Email marketing is incredibly influential when it comes to driving revenue and growth for your business. If you Google, “Is email marketing good for eCommerce?”, the featured answer is,
“Email Marketing is an invaluable and effective tool for any eCommerce brand to connect with its customers. Without eCommerce email marketing, it becomes difficult to build meaningful relationships with buyers – the kind of relationship you need to grow a successful store online.’
Well, Maropost.com, we couldn’t agree more.
In the eCommerce space we often rely on platforms like Google (both organic and paid) and Meta to drive revenue. But anyone in the industry will tell you that the only consistency you get with these platforms is change – change in algorithm, change in rules and change in the Ad spend needed to achieve results
Don’t get us wrong, we love Google and Meta. They drive impressive results for our clients on a weekly basis. But, with email marketing, your email list is an asset that you own. It provides you and your customers consistency, as you are able to fully control and nurture the experience that your customers have with you. Not only that, email allows you to personalise in a way that no other platform does and in our industry, personalisation = conversion. It’s that simple.
So what should you look for in an ESP (Email Service Provider) and why do we choose to Partner and implement Klaviyo with our clients?
Intelligence
Why is it important?
Using an intelligent ESP is essential to know and learn as much about your customers as possible. This will enable you to make informed decisions not only about email campaigns but other key marketing decisions across your business. The more you know about your audience + the more you can personalise your email marketing = conversion.
Is Klaviyo an intelligent software?
Absolutely. The smartest. Klaviyo boasts 220+ integrations, allowing you to plug your entire tech stack into it and with it, using all data such as user actions on site (real time), user searches, reviews (and many more!) to educate you on what individual users are looking for and expecting from your brand, so you can deliver via your email marketing. The level of detail that Klaviyo can provide you about your audience is not only essential for top notch email campaigns but also helpful in wider marketing strategies. A big green tick from us.
Automations
Why are they important?
No matter the size of your marketing team or how dedicated your email Marketing Exec is, you cannot man your email marketing or any platform for that matter, 24/7. What you will find with a great ESP is that with good automations it can make you money while you sleep or out for dinner or at the gym. The better and more complex the automation capabilities of your ESP, the better your result will be.
Does Klaviyo offer good automations?
Without a doubt. In Klaviyo, flows can be set up based on real time consumer behaviour. No we are not kidding. So once you have created a flow and it’s conditions, you can leave Klaviyo to sort the rest so, when you’re at the gym and Joe Bloggs abandons his cart, you can bench press with the reassurance that he will be added to the personalised abandon cart email flow to get him back on the site and purchasing before your set has finished.
Klaviyo offers a number of flow templates to make setting these automations up even simpler. It allows you to duplicate and edit also, speeding up your set up, voila! You can rely on Klaviyo to do your email marketing without any work from you after setting up! (Well, not quite, we always recommend consistent optimisation and testing, but you know what we are trying to say!).
Personalisation
Why is personalisation important in email marketing?
So, did we mention that in eCom, personalisation = conversions? I don’t think I did. In order to be successful with email marketing (and any marketing really) it is essential to be sending customer information and products that are relevant to their preferences and their behaviour. This way, all content they receive makes sense in relation to where they are in their customer journey and they are more likely to engage and act as you desire.
Does Klaviyo offer sufficient personalisation?
Are you kidding? Klaviyo is absolutely royalty in the personalisation game. The amount of learnings and insight the platform can offer you about your customers is nothing short of incredible. There is an easy to use pop up form implementation, you can not only personalise according to data that the platform deems important but also what is hyper-relevant and important to your brand specifically. First name and surname are just not enough these days my friend. We are talking about favourite product categories and subcategories, favourite colours, who / what they are shopping for, what they purchased last. With Klaviyo, the personalisation opportunities are endless.
Design
Why is Design important?
This one may seem a little obvious, but it is important. Not only is it important that your emails look great and are on-brand, but it is also important that they don’t look like a template you have copied and used, like everyone else has, and that they are also easy to put together. Nothing causes more of a headache for email marketers than an Email Service Provider that makes design a nightmare.
What is Klaviyo’s design functionality like?
Well, unsurprisingly, it’s great and, despite already being great, it is a focus for them to improve even further over the next year or so. There are email templates within the Klaviyo that are a perfect starting point to easily build upon and ‘brand up’ using their easy drag and drop function. They allow you to easily import used brand assets from previous ESPs during set up and easily change small variants such as background colour to quickly build a repertoire of on brand templates. Winner.
Testing
Why is testing capability for an ESP important?
This one is obvious, right? Your email list is such a valuable asset to your brand, but only if you are making the most out of it. There are so many different variables you can test when it comes to emails: colour, copy, subject lines, images, time and day sent, to name a few. Using a platform with poor or no (gasp!) testing functionality will seriously hinder any potential success with your marketing strategy. How are you supposed to learn what does and doesn’t work?
Is Klaviyo a good platform for testing?
Duhh. Klaviyo has the best testing functionality in the market. Not only does it allow you to test all the elements listed above and make the results super clear, it also automates some of your testing to take the leg work out of it for you and make the most of the opportunity you are reaching. So, it will send one variation of your test to a small sample size and will do the same with your other variation. Once results are in it will then automatically determine the winner and go ahead in sending that email to the rest of the relevant list. Amazing. Just when we thought we couldn’t love Klaviyo any more.
Segmentation
Why is segmentation important?
Segmentation of your email lists is an essential part of the personalisation process. And we all know how important that is (personalisation = conversion remember?). The more segmented and specific your data lists are, the more personal you can get with the copy you’re sending out. This is such an essential feature to look for in an ESP.
How is Klaviyo with segmentation?
Unbeaten in our opinion. Klaviyo segments dynamically and in real time taking a lot of the work out of it for your team. It doesn’t just pull the data it is receiving from your tech stack integrations, but also segments it into useful and accurate lists so you can pretty much get going with your strategy immediately. You can, of course, then segment further by telling Klaviyo what you are looking for amongst your entire data set (ie. customers that haven’t purchased in 6 months) and it will form that segment for you in minutes. Ohhhh, ahhhh!
Focus on Deliverability
Why is a focus on deliverability important?
Deliverability is your ability to send emails to your customers inbox, without it landing in spam or bouncing. It is, in essence, how likely it is that your email will reach the desired inbox. So, it is pretty important. Using an ESP that allows you to monitor and work on this is really important – but very few do.
Does Klaviyo help you manage deliverability?
Ohh yes! Let us introduce you to Klaviyo’s Smart Sending functionality. It is super but simple but OH SO valuable. In simple terms, what Smart Sending does is stop you sending too many emails to the same contact in a short period of time. So, if you have a campaign due to go out and its recipient list includes a handful of people who have already been sent an email from you that day (or in whatever reasonable time frame you set) then smart send withhold sending that email in order to ensure you’re not a nuisance in their inbox. Simple but incredibly effective and very important for deliverability.
So there you have it, 7 reasons (off the top of our heads!) why Kaviyo is one of the best Email Marketing Softwares for eCommerce brands. And we haven’t included the amazing onboarding support, reasonable and easy to understand pricing, the opportunity to scale with SMS and how insightful their dashboard is. Maybe we need to write another blog post!
In 2023 all eCommerce brands should be prioritising their email marketing strategy and we fully recommend Klaviyo as our chosen email partner. Whether you want to get it implemented right away or have a few questions on how to improve your existing email strategy, call us!
