One of the most common questions I get asked when building an email inside of Klaviyo is about the difference between “manual” and “draft” status.
Manual or Draft Status in Klaviyo?
To begin, when you are building a flow like the one I have set up here, there are three different statuses you can have within your email.
The first one is “live”, which is pretty straightforward — it means that the email is sending.
The second is “manual”, and the third is “draft”.
The beauty of Klaviyo is the fact that you can toggle between these three settings.
This is where a lot of people get confused and ask: Do I put an email in “manual,” or do I put it in “draft”?
The Difference Between Draft and Manual
We are going to start with draft first.
Draft is basically your default setting.
When you log in to Klaviyo and create a new email (like the one in the screenshot below), the system will default to draft mode.
This means exactly like what you would assume a draft is.
It’s an email that is currently not live, an email that you are currently working on — designing graphics, writing copy, testing the feel and deliverability, etc. That is what draft status is for when building a new flow.
So if you are working on an email that has never been live before, that is the setting you should use.
Manual differs from draft in the fact that when an email is in manual mode, the message will not be sent. Instead, this mode will queue people up so you can send to them once you’re done editing.
That’s why the main time I use manual is when editing an email that has already gone live or when doing an investigation/audit of an email in a certain flow that I plan on turning on live again.
Imagine getting a response from a customer stating that a link is broken, something isn’t working properly in the email or that a stat is incorrect. These types of hiccups are relatively common when working with flows.
In this case, I would toggle to manual mode instead of draft.
“Needs Review” In Analytics
You will see on the left-hand side graphs that show:
- Deliver
- Open Rate
- Click Rate
- Active on Site Rate (this will change based on the metric you have selected)
If an email is in manual and people are passing through that email while it’s in that mode, it is not going to send the email. However, you will see another little line item called “needs review.”
Imagine that you have people running through this flow.
You put the email in manual while working on it, and it passes through 10 while it was on manual.
What happens next? In the analytics tab a new option or row will pop-up called “needs review.” In this row, there will be 10 people waiting, and here you can go back and retroactively send people that email after you are done editing it.
This can be really helpful if you want to make sure everyone gets the message in a flow that gets a lot of traffic.
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