Klaviyo built the leading unified customer platform for ecommerce brands: Email, SMS, personalization and more

Klaviyo built the leading unified customer platform for ecommerce brands: Email, SMS, personalization.

If you’ve ever felt like an email or SMS message from a company or brand was tailored just for you, you know the impact it had on making you feel important, and seen. You also know how it made you feel about that brand.

For most people, personalized messages build loyalty. A brand you know and love also knows you: what products of theirs you like and don’t, how often you purchase them, how many loyalty points you have, and more.

The challenge with this kind of personalization, though, comes down to a disparate tech stack, where data a customer has given you is kept in various tools that don’t talk to one another.

Klaviyo is the leading unified customer platform, used by more than 90,000 ecommerce brands. The tool allows you to send multi-channel customer communications through email and SMS, properly attributing credit to each. Brands use Klaviyo also collect zero- and first-party data—or what Klaviyo calls Customer-First Data—through forms and integrations, including tight ecommerce platform partnerships with Shopify, BigCommerce, WooCommerce, and more. 

Unified, ethically collected data makes Klaviyo an easy choice for customer-first ecommerce brands working to build better customer relationships throughout their funnel. A big part of doing that is using personalized messaging through automations and flows.

Personalized emails and SMS messages stand out because:

• Highly relevant messaging piques consumers' interests, speaking to them at the right time about the right thing.
• Engagement rates with more personalized messages (rather than a batch-and-blast play) are far higher. Klaviyo customers average a revenue per recipient of $2.50.

As the privacy-first web comes to life, and ecommerce marketing teams work to better balance their paid and owned marketing efforts, personalization is becoming more and more important.

Personalization is a customer expectation

Personalized communication is becoming increasingly more important for consumer engagement and retention.

A 2017 survey by Epsilon revealed that 80% of consumers indicated they were more likely to do business with a company that provided personalized experiences. 

When a generic message is sent to a customer it falls short in giving the audience targeted promotions and recommendations, ignoring their interests and needs. Worse, emails that don’t receive sufficient engagement can tank your email deliverability, causing longer term issues.

This makes using marketing automation tools that enable personalized messaging no longer a nice to have, but an essential. 

Modernizing personalization & combating privacy changes

In an ever growing ecommerce market, consumers have their pick of which brand to stand behind and support. So, your brand has to find a way to set yourself apart from the competition—and personalization helps brands do just that.

• What catches the eye of your consumers?
• How can you maintain their attention and make them feel special?

Using a unified customer platform like Klaviyo is certainly a good way forward—especially since so many ecommerce brands of all sizes already use them. In many ways, if you aren’t using Klaviyo, you’re at a disadvantage. 

In addition, changes in data privacy regulations pose a challenge to ecommerce brands that rely on third-party cookies to personalize customer experience. 

Brands are now having to figure out more direct methods in which they can acquire data while still providing the same level of personalization and tailored experiences to each customer.

Could these changes be a good thing? Absolutely! And Klaviyo has doubled down on their commitment to helping brands adjust to Customer-First Data collection and use, weaning them off of third-party data to improve customer relationships.

In 2021 alone, Klaviyo helped brands generate more than $28 billion in revenue.

What is a unified customer platform, anyway?

Klaviyo helps brands turn ethically collected customer data into personalized experiences that in turn convert more visitors into customers.

To make this possible, Klaviyo builds unified customer profiles within the platform, giving brands the power to build niche audience segments and lists, then target their communications and even their on-site experiences for those niche audiences. 

Better yet, Klaviyo’s APIs allow you to build whatever ecommerce tech stack you want, with their unified customer platform at the center.

Klaviyo is also the only provider that:

• Allows you to segment out iOS opens to better understand how Apple’s privacy updates are impacting your metrics and your list.
• Unifies email marketing and SMS marketing into a single platform with sophisticated automations, flows and analytics (including customizable attribution windows).
• Offers a global ecosystem of freelancers, agencies, and partners to help your business turn customers into loyal promoters of your brand, and repeat purchasers, too.

A new channel for growth: Unified and personalized SMS marketing

Using a marketing automation platform like Klaviyo empowers brands to have insight on how to engage with their consumers, learn their shopping habits and customize each experience to specific customers.

With Klaviyo’s email and SMS capabilities, increased conversion and optimization opportunities are the key to a successful ecommerce business.

Experimenting with SMS marketing is an avenue for ecommerce brands to look into. This method provides a more intimate and fast way to reach consumers. With privacy policies becoming more strict, SMS provides more 1:1 communication with its customers while still adhering to new restrictions. 

Brands can send out relevant and important personalized promotions and offers. Not only does this create more of a sense of urgency, but it makes consumers feel as if promotions have been created just for them.

WIth SMS marketing, brands can send “Welcome” texts, promotions, updates on orders, announcements, and so much more to stay top-of-mind. Coupled with email marketing to increase visibility and spread awareness, the possibilities of these two channels really are endless!

Personalization in practice: A case study

Growing as an online brand has evolved from using third-party information to putting ecommerce brands (and their customers!) in charge of their own data and relationships.

Klaviyo currently helps over 90,000 paying customers and brands collect Customer-First Data to deliver relevant messaging to their consumers. Among those customers is Doe Lashes.

Doe Lashes used Klaviyo’s unified marketing automation platform to build personalized experiences on their owned channels and stand out amongst their competition. 

Doe Lashes launched onsite quizzes and a loyalty program to personalize interaction from the very beginning of their customer journey. The hand-crafted false lash company saw 3x more email sign-ups with their product recommendation quiz and saw a 35% repeat purchase rate within 30 days.

Through the use of personalization, Doe Lash customers were receiving content that was relevant and made them feel seen.

Build more powerful customer relationships and experiences with unified data

Bottom line? After all, customers now hold the power. They are demanding data privacy and ownership, as well as increased personalization and improved ecommerce experiences. That can be a lot for even a large ecommerce brand to take on. But not if they are using tools like Klaviyo.

Unified customer data profiles and ease of segmentation and automation across email and SMS is a powerful combination in today’s ecommerce ecosystem—and tens of thousands of brands are already leveraging it to increase revenue despite inflation and supply chain issues.

Why aren’t you?