Email and SMS marketing are powerful tools that drive deeper connections with a brand’s audience, tell stories, and drive both sales and loyalty. Email marketing is back on the rise, with many brands seeing this channel drive 30% or more revenue. Its high ROI makes it a marketing channel worth focusing on. As a Silver partner with Klaviyo, with a Klaviyo Community Champion in-house, Unified helps our clients optimise and get the most out of their email marketing channels.
Why Klaviyo?
Klaviyo stands out as a leading marketing automation platform, offering a comprehensive suite of tools for email and SMS marketing, as well as customer relationship management (CRM). It’s all-in-one solution means it has all the tools you need for an email and SMS channel that really works for your brand. Our clients have also praised its ease of use, and seamless integration with their tech stacks including Shopify, Magento, Google Ads, META, Klevu, Loyalty Lion and more. In this guide, we'll delve into the best practices for harnessing Klaviyo's potential to elevate your email marketing efforts and achieve tangible results.
Deliverability
This should be a key focus for your email marketing channel, and you should check your account is properly set up to ensure maximum deliverability. Without good deliverability rates, your sender’s email address and IP address could be blacklisted as spam, and you could even be blocked.
When you start sending emails out on Klaviyo, it’s best to go through a ‘warming’ stage to ensure your engaged customers are interacting with your messages, and you are hitting your KPI benchmarks. This would normally be a 4-week process, but can be faster depending on the cadence of your email sends and the size of your database.
Data
It's so important to have clean data with a single source of truth when you are starting email marketing. Thankfully Klaviyo integrates seamlessly into Shopify, Magento, BigCommerce etc in real-time giving you a clear view of your customers.
If you are importing customer data from different places manually (such as in store sign-ups) it's important to import these correctly with the right data fields so you can clearly see source data. You can also capture the interests and behaviour of your customers too, capturing this information in ‘Profile Properties’. For example, if someone was purchasing an engagement ring, only ever wanted a city break for a holiday, or followed a vegan diet. Speak to us to find out more.
Automation + Flows
Flow emails are triggered by an action such as a customer subscribing to your email list, placing an order or abandoning the checkout. Flows consistently outperform campaign emails across all metrics as you are sending a targeted message to a customer at the right time.
Flow emails are the most important emails to get set up, and ensure they are working correctly. They need to be reviewed on a regular basis, and key elements (such as subject lines, timings or creative) A/B are tested consistently. We recommend setting up the following flows as standard, and then developing further flows based on your specific business goals and objectives.
Welcome Series (when someone subscribes to your email list)
Abandoned Cart (when someone has added to cart but not completed checkout)
Post Purchase (after someone has placed an order)
We have worked with The Conran Shop and Ehrman Tapestry to improve their automation and flows following their Klaviyo implementations. The Conran Shop saw a fantastic 23% increase in email marketing revenue following this work and Ehrman Tapestry saw similar results with a 21% increase. So this is an area well worth focusing on!
Ehrman Tapeststry Klaviyo campaign, 2024
Segmentation
To ensure your engagement is high and deliverability is good, we really recommend segmenting your audience. Klaviyo’s segmentation tools are super easy to use, and calculate in real-time so you have a clear view of your customers at all points. It’s important to know the difference between Lists and Segments:
Lists - these are static and only grown as people subscribe or are manually added.
Segments - these are dynamic, meaning people are added (or removed) when certain conditions are met.
Segmented campaigns can return 3x the revenue per recipient compared to unsegmented campaigns.
We recommend setting up the following segments as standard, then developing them as you grow:
Engaged Subscribers: Anyone who has opened or clicked an email in the past 30 days
VIPs: Anyone who has purchased X times or spent over Y
Inactive Subscribers: Anyone who has been on your list for 6 months but have not opened or clicked.
Nearly There's - People who have browsed a product X times, but not yet purchased.
You can send targeted campaigns to these segments or trigger a flow when someone enters the segment.
Utilise sign-up forms
Your list growth strategy is so important now, as paid social becomes harder and more expensive to drive sales. Part of this strategy should be the use of sign-up forms.Klaviyo has the ability to run pop-up forms, web pages or embedded forms to collect information from your website visitors.
It’s important to A/B test these forms and your messaging to ensure you are capturing your visitor's attention. One size doesn’t fit all, so you shouldn’t be showing the same pop-up to everyone. You can also be really targeted with these forms, showing them to people who are visiting from certain countries, and viewed a certain page or interacted with a particular ad.
Email Campaigns
Email campaigns can drive a high ROI if they are well-executed and highly targeted. Unified can support you to develop an email campaign strategy that can deliver for your brand, or manage all your campaigns for you.
How many email campaigns you send needs to be personal to your brand, but a consistent schedule should be maintained to build familiarity with your audience. It’s important to keep tracking unsubscribe rates to ensure your deliverability remains strong. A/B testing email campaigns is also really important. A rigorous testing plan is key, which should include subject line testing and creative testing. You can also test time of day and day of week.
Beyond Email & SMS
Klaviyo integrates with Google Ads, META and Pinterest so you can easily connect your desired customer segments into your advertising channels. Want to target your VIPs with a new launch on Instagram or Pinterest? No problem. Or perhaps target lapsing customers with a special offer to bring them back?
Our Digital Marketing teams work closely together to ensure we are working with you to grow your brand effectively by using this tech and understanding your customer behaviour.
Ready to get started?
Unified’s team of Klaviyo experts have worked with global brands from one-off audits to ongoing campaign management and flow set-ups. Check out our recent success story from Ehrman Tapestry.
Get in touch with our team to find out more.
