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Metrics type: Cross-Platform Metrics • Category: Email Marketing
Spike = post-purchase flow over-mailing. Tune cadence in the post-purchase template.

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At a glance

The percentage of customers who unsubscribed from Klaviyo within 7 days of placing an order on the commerce platform. Computed by joining Klaviyo’s unsubscribe events against commerce-platform orders on customer email and filtering to a 7-day post-purchase window. A spike here is the single clearest signal that the post-purchase flow is over-mailing customers, the customer just bought from the brand, then a barrage of post-purchase emails (review request, upsell, reorder reminder, social-share request) drove them off the list.

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Calculation

Calculated automatically from your Klaviyo data. See the At a glance summary above for what the metric tracks and the worked example below for a typical reading.

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Worked example

A skincare brand on Shopify with a 5-step post-purchase Klaviyo flow (order confirmation, review request at day 3, upsell at day 5, social-share request at day 7, replenishment reminder at day 14). The 90-day window covers 12 Jan 26 to 12 Apr 26.
Five observations:
  1. 5.6% well above the 3% alert threshold. Of every 100 customers who place an order, nearly 6 unsubscribe from Klaviyo within the next week. The post-purchase flow is the most likely culprit, customers who just bought are most engaged with the brand, but a barrage of follow-up emails immediately after purchase reads as harassment.
  2. The 5-step post-purchase flow is the diagnosis. Each post-purchase email is a chance to lose the customer. Brand-loyal customers tolerate 1-2 post-purchase emails (the order confirmation and a review request); past 3 emails in a week the unsub rate climbs sharply. Industry benchmark is 1-2 post-purchase emails over the first 14 days.
  3. The fix is sequence pruning, not template rewriting. Common pattern: keep order confirmation (day 0), review request (day 7, not day 3), and replenishment reminder (day 30+). Drop the upsell-at-day-5 and social-share-at-day-7. Most merchants who do this see post-purchase unsub rate fall from 5-7% to 1.5-2.5% within a single 90-day window.
  4. The unsubscribe is most damaging when it happens fast. A customer who unsubscribes within 24 hours of buying has had their relationship with the brand harmed; a customer who unsubscribes 6 days later just doesn’t want more email but still likes the product. Watch the within-1-day rate as a leading indicator: if 2%+ of buyers unsubscribe within 24 hours, the order confirmation itself has marketing content that’s pushing them away.
  5. Cross-platform context: SMS opt-outs are the bigger lift. SMS unsub rates run 4-8% post-purchase vs email’s 1-3%. If the merchant runs both, the combined rate easily reaches 6-10% post-purchase. Some accounts intentionally aggressive on SMS post-purchase (immediate review request, immediate upsell) trade off long-term list health for short-term review volume. This card surfaces that trade-off explicitly.

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Sibling cards merchants should reference together

Unsubs Within 7d of Purchase is a list-health protection metric. Pair it with these:

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Reconciling against the vendor’s own dashboard

Where to look in Klaviyo: Klaviyo doesn’t expose this exact metric natively. Closest views: This card exists because Klaviyo doesn’t surface this slice natively. Post-purchase over-mailing is one of the silent killers of list health, the merchant has to actively look for it. Why our number may legitimately differ from the merchant’s expectations: Cross-connector reconciliation: This card derives from Klaviyo + commerce-platform orders. The relevant comparisons are:

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Known limitations / merchant FAQs

My rate is 6%, what’s the first thing to fix? Open the post-purchase flow in Klaviyo and count the number of emails fired in the first 14 days after purchase. If 4+, prune to 2-3. The most common over-mailing pattern is: order confirmation (day 0), shipping notification (day 1-3), review request (day 5), upsell (day 7), social share (day 10), replenishment reminder (day 14). That’s 6 emails in 14 days. Cut to: order confirmation, shipping, review (day 7-10), and a single replenishment 30 days out. Most merchants see post-purchase unsub rate fall by 50-70% within one 90-day window after this change. The rate is 1.2%, that’s good right? Yes. The healthy band is 1-2%. Below 1% is excellent, often a sign of a well-tuned post-purchase sequence. Don’t try to push lower than 0.5%; some natural attrition (customers buying once because of a gift, customers shopping around) is unavoidable. Why is the post-purchase rate higher than my account-wide unsub rate? Because customers who just bought are highly engaged with the brand at order time, then either confirm the engagement (love what they bought, stay subscribed) or reject it (regret the buy, or feel over-mailed). Post-purchase is a moment of high attention which means high signal in either direction. Account-wide unsub rate averages across moments of low attention (mid-cycle promotional sends to less engaged subscribers). Are SMS opt-outs counted in this card? Yes. Klaviyo’s “Unsubscribed” event fires for both email unsubscribes and SMS opt-outs. SMS opt-out rates are inherently 5-10× higher than email, so SMS-heavy accounts see elevated numbers here. To split, manually filter the underlying events by metric channel in Klaviyo’s dashboard. Customers who refunded their order, are they counted? Yes. The order is in the denominator at order time and the unsubscribe is in the numerator if it happened within 7 days. Refunding the order doesn’t reverse either side. So the rate slightly overstates the “engaged buyer who unsubscribed” reading; some of these customers were the ones who didn’t end up keeping the product. My rate spiked after I added an SMS opt-in to checkout, why? Customers who opt into SMS at checkout get both email and SMS post-purchase sequences. The combined volume of communications doubles or triples. The unsub rate jumps because SMS feels more invasive than email. The fix is to throttle the post-purchase SMS sequence specifically: usually 1 SMS in the first 7 days is the maximum tolerated, additional SMS pushes drive aggressive opt-outs. My rate is 4% and I only have 3 emails in my post-purchase flow, what’s wrong? Three checks: (a) is there a separate post-purchase flow for VIPs or wholesale that fires in addition; (b) is the welcome flow firing concurrently for first-time buyers (welcome + post-purchase = double sequence); (c) are promotional campaigns to the full list catching post-purchasers. The third is the most common cause: a customer buys on Tuesday, then the Wednesday weekly newsletter and Friday flash-sale send make it 5 emails in 7 days from Klaviyo even though the post-purchase flow itself is 3 emails. Suppress recent buyers from promotional sends for 7-14 days post-purchase. The card joins on email, but my customers use one email for newsletter and another for orders. Are they counted? No, the join key is email address. Customers with mismatched emails are excluded from both numerator and denominator (they never appear in the join). On average 5-15% of customer pairs are excluded for email-mismatch reasons. The reported rate is the rate among matched customers, which is reliable directionally even if absolute volume is understated. Does this card include flow-driven unsubscribes only, or all unsubscribes? All Klaviyo unsubscribes within the 7-day post-purchase window are counted, regardless of source (campaign, flow, profile-direct). The shape of the metric assumes the post-purchase flow is the most likely cause, but in practice campaigns to recent buyers are often equally responsible. My new-buyer unsub rate is much higher than my repeat-buyer rate, why? First-time buyers haven’t formed a brand attachment yet; one or two over-aggressive post-purchase emails feel like spam. Repeat buyers have already self-selected as engaged and tolerate more communication. Segment the post-purchase flow by buyer-history: a softer 2-message sequence for first-timers, a fuller 4-message sequence for repeat buyers. This typically halves the new-buyer post-purchase unsub rate without affecting repeat-buyer engagement.

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Tracked live in Vortex IQ Nerve Centre

Unsubs Within 7d of Purchase is one of hundreds of KPI pulses Vortex IQ tracks across Klaviyo and 70+ other ecommerce connectors. Nerve Centre runs the detection layer; Vortex Mind investigates the cause when something moves; Ask Viq lets you interrogate any number in plain English. Start for free or book a demo to see this metric running on your own data.