How to become a data-driven marketer without an analytics background

You’re not alone if a data-driven marketing strategy is both exciting in its potential but maddening in its execution. Sometimes wrangling all the relevant information into one place, let alone figuring out how to effectively use it to direct a campaign, can feel impossible. Here at Klaviyo, new customers often come to us with data inaccuracies, silos, latency and limited lookback windows. As a result, they can’t be as data-driven as they desire, or as is expected of them. Truth is, even if your marketing team has perfected its data acquisition and organization, the chances of them being able to access this information, nonetheless quickly, is slim. This significantly slows the team’s time to market for new campaigns and limits the number of data points leveraged for a campaign––impacting segmentation and personalization opportunities, which then impacts customer lifetime value. In the “year of efficiency,” as 2023 has been dubbed by the CEOs of Ford, Apple and Meta, in which marketers have been challenged to do more with fewer resources, this slower time to market and ineffective campaign deployment just won’t do. Data-driven marketing needs marketers who have access to data. That’s why Klaviyo believes in a marketer-friendly central source of data truth, one that integrates data from all your channels to create complete and real-time customer profiles, allowing marketers to build custom campaigns for their audience at every touchpoint with the brand. “We have more than 300 pre-built integrations and can centralize all your data, normalize it, organize it and make it available for marketing, analysis or later use,” explained Matt Preyss, Klaviyo’s lead product marketing manager, enterprise. “We also provide unlimited access to real-time and historical data without archiving, and with our fast query speed, customer segments are always up to date so marketers can provide the right message at the right time on the right channel.” When brands have their customer data and insight in the same platform as their marketing channels, they can move faster, increase team efficiency and turn data insight into actionable and measurable campaigns. Let’s see how a couple of brands were able to make this happen, and with some interesting results to boot. Cargo Crew. This Australian workwear and apparel brand struggled with siloed data before switching to Klaviyo. Cargo Crew's email platform integrated with their warehousing system—but not its e-commerce platform, which created inconsistencies and holes in its customer data. When the brand migrated to Klaviyo for email and Commerce tools for e-commerce, its customer data became more cohesive and actionable. “We have a clearer picture of our customer base in Klaviyo,” said Lucy Parker, Cargo Crew’s channel and marketing manager. The brand is currently seeing 74.9-times return on investment with Klaviyo, and that doesn’t count the efficiencies Klaviyo drives on other marketing platforms—a recent paid retargeting campaign Cargo Crew ran with Klaviyo’s Facebook integration, showing recent customers care guides for purchases, drove 29.9-times return on ad spend. Tushy. This bold DTC bidet brand left Klaviyo for another marketing automation platform—and promptly lost access to key customer data. The new solution made it hard to understand or control, let alone optimize, email automations. For instance, why were they sending less often than they used to? It was impossible to audit the logic driving the frequency decline—and revenue suffered. When they switched back to Klaviyo, revenue jumped 58.6% month-over-month in their first month back on the platform—and their flow volume bounced back to its typical levels. Tushy gained more granular performance data on its flows and campaigns, and additional customer data through Klaviyo’s pre-built integrations, such as Shopify, the brand's e-commerce platform, but also Recharge, Okendo, Wonderment and Gorgias. Not only did Tushy acquire new ownership over their data, but Klaviyo also made it easier to leverage that data to optimize the brand's marketing. Tushy leaned into tools like Smart Send Time, which uses a robust, randomized testing framework to ensure brands send emails at a time that will maximize conversions, and A/B testing for flows. As a result, in Q1 2023, Klaviyo automations drove a majority (59%) of the company's total email revenue. If you’re unsure of where to begin, start with the end in mind. Align your strategy to your desired outcomes and think about how you can leverage data to help you execute. Asking the right questions will help guide your search and prevent you from getting overwhelmed with the amount of data that is out there. Then, you can determine what tool to leverage to find the answer. “Sophistication and scale doesn’t have to be complex,” explained Preyss. “At Klaviyo, our product development philosophy is to build the most sophisticated tools that can be used by anybody so everyone can be more productive and add more value quicker. About Klaviyo Klaviyo (CLAY-vee-oh) powers smarter digital relationships, making it easy for businesses to capture, store, analyze and predictively use their own data to drive measurable, high-value outcomes. Klaviyo’s modern and intuitive SaaS platform enables business users of any skill level to harness their first-party data from more than 300 integrations to send the right message at the right time across email, SMS and push notifications. Innovative businesses like Dermalogica, Living Proof, Citizen Watch, and more than 130,000 other paying users leverage Klaviyo to acquire, engage and retain customers—and grow on their own terms.

How to become a data-driven marketer without an analytics background

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