Klaviyo ecommerce email marketing: key features
If online merchants are to succeed in the increasingly competitive world of ecommerce, they need to stay ahead of the curve and use every tool at their disposal. Email marketing is one of the most powerful services ecommerce store owners can use to build stronger relationships with customers. Several marketing platforms have been developed to help store owners manage email and SMS campaigns, one of which is Klaviyo.
Klaviyo is a unique marketing platform because it was designed specifically for helping online businesses reach their full potential. In this guide, we will provide an overview of Klaviyo’s key features to help you understand why this is a must-have tool for an ambitious growing ecommerce brand. Click on one of the links below to jump to that section:
What is Klaviyo?
Klaviyo is a powerful digital marketing platform that helps ecommerce business owners deliver more targeted and personalised email and SMS marketing messages to their customers.
The platform uses state-of-the-art technologies including AI and machine learning to deliver more insight into your customer's buying behaviour, allowing messages to be precision-targeted at key stages during the buying cycle. The Klaviyo data science engine also unlocks customer data such as predicted lifetime order values, the average time between orders, churn probability and predicted next purchase date.
Let’s explore Klaviyo’s key email marketing features in more detail to see how the platform can benefit your ecommerce brand.
Automation
Klaviyo automated workflows allow you to precisely control how and when emails are triggered. The built-in flow builder enables users to quickly configure complex marketing flows without the need for coding skills. The platform provides a variety of excellent tools for sending automated emails that can greatly reduce the amount of time you and your staff spend managing campaigns, including:
Abandoned cart reminders
Research shows that the average cart abandonment rate is 70%, and many online shoppers say that they will abandon their cart because they were just browsing and/or weren’t ready to buy. Data from Klaviyo shows that 45% of cart abandonment emails are opened, 21% of those result in click-throughs and 50% of those clicks result in a sale. Automating this sort of action through your email marketing can bring those visitors who weren’t ready to purchase back to your site by reminding them that you care about their custom.
Welcome emails
Welcome emails are a simple but incredibly effective way of introducing your brand to customers. Klaviyo says welcome emails have an open rate 63% higher than traditional email campaigns, and the click rate is an astounding 83% higher. So if your company isn’t sending out welcome emails, now is the time to start.
Out of stock alerts
Nothing is more frustrating to customers than finding popular items out of stock. This is made worse if abandoned cart emails are then sent regarding a cart containing out of stock items. Klaviyo’s smart technology can identify out of stock items in the cart and remove them from abandoned cart email flows. When the items come back into stock, the customer can then be informed.
Thank-you messages
Klaviyo’s marketing automation allows you to send thank-you email to customers as confirmation of their orders. Klaviyo research shows that post-order emails have a 217% higher open rate, a 500% higher click-through rate and a 90% higher revenue per recipient than standard emails.
Smart sending
Klaviyo makes building and sending email campaigns easy. But with so many active campaigns, customers can easily be inundated with messages, from order confirmations and thank-you emails to abandoned cart reminders. Klaviyo’s smart sending technology allows you to limit the number of emails a customer can receive in 24 hours, so they will receive the most important emails first and the rest can follow later.
Responsive, mobile-optimised email templates
With mobile becoming the dominant method for ordering online, email campaigns need to be optimised for mobile devices. Klaviyo has developed a range of responsive email templates to ensure brands and customers alike can keep up with the pace of change and make the most of the opportunities presented by mobile trading.
Segmentation
Segmentation is the key to extracting the most value from your email list. Klaviyo offers some best-in-class segmentation tools including:
Target based on custom attributes
Klaviyo allows users to target customers based on their buying behaviour, location, browsing history and more. This makes it easier than ever for marketers to send only the most relevant communications to customers.
Website tracking and product recommendations
Customer behaviour insights can be used to make more informed marketing decisions, such as personalised product recommendations which can increase incremental sales by as much as 70%. Klaviyo provides deep insight into the way customers interact with your brand and automatically sends out product recommendations based on their previous buying behaviour.
Email personalisation
Personalised emails can help you connect with customers on a more human level and are proven to improve open rates and click-throughs. Klaviyo offers a range of best-in-class personalisation methods to help you connect with customers.
Custom activity fields/dynamic content
Dynamic content blocks allow you to tailor emails for specific events and locations. Say you wanted to offer customers in Ireland a special gift on St Patrick's Day; you can create dynamic content blocks to only display the offer to your Irish customers.
Reporting
Accurate data and reporting are vital if you are to make the right marketing decisions. Klaviyo offers some of the most comprehensive and accurate reporting available, including:
Real-time tracking
Real-time tracking allows you to monitor how customers interact with your site from emails, sign-up forms and SMS messages as these actions are taking place. This will provide actionable data on user behaviour that can be used to assess campaign performance more accurately.
Customer profiles
The more you know about your customers the more effective your marketing will be. Klaviyo builds detailed customer profiles for each of your customers from data including buying history, average order value, estimated lifetime order value and more.
ROI reporting
ROI is one of the most important metrics to measure for all marketing campaigns. Klaviyo offers a comprehensive suite of tools to accurately measure the ROI for individual campaigns. This data can then be used to improve the profitability of future campaigns.
Automated reports and analytics
Nobody likes compiling reports, which often results in them being forgotten about and consequently outdated or incomplete data being used to influence marketing decisions. You can schedule Klaviyo to automatically compile accurate and up-to-date reports when you need them. The dashboard makes it easy to monitor the performance of individual campaigns and email flows in real-time.
Integrations
Email automation platforms need tight integration with your back-office systems and shopping cart software. Klaviyo can be easily integrated with the following technologies:
Ecommerce platforms and social media
Klaviyo was designed from the ground up to be an ecommerce email marketing platform, so naturally, it offers comprehensive integration with most major ecommerce platforms including Shopify and Shopify Plus, BigCommerce and Magento. It can also be integrated with social media such as Facebook which can be combined with the smart segmentation tool to grow a marketing list of VIP customers.
NoSQL architecture with no limits on data volume
Email management platforms have to be able to process huge amounts of data in a short amount of time. Klaviyo is built on a non-relational NoSQL database which allows data to be stored and processed in a matter of milliseconds. So no matter what volume of data your store produces, Klaviyo can handle it.
Frequently asked questions
Which operating systems does Klaviyo support?
Klaviyo is a cloud-based software so it can be accessed from any browser on any operating system, including macOS, MS Windows and Linux.
Which mobile platforms does Klaviyo support?
Klaviyo supports email and SMS messaging on all mobile devices running on iOS and Android.
Who are the typical users of Klaviyo?
Klaviyo customers range from small independent store operators to large multinational corporations. However, Klaviyo’s pricing means it may be unsuitable for very small stores and start-ups, who may be better served by an alternative such as ActiveCampaign.
If you would like to know how Klaviyo can be used to increase order value and build stronger customer relationships, get in touch with the email marketing experts at Milk Bottle Labs today.
