Chapter 1:
Introduction
Introducing Klaviyo Email Marketing
Klaviyo is a platform dedicated to growing eCommerce businesses through email marketing and SMS automation. Suitable for both small businesses and Enterprise brands, Klaviyo delivers exciting and engaging shopping experiences across owned channels such as email and text messaging. In this guide, we’re sharing some features of Klaviyo that make it one of our favorite eCommerce email marketing platforms to date.
Chapter 2:
Build Customer Relationships
Using Klaviyo Email Marketing To Build Relationships With Customers
Integrations
There’s no need for a complicated setup because Klaviyo integrates natively with other apps to pull in all customer and order data. Fortunately for Klaviyo customers there are no hidden fees, so merchants can integrate an unlimited amount of data. See in-depth information about your customers, like their email, phone number, birthday, average time between orders and last order date. Even see the most recent activity on an order, from when a customer started checkout and ordered a product to when the merchant shipped the order.
Here’s a list of some available native integrations:
- BigCommerce
- Shopify
- Magento
- Smile.io
- Justuno
- ReCharge
- Yotpo
This list isn’t comprehensive, and you can view the full list of native integrations here.
Additionally, Klaviyo uses direct integrations to sync data with other apps and platforms that aren’t on the native integration list. Similar to the native integrations, the direct integrations have no limit on data volume, data fields or age of data. On the technical side, the simple API is a favorite among developers. The codeless signup forms are supported by Javascript (which only takes 5 minutes to set up), and Klaviyo offers a couple options that make it easy to backfill customer data.
Forms & Personalization
All marketers and salespeople know that generating leads is key to increasing sales. Klaviyo makes it easy to attract traffic and grow leads using forms and personalization. Just like how a salesperson greets a customer at a brick-and-mortar store, eCommerce stores can welcome their website visitors with pop-ups, embedded forms and more. No matter whether a person is a first-time shopper, frequent buyer or VIP customer, Klaviyo customers are able to cater offers based on a user’s profile, segment and location.
The way in which a brand designs lead capture forms and sets custom rules plays a huge role in the user experience. For example, showing more than one pop-up per session is a nuisance and disrupts a visitor’s experience with your site. Incentivize people who are about to leave your site with exit-intent forms to avoid perturbing their shopping experience. Establish other rules based on page session time or scroll percentage, and use minimal form fields depending on the form’s goal. If you are solely trying to increase leads by offering a newsletter sign-up discount, then keep the form fields minimal by asking for only the necessities such as name and email.
However, if your goal is to gather more personal information, such as birthdays, sizes and preferred styles, then don’t hesitate to ask for it in a form because that information will help you understand their product preferences and shopping habits. This information will also later aid in presenting customers with personalized product recommendations.
Also, Klaviyo allows for A/B testing, so merchants can make marketing decisions based on scientifically accurate data. Its A/B testing capabilities notify merchants when a form wins the A/B test with a significant result. This helps merchants choose the better form that will achieve their desired goal of increasing leads.
Customer Profiles
Did you know that ROI is 5 to 8 times higher when using personalization in the marketing and sales process? Businesses tend to be much more successful when they make smart marketing decisions based on their customers’ data.
Klaviyo is a CRM in itself that enables merchants to see a contact record for each person in their database. Within a single view, see the actions that a contact has taken, like the pages they visited and how much they spent on their last purchase. View the sequential timeline provided by Klaviyo for further insights into a customer’s website and spending activity. With Klaviyo, you’ll have direct insights into:
- When a customer opens an email
- When and for how long a customer was active on your website
- When they viewed a specific product
- When they placed an order
One of our favorite Klaviyo features is its predictive analytics. Once a company has a strong customer database and collects a number of purchases, Klaviyo will store valuable predictive data, such as customer lifetime value, expected date of next purchase and likelihood to churn. Brands can use these automatically-added predictions to send time-sensitive messages to customers or create highly targeted campaigns.
Chapter 3:
Analyze Customer Insights
Klaviyo Email Marketing KPIs
Segmentation
Klaviyo’s customer profiles help marketing teams specifically target customers based on their behavioral and transactional data. Behavioral data includes products viewed and interactions with emails, while transactional data includes products purchased in the past and total amount spent on past purchases. There’s no need to worry about manually updating segmented lists; Klaviyo updates these automatically - which is a feature that differentiates the platform from other email service providers.
Further, segment contacts based on special events. Set these special events based on your business’s priorities. Create workflows that send triggered emails to the people in your database that meet a specific event. For example, if someone makes a purchase, they could be entered into a flow that encourages them to write a product review. Or, if someone subscribes to your newsletter, they could be entered into a flow that offers a discount code on their next purchase within a given time frame.
Use a person’s website activity to build segments based on their behavior. Want to target only people who have viewed sunglasses 5 times in the past 10 days? Enable Klaviyo’s website tracking to take advantage of your contacts’ browsing history. Add or exclude segments based on your campaign goals to reach only the people you want to be seen by. Prioritizing segmentation and leveraging lists to promote offers is a great way to enhance performance and drive conversions.
Data Science
Klaviyo leverages machine learning, artificial intelligence and data science to provide companies with practical insights based on their customers’ data. It’s designed in a way to help businesses grow faster while saving both time and money. It’s important to note that companies must meet the following criteria to take advantage of Klaviyo’s predictive analytics:
- Must have at least 500 customers place an order
- Must have an eCommerce integration, like BigCommerce or Shopify, or use Klaviyo’s API to send placed orders
- Must have at least 180 days of order history, with some placed within the last 30 days
- Must have at least some customers place 3 or more orders
Klaviyo’s data science functionality enables merchants to predict the next time a customer will make a purchase. Identifying the day a customer will make their next purchase allows merchants to optimize their marketing and reach out to customers at the most convenient point in the buyer’s journey. Also, it predicts a customer’s gender based on their first name and U.S. census data. This prediction aids companies in narrowing down their targeted audiences and marketing more gender-specific products to the right customers.
In addition, Klaviyo’s data science features predict a customer’s total amount of future spending, number of upcoming purchases, lifetime value and even the average time spent between orders. These pieces of data are valuable when it comes to creating a customer loyalty program to drive retention and brand loyalty. Want to see who your highest paying customers are? How about the ones who purchase the most from you? See it all within Klaviyo, and leverage that information to not only reward those in your VIP tier but also to perfectly time your marketing efforts.
Further, see how likely your customers are to churn. By identifying the likelihood of when a customer may stop using your product or service, you’ll have a better sense of who to send customized offers to (a great strategy to drive repeat purchases!) Klaviyo’s data science also lets merchants A/B test signup forms so that they know which design will work best, and it establishes a “smart” time to send emails so that more people open and click through them.
Reporting
Use Klaviyo to view all data on past performance - from signup forms to campaigns to follow-up flows. View the Campaign Performance Report for key data to uncover trends and insights that will help enhance your campaign strategy. Check out the Flow Performance Report for a deeper look into each email flow, and determine which emails or text messages drive the most engagement and conversions. Leverage this data to identify opportunities for improvement, so you can enhance your strategy moving forward and reach more people.
Take a look at the List Growth Report, which shows how your contact list grew over time as well as the source in which the contact found your brand. Another popular report in Klaviyo includes the Product Performance Report, which analyzes how many shoppers browse through a specific product page, make it to the checkout page and, ultimately, purchase the product.
Use the Custom Analytics feature to see performance for a specific time period (that’s right - you don’t need to wait to see performance data from last week.) One of our favorite features is the analytics dashboard, where merchants have visibility into marketing and campaign performance within a single view. Build reports in minutes with the various metrics that you need, save them and view them all within a single screen on an as-needed basis.
Benchmarks
Klaviyo outlines their customers’ best and worst performing indicators and evaluates them against industry benchmarks to determine their value and percentile. This information provides insights into how your business stacks up against the competition (100 similar brands, to be exact.) See things like click-through rates, conversion rate, bounce rate, percent of orders returned, average order value, average orders per customer and so much more. Insight into this data, which shows the areas in which a business could use some improvement, really helps brands prioritize their marketing efforts going forward.
Chapter 4:
Personalize Communications To Enhance The User Experience
Personalization with Klaviyo Email Marketing
Automation
When clients come to us asking for a marketing automation platform that we trust, we typically refer them to Klaviyo due to its ease of use and speed. Map out what you want your customer experience to look like with Klaviyo’s drag-and-drop builder, and design the customer journey from beginning to end. Guide customers on the path to purchase by leveraging up-to-date data. Use this data to personalize the user experience and send automated emails based on certain pieces of information. Send triggered emails to the segment of customers that you want to reach (and avoid those that you don’t) with Klaviyo’s flow branching.
Also, test out different variables within emails - such as content, subject lines or sending dates and times - by using A/B testing. Klaviyo’s A/B tests ensure that companies send the highest performing automated emails to their database, so expect to see an increase in engagement metrics. Plus, with Klaviyo’s real-time reporting for each flow, it’s easy to see how various emails in a series compare in terms of open rates, closed deals/sales generated and more.
Social Advertising
Amp up your social media advertising strategy using Klaviyo’s automation and personalization features. Transfer data from Klaviyo to Facebook and Instagram (and vice versa) to generate relevant messages and offers. Target various customer segments, such as those who abandoned their cart or bought a specific product, to reach them at both the right stage in the buyer’s journey and through multiple channels. Use this data to inform your social media advertising strategy and supply relevant and consistent content that your audience will enjoy.
Take advantage of Facebook’s lookalike audiences to expand your contact list and get your ads in front of people who are similar to your current customers. For example, upload your list of VIP customers into Facebook to create a separate, lookalike audience of new people who are like those in your VIP list.
Email Marketing Campaigns
Enhance your email marketing strategy by seamlessly creating and designing Klaviyo emails. Rather than sending one-off emails to your whole list of contacts, send targeted emails - like newsletters, product announcements or campaign-specific emails - to segmented lists. This helps to build relationships with your audience by providing customers with a more personalized, one-on-one experience. Plus, it’s a great segway into sharing personalized product recommendations for each person.
Use the setup wizard to send branded emails so that it’s easier to send future emails. With this feature, you don’t need to manually brand each Klaviyo email you create. Rather, merchants can easily add their brand information, such as company name, address, logo, colors, header links and social links.
Last, Klaviyo provides the means necessary for brands to constantly improve. Use the Smart Sending tool to avoid bombarding individuals with your emails and, instead, reach the right people at the right time. Continuously test not only sending times but also email subject lines and copy to increase open rates and click rates.
SMS
In addition to Klaviyo email marketing, Klaviyo SMS is a great tool for eCommerce businesses that want to engage with their customers on a personal level. SMS marketing involves sending a text message to subscribers that provide consent. The contents of a text message can range from coupons and discounts to promotional alerts and special deals to shipping and delivery notifications and so much more.
With Klaviyo SMS, subscribers must opt-in to receive messages from any merchant. They also have the option to opt-out at any time. Combine this SMS functionality with flows, and those who consent to receive text messages will automatically receive a welcome message. On the other hand, if they did not provide consent, set up a flow so that they’re sent an automated email instead. Change the criteria at any time to send triggered emails based on a user’s actions.
Did you know that Klaviyo users who text see an average ROI of 24x? This is because text messages are more successful than emails are at capturing users’ attention. SMS subscribers are in a place where they feel they can trust your brand, so it’s important to acknowledge this customer loyalty by building relationships with each person.
Here are some common situations in which merchants leverage SMS:
- Welcome series
- Abandoned cart reminders
- Campaigns
- Promotions
- Tips
We encourage you to watch this video to learn how to add SMS to your welcome series in under 2 minutes. Also, learn how to add SMS to your abandoned cart flow with this video, and see how you can create a VIP segment for SMS campaigns here.
When it comes to reporting on Klaviyo SMS vs email, take advantage of the platform’s customizable reports to see exactly what is driving conversions. The accurate data is great for determining which email or SMS message caused a customer to purchase, while the predictive analytics are a smarter way to uncover new strategies to grow your business.
Want to benchmark your SMS performance against all other Klaviyo customers? Reference these two articles for a look into the average click, conversion and unsubscribe rates for flow SMS and MMS and campaign SMS and MMS.
Chapter 5:
Klaviyo Pricing
Klaviyo Email Marketing Pricing
Since merchants have the option to leverage Klaviyo email marketing, SMS or both, Klaviyo has pricing systems for each feature. We recommend using this Klaviyo Pricing Calculator to find out how much it will cost your company. First, determine how many contacts are in your CRM that you want to send emails and/or SMS messages to. Then, input that number into the pricing calculator to easily discover how much Klaviyo will cost your business.
Klaviyo is free for up to 250 contacts, and the price increases based on the number of contacts a company has. For instance, companies with 251-500 email contacts will be charged $20 each month. If the same company with 251-500 email contacts wants to text their contacts, the company will be charged an additional $20 per month for both Klaviyo SMS and email − a total of $40 per month.
Chapter 6:
Conclusion
Our Final Klaviyo Email Marketing Thoughts
If you’re considering investing in Klaviyo to enhance your eCommerce strategy, we are here to help every step of the way. Connect with our team to share your thoughts and goals with us. We’ll be happy to answer any questions and help you get started on your Klaviyo journey.
About Groove Commerce
Groove Commerce is a full-service eCommerce agency with 14 years of experience helping mid-market retailers design, build and grow their eCommerce websites. As an Elite BigCommerce Partner Agency and Diamond HubSpot Partner Agency, Groove Commerce follows an inbound methodology and delivers bespoke, white-glove service to convert visitors into repeat customers.
About Klaviyo
Klaviyo is the world’s leading owned marketing platform, known for accelerating revenue for online businesses using the channels they own like email, web and mobile. Enabling companies to leverage these owned marketing channels, Klaviyo makes it easy to store, access, analyze and use transactional and behavioral data to power highly-targeted customer and prospect communications.
And unlike other marketing platforms, Klaviyo doesn’t force companies to compromise between advanced functionality or ease of use − companies of all sizes are able to maximize their sales quickly. That’s why more than 70,000 innovative companies like Unilever, Custom Ink, and Eventbrite sell more with Klaviyo.
