How the ‘right message at the right time’ ideal is achievable at last

Marketers want to get the right message to the right person at the right time. It’s a vision that has informed the industry for decades—but for most of that time, it was an ideal we could approach, but never quite achieve. The data necessary to implement that level of personalization was just not readily available. Consider a brand with a variety of separate platforms for its channel execution. One manages its social campaigns, another handles email and yet another does SMS. And so forth, across the marketing org. That’s not to mention all the data outside of marketing that impacts the marketing function, too, stored in e-commerce stores, ordering and shipping platforms, and customer support platforms. It’s hard to get a clear picture of the customer’s interests and funnel stage with data fragmented across so many tools. At least, it was. Modern marketing platforms are able to consolidate data from all types of tools into one marketer-friendly user interface—and today, getting the right audience the right message at the right time is an achievable reality. Reaching toward an ideal Imagine the type of tool that can make the marketing industry’s long-standing dream a reality. How does it work? ● You can identify the right person: That means you can tie digital (and in-person) activity, from clicks and purchases to survey responses and support tickets, back to individual profiles. Click into one, and you can see how a customer has evolved over time, and ● You can send the right message: That means you can send a targeted, personalized marketing message to hyper-specific segments of your customer base—like members of your loyalty program, people with recently-resolved support tickets, or people who bought one best-seller and never bought another. ● You can pinpoint the right time: This means you’re not just picking a message send time from a drop-down menu. You’re sending at a time optimized for your audience based on historical testing, or sending in response to a customer’s action: Maybe they just made their first purchase or abandoned an online cart. Sounds too good to be true? Here’s a real-life example of how maternity wear and baby boutique Caden Lane used a modern marketing and customer data platform—Klaviyo—to achieve futuristic personalization and growth. ● Building out identity profiles at signup: After A/B testing more than 30 versions of their on-site email pop-up, Caden Lane learned they drove most sign-ups when they asked for extensive info about the customer, including the age, gender and birthday of the child they were shopping for. Responses imported into Klaviyo profiles, so they could take a personalized communication approach from Day One—and evolve it as the children grow up and the customer interacts with the site. ● Sending flash deals to engaged, nearly there shoppers: Caden Lane takes an ultra-segmented approach to email and SMS discounts. After a social media giveaway, they’ll send a discount code to everyone who entered but didn’t win; as BFCM 2022 wound down, they sent an exclusive additional discount to customers with items in their cart who hadn’t checked out. This helps incentivize purchasing without slashing margins like a full-blown sale. ● Leaning into personalized send timelines: Caden Lane leaned into Klaviyo flows—emails that send to customers automatically when they exhibit a certain behavior—and reaped major rewards. When they ramped up their number of active flows by 4.5 times, their revenue from flows grew 24.2 times year-over-year. Overall, Caden Lane saw 157.3% YOY growth in Klaviyo-attributed revenue in Q1 2023—and Klaviyo’s streamlined UX and modern functionality played a key role. “Klaviyo is worth every penny,” said Caden Lane Chief Marketing Officer Bryant Jaquez. “It’s like a sidekick to growth strategy.” Working as one “It’s essential to stitch together the data per profile from all of these platforms, and have the ability to act on that data to connect with customers across many channels,” said Elcee Vargas, lead product marketing manager at Klaviyo. “A lot depends on predictive modeling, data science and AI, and what’s been successful with other customers.” Marketers are expected to do a lot of things these days, to become developers, data scientists and creatives, and to build their own reports, even as teams and resources are slimmer than ever. Expectations are high, and they must be specific about the work they take on, so it moves the needle in the right direction. “In today’s environment, marketers need to be thinking about focusing their efforts only on what will be successful,” Vargas said. “And the only way to do that is through a consolidation of actionable data.” 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 the ‘right message at the right time’ ideal is achievable at last

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