Brands need to stay top-of-mind with consumers, which often means sending a flowing stream of emails and texts about discounts, fresh product drops and other events. The more contact the better, right?
Not exactly.
Putting yourself in the consumer’s shoes, how often do you really want to hear from a brand?
Perhaps you’ve unsubscribed, even from a favorite brand, because the constant stream of messages just got too overwhelming. If that’s you, you aren’t alone.
In a Klaviyo survey, 73% of respondents said they have unsubscribed after receiving too many messages, and 39% said they intend to unsubscribe if they get the same message via both email and text.
From the retailer side, though, the idea of sending less email raises red flags. After all, email is a significant driver of revenue, and along with SMS messages it is one of the most direct ways of communicating with customers and getting new products and promotions in front of them.
How can brands and consumers meet in the middle here? Segmentation is the answer.
With segmentation, brands often send the same amount of messages, or even less, while targeting more specific customer groups based on similar stages in the brand funnel, behavioral activity, zero-party data collection and more.
For consumers, this means fewer but far more relevant messages, and for retailers it often means fewer batch and blast campaigns, with more revenue and customer lifetime value thanks to an improved customer experience.
Let’s look at how this works with examples from brands who have successfully rethought their customer communication programs, and driven more revenue through them in the process.
Curated messaging conveys luxury and offers value
Your customer communications are an extension of your brand experience. For luxury retailer Jenni Kayne, sending three or more emails a day to customers just didn’t feel like a luxury experience––and their director of retention was on a mission to reinvent their approach.
Their team needed to find a way to reduce the total number of sends to individual customers while increasing revenue through their email marketing channel. So as they leaned on a more restrained messaging strategy, they amped up email personalization.
Here’s how:
● Turned on interest-based campaigns: In an effort to make the emails feel more relevant for the receiver, the team set up different campaigns for their apparel versus home shoppers. These two audiences are distinguished in Klaviyo via segments based on behavioral data including purchase and browsing history, as well as zero-party data collected from the company’s in-site forms. ● Reinforced in-person shopping for a more personal connection: Email shouldn’t be only about driving revenue from that specific send. For the Jenni Kayne team, some messages could be more strategic in delivering a personalized shopping experience that combined digital actions with an in-person push. So the team used emails to encourage shoppers to head in-store by offering discounts only redeemable offline. And for customers who abandoned a cart of more than $5K, the local store manager would get a Klaviyo notification to reach out personally to that shopper. All of this in the name of an up-leveled, luxury shopping experience, no matter where that shopper did their browsing. ● Built a reward system instead of a discount program: Many luxury brands avoid discounts––but that doesn’t mean you can’t offer incentives in another way. The Jenni Kayne team turned down their discount program and got “louder” about their rewards program to encourage brand loyalty and offer VIPs point and redemption options for their consistent business. Using Klaviyo and Yotpo’s integration, the team added dynamic banners to emails to remind the most loyal of customers about their points and exactly how to use them.
And it worked––Jenni Kayne reduced email sends by nearly 44% and increased revenue from email by nearly 15%. Total revenue grew even more: 22% YoY.
Value-driven campaigns help your return on spend
Even when your actual send volume doesn’t decline, your team can reduce the number of sends to each individual customer and still grow your list and your revenue. You do this through segmentation and value-driven campaigns.
Hedley & Bennett is a great example. Their team used to be “precious” about sending emails, worried they would overburden their customers. But segmentation allows them to ramp up send frequency, while delivering valuable messages to their audience based on their preferences, behavioral data and more.
Here is how:
● Leveraged wait lists for product-specific fans: The Hedley & Bennett team created a wait list in Klaviyo for their first non-apron product, a chef’s knife, and promoted it with an integrated marketing program. That program drove 4,000 sign-ups in less than two weeks, all of whom got early access to the knife of launch day. ● Messaged customers in their preferred channels: Some consumers prefer email, others SMS, and no brand can properly segment those preferences without a consolidated tool that sends both––and collects preferential data from customers so that an email vs. SMS segmentation is even possible in real time. Hedley & Bennett sees a visible uptick in Shopify revenue whenever a new Klaviyo SMS campaign sends to their audience that prefers SMS messages.
In total, the team saw a 61x ROI on Klaviyo in 2022 based on increasing send frequency, reducing individual audience member messaging and increasing the personalization of each message a customer did receive.
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.
