- Think Z
- Posts
- You're not using Klaviyo
To Its Full Potential
The TL;DR:
Let’s Chat D2C: Klaviyo may be a CDP, but most brands I’ve audited don’t leverage the platform to its full potential.
What I’m Thinking about this Week: Setting yourself and your team up for success this BFCM.
The D2Z Podcast: I sat down with the founder of Mason, an e-commerce conversion platform, and chatted about building a technology company, navigating DTC pains, and how to handle promotions without hurting your customer base.
App Highlight - Windsor.io: A super cool AI video platform we just got done testing with an Electriq client that resulted in a 176% increase in abandoned cart revenue.
Book of the Week - Smart Choices: A Practical Guide to Making Better Decisions.
Random tip: It’s good to have ambition and want to advance your career, but not if it is a constant distraction from what you need to accomplish in the present.
Let's Chat D2C: Klaviyo IS a CDP, but Most Brands Don’t Leverage the Platform to its Full Potential
Buying a stick-shift car without knowing how to drive a stick-shift…
This might be a terrible example for me to use, seeing as how I have no idea how to drive stick-shift and most likely never will, but I’ve been in far too many Klaviyo accounts that treat it like it’s Mailchimp and don’t take advantage of the true power of the platform.
What I See Far too Often
It’s not like there’s anything inherently wrong with this, and Klaviyo still should be the #1 choice for any ecommerce brand, but I can’t get over how many Klaviyo accounts I’ve audited that are being used to send email marketing campaigns to their entire list and have just a few of your basic flows set up with zero testing (A/B testing subject line doesn’t count) or personalization (Hi doesn’t count here either).
The Data you have on a Customer is Immense…
And with this data comes a responsibility to leverage it to create an authentic and personalized customer experience.
Here’s an example of a segment I quickly threw together in our client’s account, as I think this is the best way to showcase the true power of Klaviyo.
This segment is pulling in data from 7 different sources:
Okendo - Latest Review Rating
Fairing (formerly known as Enquire Labs) - How likely the customer is to recommend Soylent
Shopify - Active Subscriber.
Loyalty Lion - Referral URL & loyalty tier.
Gorgias - Engaged with customer service at least once before.
Gatsby - Instagram handle is known.
Klaviyo - Opened an email at least once in the last 30 days.
I think I’ve proved my point on the immense amount of data Klaviyo is ingesting from various sources to give you a complete 360 view of your customer's behavior, interaction, and characteristics with your brand. But let’s start with the basics first.
Let’s start with the Flows you NEED
These are the basics, and if your Klaviyo account doesn’t have them, you’re missing out on revenue - plain and simple. I created a full walkthrough video on Youtube of all the flows you need and how to set them up here, but this is the list:
Welcome Flow
Post Purchase Flow
Abandoned Cart Flow - Add to Cart Metric
Abandoned Checkout Flow - Checkout Started Metric
Browse Abandon Flow
Customer Winback Flow
ReCharge/Subscription Flows with Quick Actions!
Subscription Started Flow
Upcoming Subscription Flow
Subscription Cancelled Flow
This list is by no means exhaustive, and it doesn’t touch on any of the flows we create that are powered by triggers from integrations such as Octane.ai, Rebuy, Okendo, Gorgias, Loyalty Lion, etc., etc., but this will give your brand a solid foundation you can build on top of.
How do you Layer Data into these Flows?
You can conditionally split and personalize any of the above flows, but let’s use an abandoned cart flow as an example of how you can take something simplistic and turn it into a robust, personalized customer experience.
You'll get the following if you log in to Klaviyo and set up an abandoned cart flow from their templates.
Great place to start, but this is just the tip of the iceberg. Let’s think of some data points or customer actions we might want to leverage to enhance this:
Are they subscribed to SMS marketing?
Is this a new or returning customer?
If it’s a new customer, what is the basket size of their cart?
If it’s a returning customer, are they currently an active subscription customer?
If it’s a returning customer, do they have loyalty points or store credit available to redeem?
These are five examples of how you can conditionally split the flow or personalize the email and SMS content. Here’s how I’d build this out in order:
Check whether they are subscribed to SMS marketing first. If they are, you will branch them down a path that includes SMS messages and less frequent emails! You will branch them down your standard email-only path if they're not.
Next, check to see if they are a new or returning customer. You’ll want to communicate with them differently, but you’ll also want to check for different things based on this information.
If it’s a new customer, you can trigger split your flow based on their checkout size. If it’s over $100, maybe you offer 15% off instead of 10% off.
If it’s a returning customer, you can split your flow based on whether or not they are an active subscription customer. If they’re an active subscription customer, I’d recommend sending one gentle reminder and letting them be.
If a returning customer has loyalty points or store credit available to redeem, include this dynamic property in the email content. You can choose to conditionally split the flow to achieve this (necessary for SMS) or create a conditional block in the email that only shows to contacts with loyalty points or store credit.
The above flow isn’t even leveraging zero-party data yet. Imagine how crazy we could get with things once we start to incorporate that!
What about Campaigns?
The above applies to your campaign strategy, but on a one-off basis. My favorite thing to do is to create reusable conditional blocks that only show to contacts who meet the criteria (i.e., only show a section at the bottom of the email with # of loyalty points left to redeem for customers who have loyalty points or only show a section at the bottom of the email with a CTA to subscribe to SMS marketing for customers who are not subscribed yet).
Taking a Different Approach to Email/SMS Marketing
One of the biggest reasons Electriq is a retention agency, first and foremost, NOT an email/SMS marketing agency, is because the above can’t happen without an understanding of the entire customer journey with a Shopify brand and how all of the various apps play a role in creating a unified customer profile in Klaviyo that we can use to create personalized experiences at scale.
We’re Shopify retention experts at our core. Email/SMS marketing just happens to be one of the #1 levers to impact retention and LTV.
Extending Klaviyo beyond Email/SMS
Klaviyo is a hub for more than just email and SMS communication. We’ve started to work with Tapcart and PostPilot to enable push notifications and direct mail communications directly from our Klaviyo campaigns and flows.
Imagine a customer win-back flow that doesn’t just touch email and SMS but sends a timely push notification and a last-chance personalized direct mail piece to that customer’s home.
I’m excited to further my and Electriq’s knowledge around these two channels as a logical addition to our Retention-as-a-Service (RaaS) offering.
What I’m Thinking About This Week: Setting Yourself up for BFCM Success with a Few Simple Tips
BFCM is going to be hectic, and your promotions might have already started for some of you! These are a few tips and tricks I’ve found success with over the years that hopefully will set you and your brand up for success.
Test your Site!!!
It’s easy to forget the basics when running around in a million different directions, but before the big day, test your site and ensure all your promotions and codes are functioning correctly!
Give Early Access
Customers love early access. It’s also a great way to increase your SMS list size by proactively sending email campaigns to your customers, letting them know that the VIP SMS list will get special BFCM offers before anyone else.
“Limited” Quantity Offers
Demonstrate rarity and increase buyer urgency by offering a “limited” quantity of an offer. Once you run out of stock, you can always send out a campaign letting customers know that you worked hard to get some more in stock and that they have a limited time to take advantage of the second drop!
Robust Referral Program
It’s your best offer of the year. Reward your customers for sharing it with their friends!
Protect your Customer Service team with Self-Service Chat
Gorgias is hands down the best customer service platform for Shopify merchants, and one of their most powerful features is Self-Service chat. The results show that the self-service chat portal can deflect and automate up to 30% of your chat tickets! Save your customer service team from wasting their time with inquiries like “Where’s my order?” and allow them to focus on creating positive customer experiences for urgent situations.
You can set up quick response flows and allow customers to track their order easily, start a return (based on if they meet specific criteria), report a problem (you can customize these), and cancel their order.
Strong Transactional Journey
Cut down your customer service inquiries and improve your returning customer rate by moving your transactional communications into Klaviyo via Malomo.
Proactively keep customers up to date on their order status with beautiful, branded emails and texts that you can customize based on all of your data on that customer in Klaviyo.
This Week's The D2Z Podcast
#35 - Building a Technology Company, Navigating DTC Pains, and Promotions with Kausambi Manjita
🎧 Listen Now 🎧
In this week’s episode, I sat down with Kausambi Manjita, Founder of Mason, an ecommerce conversion platform. Specifically, we explored the following:
💰 The need for conversion services for e-commerce brands
📲 The nuances of building a technology company
😎 Solving the customer acquisition problem
🚀 What makes an effective promotion and missed opportunities to increase conversion
App Highlight - Windsor
Windsor.io is a new app we recently tested with an Electriq client, immi, that produced a significant ROI lift in our abandoned cart flows.
❓ What is It: Windsor enables brands to send a personal video to every customer.
🏅 Differentiator: Through their AI, we’re able to record one video, typically by the brand's founder, and have millions of personalized copies sent to our customers.
💰 Starting Price: $300/mo. 3 months off annual plan through Electriq!
🚀 How we use it: Post-purchase and abandoned cart flows. The post-purchase thank you video increases repurchase rates and brand loyalty, while the personalized abandoned cart video dramatically improves conversion rate. I even see some applications for win-back flows and commemorating special moments (i.e., “You’ve just placed your 10th order! We appreciate and value your support.”)
I’m looking forward to rolling out this technology with our clients as a logical extension of Electriq’s Retention-as-a-Service (RaaS) offering.
Book of the Week - Smart Choices: A Practical Guide to Decision Making
Make smart choices. Seems simple enough, right?
While not a traditional business book, I found the framework for making better decisions enlightening. It was interesting to reflect on past choices and how I went through some of these stages without being aware of them. I’m looking forward to approaching decision-making personally and professionally with the below eight elements.
The 8 Elements of Smart Choices
Problem: How you frame your decision can make all the difference.
Objectives: Ask yourself what you want to accomplish in order to give direction to your decision-making.
Alternatives: Have you considered all of your alternatives?
Consequences: Both positive and negative consequences are associated with each potential decision.
Tradeoffs: There’s never a perfect decision. Your task is to choose from less-than-perfect possibilities.
Uncertainty: Effective decision-making requires addressing uncertainty head-on and
Risk Tolerance: Not every option carries the same level of risk. It’s important to understand your risk tolerance and be comfortable if the worst-case outcome comes true.
Linked Decisions: What you decide today can influence decisions you’ll have to make in the future.
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