This is a guest post by Marcia Newquist with Creative Jewelry by Marcia.
I use Shopify for my e-commerce website. Shopify offers many free and paid templates for online shops. I used one of their paid templates to create the basic website then customized it using my brand colors, fonts and images. Initially I used Mailchimp for my email software because it was widely used by many online merchants. About a year ago, Shopify and Mailchimp decided to end their business relationship. It meant Shopify merchants had to get a 3rd party app to sync with Mailchimp or find another email platform.
When I found out Shopify and Mailchimp were parting ways, I started to look at other software to use for my emails. The business group that I’m part of suggested using Klaviyo. I checked it out and talked with others that switched to it. The people I talked with liked Klaviyo and felt it was more powerful than Mailchimp.
If you’re just starting out, I would suggest you take the time to go through the Getting Started Training Session recordings. This series explains all the basics of Klaviyo. I didn’t do this and in looking back it would have saved me a lot of headaches.
I’ve been using Klaviyo for over a year now and I love it. Here are some reasons why.
1) Chat
At first, Klaviyo seemed a bit complicated, but like anything it became easier the more I worked with it. I signed up for the paid version so I would have access to chat. Having chat available was and still is extremely helpful when I can’t figure things out.
When I sent out my first email in Klaviyo, I had a lot of bounced emails. I wasn’t sure what was going on. I chatted with Klaviyo and they explained what was happening. They said I should work with segments rather than using the entire newsletter file. After chatting with them, I knew how to create segments and started using those when creating my email campaigns.
2) Automated Emails (Flows)
Klaviyo calls their automated emails, flows. I set up a flow to send to my clients when they sign up to be part of The Exclusive Jewelry Club for my website: creativejewelrybymarcia.com. My flow consists of three emails. The emails are a welcome series introducing the new client to Creative Jewelry by Marcia.
- The first email is sent to them after they sign up.
- The second one is sent three days later and
- The last one three days after that.
Each email is personalized with their name. I love not having to worry about sending emails to everyone that signs up with me.
As of now, I only have one flow but have plans to set up more. The next flow I’ll create is for the abandoned cart. How often have you started an order, got sidetracked and forgot to finish it? Right now I only have one email from Shopify that gets sent to people. I’ll turn that email off and have a flow of two emails to send to the client when they don’t finish checking out.
This is what my Welcome Series Flow looks like in Klaviyo.
3) Segments
When I sent my first email, I had a lot of bounces and a low open rate. Klaviyo seems to be more punitive than Mailchimp when sending emails. Klaviyo suggested I segment people and not send the email to everyone in the newsletter file. They explained that I needed to set up criteria for a segment to choose which people I want to include in my emails. I set up a segment selecting people who are in the newsletter, still subscribed and have opened up an email in the last # of days or active on my website in the last # of days. Over time, I revised this segment until it seemed to be working well.
As time went on, I started to work with segments more. I created another segment to resend the same email the following day to the non-openers. This has helped with my open and click through rates. I usually get 10-17% open rates for the email I send to the non-openers the following day. When doing this, you want to change the subject line for the resend email. You can leave the rest of the email the same. I schedule both the original and the resend email at the same time. Be sure to check ‘Determine Recipients at Send Time’. You’ll want to use this feature so you don’t resend the email to people who have already opened the email. By checking that, the segment will be recalculated at send time.
You want to periodically compare your profiles to your newsletter to make sure people are being added as they should. I decided to check that and discovered people weren’t being added as they should when they were signing up through Shopify. I worked with both Shopify and Klaviyo through chat to get this resolved. Now, I check this on a monthly basis using segments I created.
Here are some of the segments I use in Klaviyo.
4) Templates for Creating Emails
The possibilities are endless as to what types of emails you can create using Klaviyo.
If you don’t want to start from scratch for your email campaign you don’t have to. Klaviyo has over 50 theme versions and over 15 basic themes to choose from. Plus, you can import templates and save the templates you’ve created to use later.
If you want to create your own template, you have many options to choose from such as text, image, split, button, header, social links, products, spacer, and saved blocks when creating an email campaign. For products, you can choose actual products from your website to include for people to shop right from your email. The saved block area allows you to save bits and pieces from an email to easily use in future emails. I have my footer area in saved blocks.
5) Metrics
I have found that Klaviyo gives me a lot more information about what people do on my site than Mailchimp did. They have a great metric area that gives all types of analysis about the people on your list. Even though I’ve been on Klaviyo for over a year, I’m still discovering things that it can do for me. One of my favorite things about Klaviyo is, I can look at people on my email list and see what jewelry they are checking out in my store.
This screenshot is only a portion of the reports that are available.
Klaviyo not only gives you reports, but you can view them in five different formats. You can view them via chart, activity, cohorts, best people and by map of location. You can also export the information that you have brought up on the screen. With the metric reporting available, data for each individual, being able to segment people and export data I haven’t thought of anything I can’t do for what I need.
Which email platform do you use?
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