At Accorin we are advocates of Klaviyo as the highest performing, easiest-to-use email / sms service provider for e-commerce merchants. Klaviyo newbies love it because it’s easy to learn, which means you can teach relatively new e-commerce team members how to use it and how to manage important communications and marketing campaigns. Experienced e-commerce marketers also like it because it makes “advanced” marketing tactics, like personalization and segmentation, accessible and executable without getting into complex data queries and complex data imports or exports. If you work in e-commerce marketing or non-commerce digital marketing and you haven’t tried Klaviyo, you should really consider a free trial by clicking right here.
But the main purpose of this article is to give general e-commerce merchant team members our thoughts on which Klaviyo features and functionalities you should be mastering to get the most out of your marketing efforts. Some may be obvious, while others will make you a power user. So, let’s get to it…
Executing a Segmentation Strategy
Klaviyo has a fairly elaborate formula for “effective segmentation,” which is outlined in this helpful article.
To boil it down into simple terms, you’ll want to organize your customers into 3 general groups:
- Frequent purchasers
- Recent purchasers
- Prospective purchasers (visitors that have not yet purchased)
These 3 general groups of customers are where your bread is buttered. So if you are not doing any segmenting at all, that is if you are still “spraying and praying” start out by creating segments based on behaviors that make sense for your business.
For example, let’s say I sell high end all natural pet foods. My most valuable customers are
- Subscribers (they combine high average order value, AOV, frequency and lifetime value (LTV)).
- New purchasers (new customers that bought in the last 90 days), and
- Prospects and/or cart abandoners that have visited frequently but not purchased.
This is a simple segmentation strategy but if I design unique messages and timing of messages to each of these our overall performance and growth is almost certainly going to increase. Incredibly, Klaviyo quotes that campaigns that utilize the behavioral data (used to create segments) perform 11X better than campaigns that don’t.
Setting Up a VIP Segment
Following on from that first one, it’s important to really treat your absolute best customers and a separate group. You’ll need to classify your best customers based upon value metrics that make sense for your own business. An easy metric is anyone who has purchased and accumulated LTV of $xxx or higher. You can decide if your VIP segment should include subscribers and high LTV customers, but remember to apply the rule by a frequency metric that makes sense. VIP customers of most brands, CPG businesses, and consumer-focused companies tend to respond very well to offers so it’s worth it to make offers compelling and rewarding to each of these members.
Use A/B Testing to Learn What’s Effective
Lots of marketers know they need to test but they don’t because they’re too busy trying to find campaign concepts that drive results. But it’s important to test and no other tool makes it as easy as Klaviyo.
After you set up a campaign, you can easily set up a second version of the same campaign with a different content component you would like to test by clicking on “add a variation” – the result of which will walk you through a very easy-to-use process to set up your test.
Tests we see our merchants utilizing to drive higher performance include: testing subject lines with alternative CTAs, Different landing page versions, different offer percentages, alternative product imagery or graphics.
A/B testing is not very scientific with Klaviyo; it’s easy and for that reason you can address that little voice in your head that says, “maybe we should have made that offer X rather than Y” and you can TEST! A great feature of Klaviyo’s A/B testing is the ability to test with a sample first and then release the ‘winner’ to the remaining subscribers. That way, you can optimize your campaigns in real time, rather than waiting for the next campaign.
Other platforms provide testing capability but we have found that Klaviyos is by far the easiest to add to a campaign(s).
Setting up SMS (Text Messaging)
It’s time to help your customers with the convenience of SMS-based messaging; but be careful because you need absolute, unbridled consent in order to do so. Klaviyo easily facilitates SMS messages as a primary e-commerce marketing channel. For most e-commerce merchants the hard part will not be obtaining the numbers – it’s a required field in 99% of e-commerce checkouts where shipping is required. The hard part will be gaining consent. While the process is similar to opting in for email, the grey area around “spam” with texting doesn’t exist and you need verifiable consent. Any complaints about unapproved texting can add up to measurable and meaningful fines quickly. This important article about consent is worth a read for anyone who is considering setting up SMS.
Why bother with SMS? Well, once it is implemented, open and response rates tend to be much higher than email; Klaviyo merchants report that customer service ratings increase and sales increase once it has been implemented.
Use Klaviyo’s Insights to Optimize Your Customer Experience
One of the biggest benefits of Klaviyo is the deep insights an e-commerce merchant can gather directly from the same too they are using to do their email marketing. Because Klaviyo tracks behaviors on e-commerce sites, the insights aren’t limited only to the campaign performance but also site performance after the click.
You can track key behaviors beyond the open – view – click campaign metrics such as when users were active on your site, their views of product pages, and if they purchased.
You can leverage this information to do things like:
- Segment your list based on level of engagement,
- Trigger an automated flow email to those that browse several times without purchasing (abandon browse)
- Create sequenced Abandon cart messages
Our clients have found the combination of Klaviyo behavior tracking and analysis of their analytics extremely important in making their e-commerce marketing operations more efficient.
The Bottom Line
Campaigns and lead flows are the core of Klaviyo, but those are not power moves. If you don’t know what those are, learn those first as a part of playing with your free trial. But once you’ve decided to move your marketing to Klaviyo and you’ve got your customer data loaded up, you’ll be wanting to explore these power moves quickly because once you do so you will find that your e-commerce business will grow – potentially by up to 11x!
