What is Klaviyo and Why Should I Use It for My Online Store?

There are so many reasons to love Klaviyo and I cannot wait to share them with you in this article.

First, let me make a bold statement - Klaviyo will make your online store more profitable!

For B2C/DTC retailers, the most profitable orders that will be placed on your online store are concentrated into several marketing channels including:

Email Marketing
SMS Marketing - Klaviyo is not just email marketing. With Klaviyo SMS, you send your message through the mobile carriers to the customers cell phones. Retailers are seeing incredible engagement rates as customers naturally review their text messages often.
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) - this program is about ranking your store pages high in the search engines to drive FREE traffic organically to your online store. Although there is no direct cost to this traffic, there are a tremendous amount of time and resources involved performing SEO optimization, which has its costs.

Simply, marketing via the Klaviyo software allows you to deliver email and SMS best practices to make more money for your online store.

How Does Klaviyo Help Your Online Store Grow?

By being a Klaviyo customer, you can centralize your customer data in one system, so you can create highly segmented and personalized email and SMS campaigns that will blow away your competition. Plus, they make it easy for you to do this through email and SMS templates, built-in integrations with hundreds of apps and eCommerce platforms and an interface that is easy to understand from a novice to an expert ecommerce marketer.

Plus, Klaviyo provides best-in-class reporting and analytics for your marketing campaigns to give you a clear picture of what is working in your email or SMS program as well as a CRM-like interface to understand your best performing customers and who is responding to your campaigns.

Klaviyo Solves Several Problems for Online Retailers

One of the challenges when selling online is that you will have your customer data in multiple systems.

Customer data (e.g., order date, customer address, products purchased, etc.) could live in your order management system as part of your ecommerce software such as Shopify, BigCommerce, WooCommerce, Volusion, or one of the many other popular eCommerce platforms.

Next, you will have your email click activity in another system such as Klaviyo, MailChimp, SendGrid, or a host of other email service providers.

Additionally, you will likely have your visitor and customer site activity (what your site visitors/customers do on your site) in another system. For instance, another system is capturing what pages they visit, what products they viewed, what items they have abandoned, and more activities like this.

Klaviyo customers can easily centralize all three data sources into their system to provide you with a 360-degree view of your customer. This is the holy grail of marketing. Plus, this is all 1st party data - more about this later.

By centralizing your customer data, smart online retailers can create highly segmented and personalized campaigns to achieve incredible results and get more highly profitable orders for your business.

13 Reasons Klaviyo Makes Money for Your Online Store

An Email/SMS Leader - Klaviyo is an all-in-one platform that will handle all your email marketing and SMS marketing from the same interface. It is perfect marketing tool for new merchants and seasoned retention experts. Klaviyo allows you to have multiple channels of communication with your customers at once. For instance, you can combine email and SMS in automated Klaviyo flows to allow multiple channels of communication as part of the same campaign!

Segmentation - In any good retention marketing effort, it is important to segment your customer lists. This is direct response marketing 101. Klaviyo allows you to easily build static (e.g., upload a customer list) and dynamic lists (e.g., changes based on customer data or activity) to target the right customers at the right time. Klaviyo makes this easy with Boolean logic (AND/OR). For instance, you can make a dynamic segment of your VIP customers by targeting a customer who spend over $200 in the past year OR a customer how ordered 3 times in the past year. Additionally, you can use customer lists in your Klaviyo account to create a custom audience for a Facebook Ad. How cool is that!

Personalization - Once you create a targeted list, it is important to personalize the message in an automated way. Personalization comes in many different forms and can be as simple as adding a customer's name to a message, but it can get more advanced. For instance, you can easily include recently viewed products or product recommendations from past orders in your email and SMS marketing to allow cross-sell, up-sell, or order again buying opportunities. Klaviyo makes it easy for you!

Unified Profile - This is so important. We touched on this earlier but having a 360-degree unified profile of your customer is key to successful marketing. Many of the largest companies online, names you know, have not achieved this.

When you can combine customer data, site activity, and email/SMS campaign activity on one customer profile, your possibilities are endless to create highly effective, targeted, and profitable campaigns that drive profits.

Product Catalog Integration - Klaviyo integration is easy with your favorite eCommerce platform such as Shopify, BigCommerce, WooCommerce, and dozens of others to allow your product catalog to be integrated into your Klaviyo account. Why is this important? Integrations with your ecommerce store can not only provide individual products in your catalog (including product name, description, image, price, inventory, etc.), but also the product's category. This allows Klaviyo customers a whole new way to implement their segmentation. For instance, if you were a candy company and wanted to send a campaign about your new line of dark chocolate gifts, you can make a dynamic list of all customers who purchased dark chocolate in the past year.

By integrating your product catalog into Klaviyo, you can populate emails and SMS with your product information to provide personalized recommendations in your campaigns.

Predictive Analytics - Most large online retailers that generate millions of dollars of business annually online do not have the capability in place to predict their customer's next order date. Klaviyo gives that to you this automation right out of the box! Klaviyo is much more than an email and SMS tool. It is also an AI tool that gives you insights and predicts future customer behavior that giant online stores either don't have or pay hundreds of thousands of dollars per year to get. You get this intelligence at a fraction of the cost!

Smart Sending - This smart sending feature is a customizable Klaviyo feature that gives you the power to automatically avoid sending too many emails to the same person in a short amount of time. This is important when you have multiple campaigns launching on the same day. Smart sending will suppress customers from getting a campaign that got one recently, say in the past 12 hours. This feature is a great way to have sophisticated program that does not overwhelm your customers with too many emails or SMS.

1-Click Personalization - It is super easy to personalize email and SMS campaigns with one-on-one marketing messages based on order history and site activity. Powerful stuff!

Forms - One of the quickest ways to build your email list is capture email addresses of new visitors to your online store. You see this all the time because it works. You can offer an acquisition offer (e.g., 15% Off When Your Sign Up Today) in exchange for a visitor to provide you with their email address. This allows you to grow your list quickly and if the visitor does not order today, you can retarget them automatically via flows in Klaviyo.

Flow Templates - This is an incredibly important feature at Klaviyo provides you. They have done all the hard work and provide prebuilt flow templates that help add advanced automation to your email and SMS efforts. This is a huge timesaver and helps you implement best practices right out of the gate. Thanks, Klaviyo!

Attribution - Klaviyo does what many email service providers don't and provides you with a flexible attribution time frame. This allows you to match your attribution in their system to your business needs. For instance, you can adjust the Klaviyo settings to attribute revenue to your email program for activity in the past 5 days of the last click.

Native 200+ Integrations - One of my favorite aspects of Klaviyo is their plug-and-play native integrations to sync customer data, site activity and email/SMS activity into one marketing platform. This is done through a combination of native integrations (and more via tools like Zapier) as well as placing a small JavaScript within your store to capture site activity and allow smart logic to display email capture pop ups.

Plus, for my tech nerds reading this, Klaviyo has pre-built integrations that allow you to do events, custom properties, and JavaScript API. This includes a private API key inside the Klaviyo app.

Intuitive Interface - Klaviyo's interface is one of my favorite features. Starting from the Klaviyo dashboard, their interface is a good customer experience that is well organized into different sections that allow you to jump to your campaigns, flows, analytics, forms and more with ease. Like any marketing platform, there is a slight learning curve, but it is shorter than most. Plus, if you have platform questions, their customer support and chat support is top notch.

Why Use Klaviyo for SMS Marketing?

One of the most important aspects of SMS marketing is that it is a key marketing channel for you for first-party customer data. As the industry, moves away from third-party customer data, this will become an even more important marketing channel for your store. You can create your owned marketing channels.

With Klaviyo SMS, a host of new possibilities to communicate with your customers awaits. For instance, you could:

Provide coupons and promotions
Send personalized messages
Give reminders for important dates
Send order-related messages
Respond to customers who text you back

There are many SMS providers competitors including:

Point solutions:

Attentive
Postscript
SMSbump
Retention Rocket
And others

Marketing Platforms:

Listrak
Iterable
Sailthru
Emarsys
And others

Custom solutions:

Twilio
via Zapier

So, Why Choose Klaviyo for your SMS?

One of the great new services when you sign up with Klaviyo for your SMS program is onboarding help from their team. For companies that spend $40 per month on SMS, Klaviyo includes SMS onboarding, SMS best practices and a review of your SMS program.

Their Onboarding Team will help you get up to speed quickly and seamlessly. They are going to work with you to understand your business goals and help you be successful with your SMS program.

Here are five steps to the SMS onboarding process at Klaviyo:

Kickoff call - the onboarding specialist will get to know your business and help you get started with your SMS program
Receive training materials - your onboarding specialist will send them over to you and help answer any questions
Strategy Review and Go Live Call (optional) - the onboarding team is going to walk you through SMS best practices and provide personalized feedback regarding your program
Performance review call - this is the final call with the onboarding team. They will walk you through your SMS analytics benchmarks and review your first campaigns to identify opportunities
Ongoing Support - the Klaviyo team will provide ongoing support through trainings including live and on-demand trainings. Plus, you'll get personalized education emails and in-app messaging for you even learn more

SMS Marketing Best Practices for Your Online Store

In terms of SMS best practices, it is important to keep your messages short and sweet with a single call-to-action. You'll want to make sure your message is a time sensitive such as back-in-stock campaigns, flash sales. Also, you'll want to create urgency around your SMS messaging.

Each SMS message should be personalized when possible and you want to make sure you are delivering immediate value to your subscribers and to keep those unsubscribe rates low.

Don't forget to surprise and delight your customers through exclusive offers and content.

Here is a short list of use cases for SMS for online retailers:

Transactional messages about your order
Back in stock
Helpful tips product announcement
Customer service
Cross-sell/up-sell opportunities
VIP messaging - messages for your best customers only
Ask for valuable feedback

When you leverage SMS to engage with your customers, you will generate repeat business for your online store.

Pre-Built Klaviyo Flows That You Must Use for Your Online Store

Give Klaviyo big kudos for creating powerful pre-built templates for you to use to grow your email and SMS program quickly.

Here are examples of available email

templates:

Automated Emails via flows:

Welcome - New Customer
Welcome - Email Signup No Order
Abandon Checkout Campaign
Abandon Cart Campaign
Abandon Product Campaign
Abandon Browse Campaign
Winback - work to get a subsequent order
We Miss You - re-engage with inactive email subscribers
And more...

Other key email campaigns to run in your Klaviyo account include:

Automated - Transactional Emails:

These campaigns are related to a customer's order and help inform your customers that you received the order, shipped the order, got their return, and would like their product review (to help build more social proof on your store).

Order confirmation
Shipping confirmation
Returns confirmation
Product review request

Manual Email Campaigns:

These campaigns are manual created and the distribution list may change based on your segmentation strategy. These campaigns make up the volume of your email sends. However, you will find that your Flows in Klaviyo have higher $/email sent multiples higher. Overall, it is a good idea to have you're your Klaviyo campaigns and Klaviyo flows working hard to drive your email revenue.

Targeted (Segment) Campaigns - based on order history/click behavior
General Newsletter - sent to all subscribers

In Summary, Klaviyo is a must-have for marketers

There is so much to love about Klaviyo marketing tools.

Whether leveraging their pre-built templates for email and SMS campaigns, predicting future customer behavior through automation, personalizing product recommendations with recently viewed product, or providing a 360-degree view of your customers order history and click activity, Klaviyo marketing software is a powerhouse of a marketing platform that you should leverage for your ecommerce marketing.

Remember that your most profitable orders are in the backend of your business (e.g., your customer list).

It's time to create a robust and powerful retention program via email marketing and SMS to create loyal customer and make more money for your eCommerce store.