Case Study: How Advanced Klaviyo Email Segmentation Improved Attributed Conversions by 323%

Prior to this Californian water technology brand launching on Shopify Plus, Amazon sales dwarfed its DTC results. Swanky was engaged to support the new Shopify store launch in 2023 and jump-start revenue growth.

Over just six months, our Growth Accelerator team delivered a suite of services that nearly doubled monthly DTC sales (and helped the brand reach its 7-figure monthly revenue target). This case study will focus on how we developed, redesigned and optimised email and SMS marketing in Klaviyo, including how advanced Klaviyo email segmentation enabled exponential growth of attributed revenue.

Before moving on, it’s important to understand that our email and SMS services were part of a wider, full-funnel marketing strategy. This strategy considered the entire customer journey as a chance to nurture relationships and build better brand experiences, rather than solely concentrating on sales.

Here, email segmentation and automation worked alongside PPC, SEO, paid social and organic content to acquire and retain valuable customers. By taking this 360-degree approach we could also maintain a healthy Total Advertising Cost of Sale (TACoS) to ensure profitability.

Cleaning email data and migrating SMS to Klaviyo

Our first task was to clean the brand’s email marketing data on Klaviyo and implement industry best practice regarding account setup.

We also identified an opportunity to improve SMS marketing metrics by migrating this channel to Klaviyo. We completed the SMS migration from Attentive to Klaviyo, consolidating all of the brand’s owned marketing on one platform.

The results of this combined work included:

• a 108% increase in owned revenue over an 11 month period;
• greater control over channel optimisation; and
• improved visibility of data and reporting.

Improving email design

Swanky’s email team updated the brand’s existing email designs to bring them in line with best practice. These had previously been image-only, which can be problematic for several reasons:

1. Automatic image downloads may not be turned on, leaving recipients with an entirely blank email.
2. In areas of poor signal, an image may fail to load, again showing a blank email with no viewable call to action (CTA) button.
3. Some customers don’t want to use mobile data to download an image.
4. If the image takes a long time to download, customers may get impatient and close the email.

We supported the recreation of these image-only emails in Klaviyo with the appropriate combination of text and images. This is to mitigate the issues above and gives the opportunity for emails to be improved more flexibly and iteratively, with a modular approach.

Developing a data-led Klaviyo email segmentation strategy

A key aspect of our approach to automation is using data to identify where each customer is in their journey and creating customer segments accordingly. We then analyse each stage, consider the risk of churn and design a campaign cadence based on the type of content they are likely to engage with at each stage.

From here, we can build out a marketing calendar to inform the content that gets sent to each segment throughout the year. This simultaneously allows us to reduce the number of emails each customer receives, whilst increasing the relevance of what they do receive.

For example, someone who is new to the brand and has not yet made a purchase should receive content focused on the brand’s story, warming them towards making their first purchase. This is a more thoughtful approach for a high-price point item, than simply offering a 10% discount code, which may be more effective for smaller purchases.

Below are some other applications of our data-led segmentation strategy and the results they yielded.

1. Increasing engagement with customer segmentation

Our initial analysis of email performance data showed that conversion rates were strong, but email engagement was low. The challenge was therefore to improve customer engagement with email, without negatively impacting conversion.

We began this process by introducing customer segmentations. In order to maintain a strong deliverability score, it’s important to avoid sending too many messages to unengaged recipients. So, when it came to implementing customer segments, excluding these customers was our first priority.

We did this by removing email addresses that had bounced more than four times in the last month. This went a step further than the Klaviyo default of seven bounces.

We then assessed the brand’s upcoming content schedule, in tandem with the timeline of upcoming products and promotions. By utilising Klaviyo’s integration with Shopify, we were able to create segments excluding anyone who had recently bought any of these products, to avoid them seeing discounted prices for products they had paid full price for.

These changes resulted in immediate improvements to deliverability and engagement.

2. Creating customer segments for sales campaigns

Next, we created segments specific to sales campaigns. Customer data from Triple Whale allowed us to target big promotions to more specific segments, making sure people were shown the most appropriate products.

Using data and insights gathered from Triple Whale, Google Ads and other marketing channels, we created high-converting segments based on where customers were in their customer lifecycle.

We considered recency, frequency and monetary factors, combined with typical buying behaviour, to implement targeted segments of engaged and converting profiles. From here you can tailor sales campaigns to specific segments, resulting in higher engagement and attributed revenue.

3. Creating a bespoke cart abandonment flow

We were able to utilise an exclusive integration with Littledata, allowing us to trigger cart abandonment at a more granular level. Klaviyo’s out-of-the-box cart abandonment flows only trigger at the checkout page, thereby missing any customers who add products to cart but never reach the checkout page.

With Littledata, there are numerous ways to identify customers and trigger a flow. We harnessed this tech to develop a trigger when a user adds a product to cart, but doesn’t reach the checkout page.

Our bespoke cart abandonment flow quickly became one of the brand’s top performing flows within a few weeks of it going live.

Results of an optimised Klaviyo implementation

As a result of Swanky’s email marketing expertise, we were able to help this US Shopify brand boost the performance of its email and SMS channels, with revenue from these channels increasing by 108% over 11 months.

Our Klaviyo services were just one part of our full-funnel marketing strategy, which, in the first five months of engagement, delivered:

• 83% increase in monthly DTC revenue;
• 77% increase in monthly site users;
• a conversion rate increase of 109% YoY; and
• over 323% increase in Klaviyo-attributed conversions.

In addition, revenue accredited to organic search increased by 25% thanks to the work of our SEO services.

Looking to improve your Klaviyo email marketing performance?

Swanky works with ecommerce brands across the globe, helping them to leverage Klaviyo to hone performance and boost key metrics. Our range of Klaviyo services include audits, migrations and consultancy, as well as ongoing implementation and marketing support.

Get in touch with our team today to discuss your requirements with our Klaviyo team.