Marketing & Growth

How to launch an email marketing campaign as DTC Brand Founders

Marketing & GrowthFor DTC Brand Founders3 apps11 steps~22 min to set up

You're running email campaigns out of Klaviyo, but your segments are stale because they're built on data that hasn't touched your Shopify order history in weeks. You spend two hours before a launch pulling customer lists into a spreadsheet, cross-referencing who bought what SKU, who returned it, and who hasn't purchased since Black Friday. Your welcome flow is live but nobody's auditing whether it's actually converting. You don't have a growth marketer — you are the growth marketer — and the weekly send gets pushed because you were on a call with a 3PL and then answering refund emails. By the time the campaign goes out, the window has passed.

Build this on Starch → See the apps used

Marketing & GrowthFor DTC Brand Founders3 apps11 steps~22 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

A live customer segment dashboard that pulls your Shopify purchase history, Plaid transaction data, and Gmail thread activity so you always know exactly who to target before you write a single word of copy

An automated pre-send workflow that checks your PostHog conversion data and emails you a summary of what's working by channel, so you're writing to your highest-intent segment with actual evidence behind the angle

A post-send report that tracks open rate, click rate, and revenue-per-recipient, delivered to your inbox automatically the morning after each campaign goes out

The Starch recipe

Apps, data, and prompts

The combination of Starch apps, the data sources they pull from, and the prompts you use to drive them.

Apps used

Growth Analyst CRM Email Agent

Data sources & config

Growth Analyst connects to PostHog from Starch's integration catalog — the agent queries it live when the weekly digest runs — and Starch syncs your Gmail data on a schedule to track which campaign threads got replies and which went cold. The CRM pulls purchase and return data by connecting Shopify from Starch's integration catalog. Plaid transaction data syncs on a schedule and can be layered in to reconcile revenue against campaign spend. Klaviyo connects from Starch's integration catalog so the agent can query list membership and campaign metrics live.

Prompts to copy

Connect my PostHog data and Gmail. Every Monday morning, email me a digest showing which referral sources drove the most signups last week, which email campaigns had the highest click-to-purchase rate, and one specific segment I should target in my next send based on recent purchase behavior.

Build me a CRM that tracks customers by total lifetime value, last order date, product category purchased, and whether they've submitted a return. I want to be able to ask 'who bought the travel bag SKU in the last 90 days and hasn't reordered?' and get a list I can drop into a Klaviyo segment.

Triage my inbox and flag any email that mentions a campaign, refund, or wholesale inquiry. Draft a reply for each one and remind me if I haven't responded within 24 hours.

Run these in Starch → or paste them into your favorite agent

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Connect Shopify from Starch's integration catalog. The agent queries your order history, return records, and customer profiles live when your CRM and campaign segments run.

2 Starch syncs your Gmail data on a schedule. This powers thread history inside the CRM so you can see which customers you've actually talked to, not just who's on a list.

3 Connect PostHog from Starch's integration catalog. Growth Analyst queries it live to pull signup trends, conversion rates by channel, and content performance into your Monday digest.

4 Connect Klaviyo from Starch's integration catalog. The agent queries your list membership and campaign stats live — open rates, click rates, unsubscribes — so your digest includes email-channel performance alongside paid and organic.

5 Starch syncs your Plaid transaction data on a schedule. This lets you reconcile actual revenue in the days after a campaign send against what Shopify reports, catching any gap between gross sales and net cash.

6 Start the Growth Analyst app and tell it: 'Every Monday at 8am, pull last week's PostHog data and Gmail campaign replies, and send me a digest with the top three things I should know before writing this week's email.' Starch schedules the automation and emails you the first report next Monday.

7 Fork the CRM starter app and customize it for your DTC context: add fields for SKU purchased, AOV tier, return flag, and last campaign they clicked. Tell Starch: 'Build me a CRM where I can filter customers by product category and see which ones haven't reordered in 60 days.'

8 Use the CRM to generate your target segment before each send. Ask it: 'Who bought the canvas weekender in the last 120 days, hasn't returned it, and hasn't placed a second order?' Export that list and upload it to Klaviyo as a new segment.

9 Start the Email Agent and route your campaign-related inbox traffic through it. Tell Starch: 'Flag any email about a product launch, campaign reply, or influencer collab. Draft a response and remind me if I haven't sent anything within 24 hours.'

10 After each send, tell Starch: 'The morning after every campaign, pull Klaviyo open and click data, match it against Shopify orders placed in the next 72 hours, and email me a one-page revenue-per-recipient summary.' Starch builds the automation and runs it after your next send.

11 Use the Growth Analyst digest the following Monday to decide which segment to hit in the next campaign. The digest tells you which angle drove the most click-to-purchase last time, which referral source is sending your highest-LTV customers, and whether your returning-customer flow is underperforming.

See this running on Starch

Connect your tools, describe what you want, and the agent builds it. Closed beta is free.

Try it on Starch →

Worked example

April 2026 re-engagement campaign — lapsed 90-day buyers

Sample numbers from a real run

Target segment (Shopify query, 90-day no-reorder)	1,840
Klaviyo send — open rate	31
Click-to-purchase rate	4.2
Orders attributed (72hr post-send)	77
Revenue attributed (Shopify + Plaid reconciled)	9,120
Revenue per recipient	4.96

You ran a re-engagement send targeting customers who bought the canvas weekender between January and March 2026 but hadn't placed a second order. The CRM query took about 20 seconds: 'Show me everyone who bought SKU CW-003 in the last 90 days with no subsequent order and no open return.' That returned 1,840 names. You uploaded the list to Klaviyo, sent a single email with a 15% repeat-customer offer, and let the post-send automation run. The next morning you had a summary in your inbox: 31% open rate, 4.2% click-to-purchase, 77 orders, $9,120 in attributed revenue, $4.96 per recipient. The Growth Analyst digest the following Monday flagged that the segment had a 22% higher click rate than your general list — which told you the re-engagement angle was worth running again for the travel bag SKU next month. Total time you personally spent on setup: about two hours, spread across two evenings.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Revenue per recipient (each campaign send, reconciled via Shopify + Plaid)

Click-to-purchase rate by segment (not just open rate — who actually bought)

Lapsed-buyer reactivation rate (90-day and 120-day cohorts)

CAC trend vs. email-attributed revenue (are you buying customers cheaper through email than paid?)

Return rate by campaign SKU (are your promo sends moving units that come back?)

Comparison

What this replaces

The other ways teams handle this today, and how the Starch version compares.

Klaviyo alone

Klaviyo handles the send mechanics well, but building the segments still requires manual Shopify exports, and there's no layer that tells you which segment to target next — you have to figure that out yourself every time.

Triple Whale + Klaviyo + Notion

Triple Whale gives you attribution dashboards but it's another monthly bill, the Notion docs are always out of date, and nothing automatically connects your post-send revenue back to a customer CRM record you can query conversationally.

Hiring a fractional email marketer

A fractional hire brings judgment, but they need three weeks to get context on your catalog, they're not available at 11pm before a launch, and they can't query your Shopify data directly — you're still pulling exports for them.

Attentive or Postscript (SMS-first)

Better for SMS-heavy brands; if email is your primary retention channel and you want the segmentation logic tied directly to your order and return data without a separate CDP, these tools don't close that gap.

On Starch RECOMMENDED

One platform — growth analyst, crm, email agent all running on connected data. Setup in plain English; numbers stay current via scheduled syncs and live agent queries.

Try it on Starch →

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Can Starch actually push a segment directly into Klaviyo, or do I still have to export a CSV?

Klaviyo connects from Starch's integration catalog, so the agent can query your Klaviyo lists and campaign stats live. For pushing a new segment into Klaviyo, Starch can automate the browser-side steps through browser automation — no API required. You describe the workflow and Starch handles the mechanics.

Does Starch store my Shopify order history, or is it querying live every time?

Shopify connects from Starch's integration catalog and is queried live when your app runs. It's not stored in Starch's database the way Plaid transaction data is. For most campaign segmentation this is fine — the query runs fast. If you need archived historical data going back years for trend analysis, that's worth knowing upfront.

What if my campaigns run on a tool that isn't Klaviyo — say, Mailchimp or Customer.io?

Mailchimp, Customer.io, ConvertKit, and ActiveCampaign all connect from Starch's integration catalog. The agent queries them live. Swap in whichever platform you're on — the workflow structure is the same.

Is the Growth Analyst digest actually useful, or is it just another dashboard I'll ignore?

The Growth Analyst emails you a digest — it comes to you, you don't have to log into anything. It tells you three specific things with numbers, not a full analytics report. Whether it's useful depends on whether your PostHog data is clean. If you're tracking signups and conversions properly in PostHog, the digest gives you real signal. If your event tracking is messy, it'll reflect that honestly.

Is Starch SOC 2 certified? I'm connecting bank transaction data via Plaid.

Starch is not SOC 2 Type II certified yet. If that's a hard requirement for your business before connecting financial data, it's worth knowing now. It's on the roadmap.

Can I use this if I don't have a PostHog account — I'm on Google Analytics?

Google Analytics 4 connects from Starch's integration catalog. You can wire the Growth Analyst workflow to query GA4 instead of PostHog. Tell Starch what you want to track and it'll pull from whatever analytics source you've connected.