lists and segments page as Never Engaged (Email). These profiles get one final attempt through a sunset flow. Anyone who does not respond gets suppressed in bulk through the suppress current members action on the segment itself, which stops the sends without touching the rest of your list. Buyer segments the engagement tiers cannot give you. Engagement tiers answer exactly one question, which is who can safely receive email this week. They say nothing about what the email should contain. A subscriber who has never ordered and a repeat customer three weeks past their usual reorder point can both sit inside your 30-day engaged segment, and sending them the same promotion wastes the better half of the opportunity. Build the second layer from your own order data. * Engaged subscribers with zero orders need proof and objection handling, and they are the group most often handed a blanket discount by default. * One-time buyers inside their category's repurchase window should see the complement or the refill, with the product they already own named in the email. * Repeat buyers can carry early access and higher price points, and they rarely need the discount that goes to the whole file. * Customers past twice their expected reorder interval belong in winback, with a subject line and an offer that acknowledge the gap. That interval has to come from your data. Median days between first and second order, calculated from your own order export, gives you a window that means something. A generic 90-day lapse rule applied to a category with a six-month replacement cycle will label healthy customers as lapsed and hand them a discount they were going to spend anyway. How to read your numbers after the switch. Send volume drops immediately, and total campaign revenue often dips with it for a few sends. Stores read that as proof that segmentation cost them money and go back to blasting before the deliverability recovery has any chance to show up. Change what you are watching before you change what you are sending. Revenue per recipient and revenue per send tell you whether the smaller audience is working harder. Unsubscribe rate and spam complaint rate tell you whether the exclusion is doing its job at the inbox. Placement improvements lag the change, because reputation is built from a rolling record of behavior and needs new sends to overwrite the old pattern. Two moves make the transition easier to sit through. Start wider than you intend to finish. A 90-day engaged window that tightens as complaint rates settle beats an immediate cut to 30 days on the first send. And take the wide sends you are entitled to. Klaviyo notes that high-priority campaigns such as new product announcements and Black Friday are reasonable moments to reach past the engaged segment. A store that has been batch-and-blasting for two years is not starting from zero. The list has real buyers in it, the flows are already collecting behavior, and the fastest gains come from deciding who stops receiving mail rather than from writing better campaigns. Build the engaged definition, build the unengaged exclusion, apply both on every send, then layer purchase segments on top of the structure. If you want the rebuild handled without pausing your send calendar, Tailorededgemarketing can take that on with you.