5 Tools You Should Be Using in Klaviyo to Know Your Customers Like a Best Friend

It’s no secret that we are huge Klaviyo fans over here at SmartBug—it’s the primary platform our e-commerce department utilizes to drive success for our clients. If you’re unfamiliar with the platform, let us introduce you to this powerhouse of email and SMS marketing.

Meet Klaviyo

Klaviyo is an email and SMS marketing platform that integrates directly with key e-commerce platforms such as Shopify, BigCommerce, and WooCommerce. Utilizing tools in Klaviyo, e-commerce brands can automate their email and SMS marketing while creating personalized shopping experiences. It provides an easy way for marketers to view important data, pull key insights, and customize messaging for the best results. 

This powerful platform is growing and evolving every day, but there are several tried-and-true tools in Klaviyo that we believe every e-commerce marketer should be using in order to fully know and interact with their customers.

Primary Tools in Klaviyo You Should Be Using

1. Email & SMS Flows (or Automations)

Email and SMS flows are the bread and butter of your email and SMS marketing system.

A flow is an automated email (or SMS) series that is triggered by different subscriber behaviors. Some of the most important flows for e-commerce brands include:

• Welcome flow: Subscribers are entered into this flow after subscribing to your email list through a pop-up or another method of email/SMS capture.
• Checkout abandonment flow: Subscribers are entered into this flow if they added an item to their cart but did not complete their purchase.
• Browse abandonment flow: Subscribers are entered into this flow after browsing your website and viewing product(s) but have not yet added the item to their cart.
• New customer or post-purchase upsell flow: Subscribers are entered into this flow after they complete their first purchase. (Spoiler: this is our favorite because the post-purchase time frame is limited, valuable, and often underestimated!)

2. Email & SMS Campaigns (with Segmentation)

On Klaviyo, one-off email or SMS sends are referred to as “campaigns.” These messages cover some of the less-evergreen items you want to share with your subscribers: time-sensitive sales, product launches, exclusive offers, and so on. 

Though campaigns are less behavior-based than flows, proper segmentation is still incredibly important for maintaining a healthy sender reputation and providing a personalized experience for your shoppers. 

For example, say you’re an e-commerce brand that sells vitamins/supplements for all ages, genders, and health needs. Based on customer behavior, you’ve identified a segment of customers who are likely female and expecting a child. By blasting an email that highlights prenatal vitamins to your entire email list, you are harming your sender reputation in multiple ways:

• This email will likely result in low engagement rates thanks to its lack of personalization
• You may end up in the spam folder because of that low engagement

Tools in Klaviyo allow you to identify key characteristics of your audience and use that information wisely. With campaigns, you can customize your content to best fit shopper preferences and make modifications based on deliverability.

3. Integrations

Klaviyo is your one-stop shop for keeping your customer data in one place. You can easily integrate your e-commerce platform and a variety of other applications, such as your rewards program and subscription services, to fully shape the customer experience.

Utilizing the data that comes from these integrations, you can further customize your email/SMS automations and campaigns to maintain communication with your VIP customers and brand loyalists.

4. Dashboards & Reporting Features

Klaviyo makes it easy for you to quickly identify how your email and SMS marketing efforts are performing. Through just the homepage dashboard, you can view revenue and where it’s being attributed to:

• Total revenue: Pulled directly from the e-commerce store integration for a “big picture” view
• Revenue from Klaviyo: Shows how much of your revenue is being directly attributed to email and/or SMS
• Flow and campaign revenue: Shows a deeper breakdown of which communications are leading to conversions
• Email and SMS revenue: Helps identify which channel is contributing the most revenue
• $ per recipient: Measures the success of your email and/or SMS efforts based on the number of recipients

But ... that’s just the start! Klaviyo’s advanced analytics and benchmark data give you further insight into specific messaging, customer behavior, and how you’re measuring up to brands like yours that are also utilizing Klaivyo.

5. A/B Testing

Email and SMS marketing is not a “set it and forget it” type of marketing strategy. It’s important to use data to identify what works best and why.

Klaviyo’s A/B testing capabilities allow e-commerce brands to implement tests of various durations across both email and SMS and helps determine when you’ve reached results that are statistically significant. With this data, you can make educated decisions to increase your most important engagement metrics.

A/B testing tools in Klaviyo can help you identify:

• Best send time across audiences
• Most effective subject lines and CTA text
• Most engaging images and content structure
• Types of offers that contribute to the most conversions (ex. % vs. $ off)
• Most effective timing for flow/automation delays, etc.

Klaviyo Is a Powerful Tool—and You Know What They Say Comes with Great Power...

SmartBug Media is a certified Klaviyo Elite Partner, and our e-commerce strategists are excited to help you get the most out of the platform, utilizing all these tools and more. Contact us to start generating revenue, learning more about your customer base, and building a personalized retention strategy.