When it comes to choosing an email marketing platform for your ecommerce business, there’s no shortage of options to choose from. Whether it’s Campaign Monitor, Active Campaign, MailChimp or Hubspot, the list goes on.
They all have their pro and cons, but none of these tools are as suited for your needs than Klaviyo.
It’s simple, unlike its competitors Klaviyo was built for online merchants from the ground up. It gives them powerful functionalities to segment customers, automate and personalize emails, and get actionable insights about their email marketing efforts.
Other email software is for sending emails. Klaviyo is for making money
—Fred Perotta, Co-Founder of Tortuga Backpacks
Ready to dive in? Let’s find out what makes this email marketing platform so perfect for your Shopify store, along with concrete examples of effective strategies I’ve provided for my clients.
Seamless and detailed segmentation
One of the best ways to generate more engagement and more revenue out of your emails is to segment your audience.
A study conducted by MailChimp on more than 9 million emails found that segmented campaigns have a 14.32% higher opening rate and a 100.9% higher click rate than non-segmented emails.
And Klaviyo gets it. The tool helps you create super-targeted email campaigns based on your visitors and customers’ behaviors, such as:
- What they looked at on your online store
- Their purchase histories
- Abandonment at any stage of the buying process
And much (much) more…
Let’s say you want to reengage with your best customers who haven’t recently placed an order by sending them a special offer on a product they have never purchased.
With Klaviyo, it would literally take less than 2 minutes to create a segment of customers who:
- have spent more than $600,
- without ordering from a specific product category,
- haven’t ordered anything within the last 45 days,
- and have opened an email or visited your site within the last 30 days.
Everything is out-of-the-box and updated in real time.
Even better, what if I told you that this software goes even further to help you with your customer retention strategy?
Further? Is that possible?
Yup. Klaviyo has recently developed the ability to segment customers using their lifetime value. This function helps you to predict your customers’ future spending based on their purchasing behavior during a given period.
Want an example? You can use it to identify the customers who have a low probability of ordering again. Once identified, you can simply send them a special offer to re-engage them with your brand.
Intuitive email marketing automation
Klaviyo makes email automation stupid simple and easy to set up. You build the structure of your automated email campaigns (Klaviyo call them “Flows”) through an intuitive drag-and-drop interface, then you design your emails and branch them out together.
Once the campaigns are activated, personalized emails are sent to every user who meets the conditions established. For example, you can:
- Send a series of welcome emails to your new customers
- Send a series of abandoned cart reminder emails
- Send a thank you email to your best customers
- Send a note about new items in stock, etc.
Klaviyo also provides you with a “Flows Library” (a library of email campaigns) ready to be activated.
These are pre-designed templates to help you get out of the gate quickly with proven automated email sequences that span over all stages of your funnel.
Personalization – a key success factor in your email campaigns
As its name indicates, personalizing an email helps to create unique messages to send to customers or visitors based on their online store activity and the data collected.
Personalization begins with the subject line, the first piece of information your clients see when opening their email. If you receive an email with a subject that appeal to you, I guess you open it without hesitation, don’t you? You’re by no means the only one as a study shows that personalizing the email subject line increases the opening rate by 26%.
You can also maximize the chances of conversion by paying particular attention to the content of the email. An Experian study found that personalized emails generate a transaction rate 6 times higher than those that are not.
Thanks to its direct integration with Shopify, Klaviyo has access to all the customer information and purchasing history that can be used in the emails, including:
- Customer’s first and last names
- Product photos
- Product prices and quantities
- Recommendations based on the content of an order
And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
To give you an example, here’s a replenishment email that I did for one of my clients:
Sent automatically to a customer 35 days after a purchase, the email content is based on the previous order data and reminds her to re-order the product before it runs out.
Then, a click on the “Reorder now” button will lead her straight to the 1st page of the checkout screen with the item pre-loaded into the cart. The customer just has to fill it out and her order will be processed.
Finally, this email suggests a list of products based on the customer’s purchasing behavior. This is the last step in personalizing this email:
Once the Flow and email template have been created, Klaviyo automatically sends personalized emails to each customer that meets the conditions.
Customizable analysis report
Campaign analysis helps you to evaluate performance as well as putting corrective actions in place. But let’s be honest, what really interests you is how much more you’re making from your campaigns…
That’s why Klaviyo provides you with reports that are directly available on the main dashboard.
You have the ability to customize them and keep only the KPIs that are useful in your analysis. If more than one person uses these reports within your business, you can even create different views based on each person’s objectives.
Klaviyo vs. Mailchimp
It’s difficult to differentiate two email marketing tools that, in theory, provide similar functionalities.
To help you in your thinking, I would say that Mailchimp meets your needs if you just want to send 2 or 3 newsletters per month as well as a few automatic emails, such as one welcome email and one abandoned cart reminder email.
On the other hand, if you want to increase your sales while building lasting relationships with your customers, Klaviyo is the best email marketing tool on the market. It has superior segmentation functionalities, a more efficient automation system, greater ability to personalize, better deliverability and more responsive support.
How much does Klaviyo cost?
Subscription rates range from $25/month to $1700/month (not to mention the free version), based on the size of your list:
- 1000 contacts: $50/month
- 2500 contacts: $125/month
- 5000 contacts: $200/month
- 10,000 contacts: $325/month
- 50,000 contacts: $700/month
I could continue to provide you with a detailed price grid but instead I’ll save you some time: yes, Klaviyo is more expensive than most email marketing tools, like MailChimp.
You can save a few bucks on software and miss out on functionalities for the growth of your business. But, when you consider how profitable email marketing is and the important role it plays in ecommerce, wouldn’t it be a shame to miss out on such an opportunity?
In short, its powerful segmentation and automation functionalities, as well as its user interface developed specifically for merchants, make Klaviyo the ideal email marketing tool for your Shopify store.
Upgrade your email marketing
Contact me via the form below and we’ll arrange a phone consultation to discuss the details of your project. I’ll be happy to answer all of your questions about Klaviyo and help you decide whether or not it’s a suitable solution for your business.