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Episode 72 - Getting the Most out of Klaviyo

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Hey Scott Austin here. 

In this episode, I want to give you some tips and tricks on how to use Klaviyo.  In a previous podcast episode, I gave you my recommendation of Klaviyo for CRM/email.  So in this episode, I'm going to assume that you are already using Klaviyo.  I'm going to give you some best practices, tips and tricks that I've developed in getting the most out of Klaviyo for my clients.  I've included a link in the show notes to the previous Klaviyo episode if you want to catch up.

Now I'm going to go through a list of 20 or so Klaviyo best practices that I've developed over time.  Here they are in no particular order.

  1. The more email you send, the more revenue you will make. Of course, there can be a point of diminishing returns, but in general, the more emails that you send through Klaviyo will result in more revenue.  In other words, continue to build out your flows and always be making more campaigns.  The first place I see stores skimp on email sending is in campaigns.  But most healthy Klaviyo implementations are making more revenue from their campaigns than they do from their flows.  So if you haven't made a campaign yet, make your first and see how much revenue it can generate.
  2. In Klaviyo's dashboard, it has a Performance tab that shows you metrics.  The first thing to note here is the reporting, like most systems, over reports Klaviyo's impact on your business.  And that's normal.  The general reason that most systems over report is that they take all of the credit for a sale, even if more than one system was involved.  For example, let's say you attract a customer to your store using Google AdWords and that customer has an abandoned cart.  Then Klaviyo sends out an abandoned cart email that gets the customer to convert.  Well both AdWords and Klaviyo are going to take credit for that conversion.  There's nothing to fix here; I just want you to be aware of how the data gets tracked.  So let's go back to the Performance tab in the dashboard.  Here you can see the performance of all of your flows and campaigns.  The first metric I look at is the percentage of revenue from Klaviyo.  For most stores, this number should be above 25% and can get as high as 50% during holiday.  Next you can look at the breakdown of revenue from flows and campaigns.  Flows are more static or steady-state of email activity and revenue.  What I mean is that most stores set-up their flows and let them run as scheduled.  They are not editing them often.  They just run without having the store staff touch them regularly.  But campaigns are the opposite.  Each campaign needs to be set up and run.  So campaigns require active participation from store staff.  Now Klaviyo has a steep learning curve.  It's not an intuitive platform and takes a while to master.  If you are a small store, you can't afford a full-time Klaviyo expert.  But you should look at revenue from campaigns as a way to fund a Klaviyo resource.  And that's because campaigns take active participation from staff.  So use its revenue or profit from revenue to justify investing more in it.  This way, you'll have a way to measure ROI on your Klaviyo staff and efforts.
  3. Re-use your campaigns.  It takes a lot of work to create a new email.  And each campaign only gets sent once.  But you can re-use them.  In Klaviyo, that's the clone feature on a campaign that has already been sent.  The easiest way to re-use them is in your annual marketing calendar.  For example, you can re-use your campaign emails from last year's Valentines campaigns on this year's Valentines campaigns.  To make re-use easier, be sure to use a consistent naming convention of your campaigns.  That naming convention could include the holiday name, email purpose and the date.  For example, 'Valentines - holiday launch - 14Jan22'.
  4. Deliverability of your emails is important.  To improve deliverability, you should set up a sending domain under your URL.  To do this, go to Account > Settings > Domains and Hosting.  And then follow the instructions for setting up a Dedicated Sending Domain.  To complete this process, you'll need access to your DNS server.
  5. Lists are static and segments are dynamic.  Most stores should just have one list, probably called Newsletter and use segments to divide up customers as needed.  What I'm recommending against is creating a new list for every sign-up campaign run in the store.  Just put everyone in a single list so it will be easier to manage who is in your total population of emailable addresses.
  6. Related to #5.  If you are using one master list for your customers, you can set up different flows depending on which sign-up form they used.  So if someone signs up from a form promising a 20% discount they can receive the appropriate emails and discount codes.  You can do this by triggering the flow based on the sign-up form ID the customer used.
  7. Klaviyo's Back in Stock sign-up and flow is a super powerful tool.  And that power comes in a couple of different forms. 
    1. The first is for the simple case of not having enough inventory on hand which is common in these days of global supply chain issues.  Emails automatically get sent out when inventory gets replenished.  One thing to note here though is that if the inventory replenishment is a small quantity, then some people may not be able to purchase the new inventory before it is sold out again.  If that happens, they are no longer on the Back in Stock list for that product.  So be sure to include instructions in the back in stock email that they should sign-up to Back in Stock notifications again if the product is sold out when they get there.
    2. The second is for stores that sell limited quantity items, this could happen for example if your store sold antiques or original art.  In these scenarios, I like to create a gallery of past products.  This gallery is a collection of sold out products.  I set it up Shopify so the sold out products don't show in the collections of products with active inventory.  But customers can browse the gallery collection if desired.  These gallery products can still generate incremental organic search traction.  And by adding the Klaviyo back in stock form on these products, the business gets valuable insights.  While most of the businesses I do this for are selling antique goods and they can't that exact same item back in stock.  The data they gather is super useful.  Because now they are getting information from customers on what they want instead of what in the existing catalog they are willing to buy.  For example, let's say a store sells antique license plates.  If they are sold out of old California license plates but have California plates in their gallery, the Back in Stock sign-ups could tell the store that customers want more California plates.  The store could then go source more California plates based on the demand data from the Back in Stock reports.
  8. Email is essentially a retention tool.  So if you have a young business that isn't getting a lot of traffic, its more important that you focus your energies on customer acquisition first.  Once you have some techniques for customer acquisition in place, then you can spend time and energy on retention and email.
  9. Favor Customers.  Make your existing customers feel special.  Prioritize them first in campaigns and flows.  Give them early access to new products, sales and promotions.  In a flow this is easy to do.  You can just add a Conditional Split for What someone has done or not done and set Placed order to greater than 0.  Your yes branch is for customers.  So in the no branch, those that have not purchased from you, set a Time Delay for whatever time advantage you want to give your customers.  Then connect the time delay back into the next item in the yes branch.  For campaigns, you'll want to duplicate the campaign and send one campaign to a customers segment and the other to a not customers segment.
  10. Use the Welcome Series for brand building.  Many brands will tell you that the Welcome Series is their most important flow.  Here are some things to think about.
    1. This flow should be more educational and less sales.  Tell the customer your story, your mission, what others say, etc.  Think about this flow as starting a conversation with the customer.
    2. This flow can be super long.  It's not uncommon for stores to have 52 emails in the Welcome Series spread over 52 weeks.  That way, the customer can get regular reminders about the brand even if their lack of action on the site isn't triggering any flows.  Now you may not have enough content about your brand to create 52 educational emails.  In that case you could alternate between an educational and sales email each week.  A good sales based email for a flow, which means that it can be automated, is one that shows products based on some metric of interest to the customer.  That metric could be new products to the store or closeout products.  You can set-up a data feed from Shopify to Klaviyo that dynamically updates the highlighted content for the email when it gets sent.
    3. I have the Welcome Series triggered by a number of different events like sign-up for email, sign-up for back in stock or make purchase.  I make a custom property that I call 'Done Education'.  This is my record that the customer has gone through the Welcome Series.  When any of the triggers happen I check the Done Education custom property.  If its false or unchecked for that customer, I have the flow check the field and run the customer through the Welcome Series.  In a single flow, you can check if someone has gone through that flow before and not send them through the flow a second time.  But that feature won't work here.  Because I have 3 different triggers in 3 different flows with the Welcome Series emails duplicated in each flow.  Its that fact of different triggers and therefore different flows that can initiate the Welcome Series that we have to use a custom property to record Done Education for a customer once one of the flows triggers it.
  11. Make lot's of Saved Blocks to use in your emails.  Making emails can be time consuming.  To reduce some of the time, you can save blocks in one email to be reused in other emails.  A store can easily have 50 saved blocks if they are creating a lot of emails.  And when you save a block, I recommend you add the date to the name so you can more easily manage brand changes over time.
  12. Graphics matter.  As people go through their email inbox, they are quickly glancing at each email before making a decision on what to do with it.  So grab your customer's attention with consistent branding and bold graphics.
  13. Create different sign-up forms for Desktop and Mobile.  That way, they are more responsive and you can apply the most appropriate behaviors to them.  For example, you can set up a desktop pop-up to trigger on exit intent while the mobile version could be on a timed trigger.
  14. Some flows get really complex.  The more you know about your customers, the more complex your flows are going to become.  For example, in a flow, you may want different messaging for domestic and international customers.  And in that same flow you may want to differentiate between customers and non-customers.  And again between customers and repeat customer.  This flow now has six different paths.  So don't be surprised if you flows evolve into ones with several conditional splits and dozens of emails.  Complex flows, when done right, are a sign of a savvy business.
  15. Make separate flows even if triggered by the same event.  For example, let's say someone makes a purchase.  You may want to send a thank you email immediately after purchase and a restock email in 60 days and an anniversary email in a year.  In this case, I would make three separate flows all based off the same purchase trigger.  I find this useful when creating the flows so they don't become too complex and when looking at the performance data of flows.
  16. HTML sucks in emails.  I'm not saying you shouldn't use HTML.  I'm just cautioning you that we can't control the final presentation as much as we might like.  With web browsers, we can be fairly confident in what the display will look like for the customer.  But in email, different email apps will treat HTML differently.  For me this is just a fact and I don't fight it.  I just acknowledge it and move on.  I've seen brands that try to combat this with emails that are all images.  The images contain all of the graphics and copy within them.  However, if your customers have show images turned off in their email clients, which is a common setting, then these emails show as a bunch of missing images.  There's no winning solution here.
  17. Product specific emails are awesome.  If your store has a small product catalog like many Shopify stores do, then you should consider post-purchase emails that are specific to the product purchased.  Those emails could contain instructions about the use of the specific product purchased.
  18. Offer customers help.  For example, on an abandoned cart email, maybe the customer is just confused on what product is best for them.  So in your emails, offer them pre-sales support.  That could be chat, email or phone support depending on your support processes.  To take it to the next level, you could even invite your customers to book an online consult with you.  Though you may want to save that for your higher ticket products.
  19. Don't sweat unsubscribes.  Customers unsubscribing from your list is a normal event.  Don't take it personally and don't worry about it unless you start getting a large percentage of unsubscribes.
  20. Make sure your Klaviyo Preference Pages have your store's branding.  And also add your store's branding to each list's Subscribe & Preferences Pages.
  21. Message to customers differently based on the number of times they have placed an order.  For example, let's say that you have a subscription for your products.  For the first order from a customer, your post purchase email could talk about how to use the products.  For the second order from a customer, the post-purchase email could thank them for being a repeat customer and explain a bit more about your brand's differentiation.  And then after the customer places their third order, you can upsell them to your subscription.
  22. Text only email can be very powerful as they seem more personal.  Use them appropriately.  For example, you could send a thank you from the owner to repeat customers using a text-only email.  Most recipients will think  that the owner actually sent that email which will make them feel more special.

So that's my list of tips and tricks for Klaviyo.  The more you use Klaviyo, the more you'll discover how to make the most of it for your business.  So I recommend that you try the tips that I've mentioned that seem like they would benefit your business.

Thanks for listening.

JadePuma is a certified Shopify Expert. If you need any help with your Shopify store, we can help.

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