How to onboard Klaviyo Composer like a new hire (5 lessons)
Most teams treat AI marketing tools like a search engine. Type something vague, see what comes back, shrug, and go write the email themselves anyway.
Retention marketing agency Sticky Digital took a different approach with Klaviyo Composer. They onboard it the same way they onboard a new strategist. Brand docs, real briefs, specific feedback, and a clear division of what the AI handles versus what stays with a person.
Here are the five operational lessons their team learned along the way.
️ Lesson 1: Load the brand kit before the first prompt
Before anyone writes a single prompt, Sticky Digital loads Composer with the same onboarding packet a new strategist would get in their first few weeks.
For each client, that means adding to the Klaviyo brand kit:
- Brand voice and tone documentation
- Brand guidelines
- Content guardrails: banned phrases and products to exclude
- Compliance and legal rules
- Real campaign briefs the team has already used
This setup pays a practical dividend beyond better outputs. The less Composer has to figure out on its own, the fewer credits each prompt costs.
Lesson 2: Use real creative briefs, not lazy prompts
Sticky Digital does not skip their normal briefing process because they are using AI. They paste the same internal briefs directly into Composer.
Their quality brief format includes the segment, the campaign goal, whether it is a campaign or a flow, and every component of the message. With that input, Composer drafts the subject line, preview text, copy, and layout for the team to review.
Here is the difference in practice, using an underwear brand as the example client.
Weak prompt: We want to sell shades of blue underwear. Compose us an email and tell us who it should go to.
Stronger prompt: Build a win-back email for customers who haven’t purchased underwear from us in 90 days. Feature our new blue colors and offer 20% off for 72 hours. Keep the tone friendly but not overly promotional, and plan it to go out next Tuesday morning.
Three habits that improve prompt quality:
- Write in full sentences, the way you would explain a task to a coworker.
- Define audiences by behavior, like no purchases in 90 days, rather than labels like lapsed customers.
- Anchor tone to a past campaign: similar energy to our Black Friday send.
Lesson 3: Push back on the first draft, and be specific
A new strategist’s first draft misses sometimes. Sticky Digital treats Composer the same way: tell it exactly what to change and why, and keep the feedback inside the same conversation so context carries forward.
They will intentionally start with a basic prompt and use the output to write a better one. Here are examples of how specific feedback compares to vague feedback across common revision areas:
| Area | Vague feedback | Specific feedback |
|---|---|---|
| Urgency | This doesn’t feel right. | Dial back urgency language and lead with the loyalty angle for the VIP segment. |
| Tone | Make it more fun. | Make it sound like our Black Friday send, playful but not pushy. |
| Audience | This segment is too broad. | Exclude anyone who bought in the last 30 days and anyone with an open support ticket. |
| Offer | The offer gets lost. | Move the 20% off into the subject line and the first line of the email. |
| Length | This is too long. | Cut the body to 3 short paragraphs and one CTA. |
| Brand voice | This doesn’t sound like us. | Swap ‘amazing deals’ for language from our brand guidelines, like ‘made to last.’ |
| Timing | Rethink the timing. | Send the text message 24 hours after the email, only to people who didn’t open it. |
Lesson 4: Give Composer the routine QA, but define what to look for
QA is where Sticky Digital uses Composer the most. Each client account gets two passes: one from Composer, one from a person on the team. Composer handles the routine checks: verifying links, dark mode rendering, cross-device email rendering, and flagging alerts.
A real example shows how much it can catch. They asked Composer to audit a client’s welcome series. Over 30 days, the flow reached 165 people with a 38.9% open rate, but had 0 clicks and $0 in attributed revenue.
Composer flagged 17 issues, ranked by priority. The top five were:
- Click tracking: 61 unique opens produced 0 clicks. Composer flagged every CTA link to confirm it resolved and that click tracking was enabled.
- Stalled paths: Subscribers received the first email but none received the second. Composer flagged the last time split conditions were edited and recommended sending a test profile through each path.
- Subject line typo: Back by science should have been Backed by science across 3 messages, including both A/B test variants.
- Elevated bounce rate: The first email in one path was bouncing at 13.7% and the overall flow at 4.85%. Composer recommended adding a filter to exclude the suspicious-email suppression segment.
- Filter mismatch: Two live flows used the same trigger but checked the same profile property in different formats, one as text and one as a number. Composer recommended confirming how the property was stored.
Prompt specificity matters here too. A prompt like Find the bots in this account is weaker than Find the emails that have a lot of clicks from people in the same location at around the same time. Sticky Digital found the second approach more effective.
Lesson 5: Decide which calls stay with your team
Composer does not publish anything live without human approval. But beyond that hard stop, Sticky Digital keeps specific decisions with their team regardless of how confident Composer’s output looks.
- Campaign strategy: The team decides what to send, to whom, and why before anyone opens Composer. Composer works from the brief, not the other way around.
- Definitions: Someone has to set the rules. Sticky Digital includes on-site activity in their active audience definition, while Klaviyo’s default counts only email or text engagement. Their team decides what fits the brand and tells Composer.
- Audiences and suppressions: Composer can draft a segment or flag suspected bots, but the team decides whether the segment logic is accurate and how the suppression will work. Comparing Composer’s segment recommendation to the team’s own thinking has become a training tool for junior team members, because Composer explains the reasoning behind every segment it builds.
How to run your first Composer session in one hour
If you want to get Composer set up this week without a long implementation project, Sticky Digital’s recommended first-hour sequence is:
- Load your brand kit with voice, tone, guidelines, content guardrails, banned phrases, required legal disclaimers, and products to exclude.
- Paste in a few real briefs your team has already used, with segment, goal, message type, and message components.
- Tell Composer where your definitions differ from Klaviyo’s defaults, such as what counts as an active subscriber or your maximum segment size before deliverability risk.
- Ask Composer to audit your flows and review what it flags.
- Fix anything broken before briefing your first campaign.
Once a brief template or QA checklist works reliably, you can save it as a custom skill so you’re not retyping the full prompt each time.
What Sticky Digital is testing next
The agency maintains a segment library in their own Klaviyo account and copies segments into each client account. They also have an internal training document on how their team thinks about segmentation. Neither has been shared with Composer yet.
Their next experiment is feeding Composer the segment library and the segmentation training doc, so its drafts start closer to how the team already thinks. The principle generalizes: find where the AI’s output misses, then teach it what you already know.
I’m founder of BizStack at Cagri Sarigoz LLC and a passionate advocate for entrepreneurs.
With over 14 years in tech, marketing, and AI, including my role as Head of SEO at CitizenShipper and co-founder of TaleBot at Intale AI, I’m dedicated to sharing genuine, useful product insights and tips.
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