Email marketing isn’t dead.
As we enter 2023, it feels as though the focus has shifted away from Facebook ads and Instagram content, to a more community-led and conversational marketing tool, which is why email marketing is perfectly placed to do this job.
It’s the best tool for keeping customers engaged with your brand, keeping retention rates high, and super affordable. Every £1 you spend on email marketing gives you a ROI of between £35 - £40. It should also be making up about 20-30% of your website revenue, so you can see why it’s becoming the go to marketing tool for ecommerce brands.
But no man is an island, and neither is email marketing.
Email marketing works in tandem and collaboration with your other marketing channels. It can of course drive traffic to your website, but where did those people originally come from? They have to find you somewhere. And that’s where the other channels come into play. You cannot only focus on any one of them, as they are all working together to create the perfect ecommerce ecosystem to be bringing in new customers and then converting them into loyal ones.
The key to building a successful ecommerce business which can keep customers returning over and over again is customer loyalty.
According to Shopify’s Commerce Trends 2023 report, the number of online stores doubled in 2021 compared with 2020. Competition has never been higher to get customers to buy from you. If you can buy what you need from a number of different stores, be it online or bricks-and-mortar, how can small brands keep customers coming back?
The answer is complex. But email marketing can make a big difference to retention and perhaps solve the problem of too many customers placing one order to never return.
To create the best email marketing strategy you possibly can, I would highly recommend using Klaviyo.
Klaviyo calls itself an ‘ecommerce marketing automation platform’, they want to help you retain customers by giving you advanced personalisation and automation at your fingertips.
Klaviyo is a popular choice for email marketing specifically for product-based businesses because it offers several features that are tailored to the needs of ecommerce brands.
So what are the key differences you get from using Klaviyo for your email marketing rather than another provider, here’s seven of them:
Automated emails
Klaviyo offers a variety of automated emails (called Flows), such as abandoned cart recovery and post-purchase follow-up emails, these can be set up to trigger specific actions based on customer behaviour, which can help to increase engagement and conversions. These flows do so much of the heavy-lifting for you, and mean you don’t have to stress about sending campaign emails all the time, when you know you’ve already go great emails landing in inboxes everyday.
Advanced segmentation
Klaviyo's advanced segmentation capabilities allow store owners to create targeted email campaigns based on customer behaviour and purchase history, which allows you to speak to the right person, at the right time about the right thing. This can make a real difference when we all receive so many emails into our inboxes each day.
Personalisation
Klaviyo allows store owners to personalise email campaigns with dynamic content that changes based on the recipient's behaviour either onsite or based on what they’ve already ordered. I particularly love this feature within Klaviyo. Want to show a customer products based on what they have been browsing from a specific collection? You can do just that. And of course, knowing a customer's name and greeting them is a nice gesture within emails too.
Advanced reporting
Klaviyo provides detailed reporting and analytics on all email performance, which can help store owners to optimise their campaigns and increase conversions. The performance tab alone on your dashboard is so helpful for quickly checking on your campaign and flow performance.Of course you can also dig a little deeper and the benchmark reports, showing you how similar brands to your are performing in specific areas of their email strategy, is so helpful to give you real-life data to go on and an easy traffic light system helps you to understand where you need to focus your efforts.
Easy ecommerce integrations
Klaviyo integrates with several ecommerce platforms, including Shopify, Magento, and WooCommerce, which makes it super-easy for store owners to set up quickly with no complicate coding. This means you can begin to send targeted campaigns, even if you haven’t had time to set up all your flows you can be quickly sending out your usual campaign emails from day one. There is even an integration with Mailchimp, so if you are migrating from their you will be able to easily sync all the customer data and email addresses you currently have.
A/B testing
Klaviyo allows you to A/B test different elements of your email campaigns, flows and data capture such as subject lines, buttons, time of send and loads more. This is one of the features I see being used the least by small businesses already on Klaviyo and it can make such a huge difference to our overall performance and revenue. By testing out different elements of your email strategy, you can maximise on each aspect of what you are trying to achieve and eventually find what your audience is looking for.
Professional email design
Klaviyo's email design capabilities allow you to create professional-looking, mobile-responsive emails without any coding experience. Their easy-to-use drag and drop editor makes emails look beautiful but also means they can be highly functional as ultimately we want customers to click through to our website. With the introduction of Klaviyo’s new email editor in late summer 2022, features such as universal content, an undo button and sections, building emails is now even easier.
Most small businesses would like to grow their revenue and email marketing is a fantastic tool to do this. But according to Shopify’s Commerce Trends 2023 report, it’s not just revenue that brands are looking to grow this year. Improving customer experience is the top priority for global businesses in 2023.
I'm a big advocate of email marketing being used for more than just driving revenue. This is why, when looking at your analytics it is important to not just focus on the placed order rate. Other softer metrics can help us understand how engaged your customers are, and the more engaged they are, the more likely they are to order again.
By using Klaviyo and Shopify together you can increase customer happiness and ultimately conversion rate. After integrating the two platforms, you will get a comprehensive understanding of your customers' behaviour and purchase history, which can help you create targeted and relevant emails that are more likely to resonate with your customers.
Here are 3 other things you can gain by using Klaviyo and Shopify together:
Improved customer service
By using Klaviyo's advanced segmentation capabilities, you can quickly identify and address customer concerns, which can help to improve customer satisfaction. Got a product on pre-order and you need to update your customers that there has been a delay? You can create a segment based on what someone has ordered and in what time frame to easily highlight who needs an email sending.
Better understanding of customer behaviour
Using Klaviyo and Shopify, allows you to gain a more comprehensive understanding of your customers' by being able to analyse what actions they are taking on your website, within your email and what they are ordering. This can help to identify patterns and trends that can be used to optimise email campaigns and allow you to send the most relevant messages to customers, rather than potentially annoying people with emails that are not applicable to them.
Targeted customer experience
By creating forms that are targeted to specific customers means you are creating a unique and more personalised customer experience. It can also lead to higher sign ups and more trust in your brand. Klaviyo allows you to create forms based on a customer's previous behaviour, so no more showing sign up forms to customers already on your list.
Overall, Klaviyo and email marketing in general, allows you to speak directly to your customers and gives you a unique chance to learn more about them to create loyalty and a higher retention rate.
If you are interested in learning more about how to use Klaviyo effectively or if you want to get started using it, contact me now to find out what ways we can work together to increase your revenue from email marketing this year.
Or if you want to start setting up Klaviyo today but not sure how or where to start, take a look at my self-paced online course which shows you how to set up Klaviyo yourself and you get support from me too.
