What does the Email Marketing Manager do on top of Klaviyo?
The Email Marketing Manager is the email employee inside ftes for Commerce, the ftes.ai e-commerce application, and it works on top of Klaviyo rather than replacing it. Klaviyo keeps doing what it does well: holding your profiles and lists, rendering templates and delivering the email. The Email Marketing Manager brings the judgement: which customers should hear from you this week, which product is worth putting in front of them, whether the discount still leaves margin, and whether the send made money once it was out.
The Email Marketing Manager reads your Shopify orders, products and inventory through the ftes for Commerce Shopify app, and your Klaviyo account through the Klaviyo app. In the ftes.ai org chart this work belongs to the Lifecycle Officer FTE, the Digital FTE accountable for the owned channel. The rule that governs both is the same: the employee proposes with evidence, and a person decides, at whatever autonomy level the owner has set.
How do you connect Klaviyo to ftes for Commerce?
Connecting Klaviyo to ftes for Commerce takes one of two routes, both on the Integrations page of the app at ecommerce.ftes.ai. The first is Connect with Klaviyo: you are sent to Klaviyo, you sign in, you press Allow, and you come back connected. There is no key to copy, and ftes for Commerce never sees your Klaviyo password. The connection uses OAuth with PKCE, and access tokens are refreshed automatically.
The second route is a private API key you create in Klaviyo and paste into ftes for Commerce. That suits a team that manages keys centrally. Either way, the token or key is encrypted at rest, is never shown back to you or anyone else, and is never written to a log. The app shows which access mode the connection has, so nobody has to guess what the Email Marketing Manager is able to do. Plans and the token wallet that meters the work are described on ftes.ai/pricing.
What is each Klaviyo permission for?
The Klaviyo app ftes for Commerce asks for 15 scopes, and each one maps to something the Email Marketing Manager does. Reading lets it understand your account; writing happens only when you approve it or within the autonomy level you set.
- accounts:read: the account name and default sender, so campaigns go out from the right address.
- campaigns:read and campaigns:write: reading past campaigns and creating the ones you approve, with their sends.
- flows:read and flows:write: reading flows and creating draft flows or changing a flow's status.
- lists and segments, read and write: counting audiences, syncing the consented members of an audience you choose, and two helper segments, engaged and not engaged, used for counting.
- profiles:read and profiles:write: email, consent status and creation date, plus the ftes_pick properties behind a Picked for you block and the win-back properties set when you press Send in the Morning Brief.
- metrics:read and templates:read and write: performance reports, and the email templates for campaigns you approve.
- subscriptions:write: used once, to add your own seed addresses to a test list. A shopper's consent is read, never changed.
Read-only or full access: what changes?
Read-only access and full access to Klaviyo change what the Email Marketing Manager can do, not what it can see. A read-only private key lets the Email Marketing Manager read your account, audiences, campaigns, flows and results, so it can still advise: which audience is slipping, which customers are due a second order, what a campaign earned. Every action that would write to Klaviyo is disabled, and the button says why, so the limit is visible before anyone presses it.
Full access, through Connect with Klaviyo or a private key with write scopes, lets the Email Marketing Manager build templates and campaigns, sync audiences and send once the checks and approvals are satisfied. The access mode is shown in ftes for Commerce next to the connection. A store can start read-only to see the advice first, then reconnect with full access when it is ready to let the Email Marketing Manager build and send.
How do you send your first profit-checked campaign?
A first profit-checked campaign in ftes for Commerce follows five steps, and each one leaves a record you can read later. The Email Marketing Manager prepares each step; you make the decisions at the ones that matter.
- Choose the audience: for example Slipping or Due a second order, with its size shown after protected groups are excluded.
- Review the copy: subject, preview and body are written in your brand voice, and you can edit any of it.
- Pass the checks: products must be in stock, any discount must stay under your maximum, and margin after the discount must stay above your floor.
- Run the test send: the campaign goes to your seed list first, because a seed test is required before sending.
- Approve: you approve, send it back with a reason, or reject it. Above your audience-size threshold, approval needs typed confirmation.
Which guardrails can no autonomy level cross?
The Email Marketing Manager has an autonomy ladder of four levels: Suggest, Draft, Approve and Autopilot. At Suggest, Draft and Approve, a person approves every send. At Autopilot, a campaign that passes every check sends without waiting, except above the audience-size threshold, where typed confirmation is still required. You choose the level, and you can lower it at any time.
Above the ladder sit guardrails that no level can cross. These are the frequency cap per week, quiet hours, protected groups that are always excluded, the maximum discount, the margin floor, the daily send ceiling, the seed list test send before sending, and typed confirmation above the audience-size threshold. The kill switch sits over all of it: while it is on, everything is paused and nothing sends until you release it. Guardrails are rules you set, not suggestions the Email Marketing Manager weighs.
How does a holdout group measure the profit an email caused?
A holdout group is how the Email Marketing Manager separates the profit an email caused from the orders that would have happened anyway. For each send, a random share of the audience, 10 percent by default, is held back and receives nothing. Afterwards, the Shopify orders of the people who got the email are compared with the orders of the people held back, and the difference is the profit the email caused.
This matters because attributed revenue counts every order placed after an email was opened, including orders from customers who were going to buy regardless. As an illustration only: if both groups order at the same rate, the campaign caused no measurable profit, whatever its attributed revenue says. Because the holdout is chosen at random, the comparison is fair, and the report shows you the result beside the campaign rather than a figure chosen to flatter it.
What does the Email Marketing Manager do for each customer?
The Email Marketing Manager works from each customer's own reorder rhythm, the gap between that customer's orders in Shopify, rather than a single store-wide average. That rhythm produces two audiences. Slipping holds repeat customers who are past their own usual gap between orders but not yet lost. Due a second order holds one-time buyers who have reached the point where, in this store's own orders, a second order usually comes.
Best time for this audience picks the hour at which most of the audience places orders, and the email goes out at that hour in each customer's own local time. The Picked for you block chooses one product per customer: a product often bought with what that customer already owns, that they have not bought, that is in stock with no stockout risk, and that stays above the margin floor after the discount. When no product meets every condition, a fallback product is used instead, and test sends show the fallback so you see exactly what a customer without a pick will receive.
What happens to your data when you disconnect Klaviyo?
Disconnecting Klaviyo from ftes for Commerce revokes the token at Klaviyo and deletes it from ftes for Commerce, so the Email Marketing Manager stops reading and writing at once. Klaviyo keeps everything that lives in your Klaviyo account, including the campaigns and templates already created there, because that data is yours and stays in Klaviyo.
The ftes.ai Privacy Policy lists, in its section on Klaviyo, the data that moves each way between ftes.ai and Klaviyo, when it moves, and how tokens are handled. It also states that a shopper's consent is read, never changed, and that data from Klaviyo is never sold, never shared with another customer and never used to train AI models. Read it at ftes.ai/privacy-policy, together with the section on the ftes for Commerce Shopify app.