How to Own Your Marketing & Grow Your Business
On September 25th & 26th, Kurt went to Boston to attend Klaviyo:BOS Conference 2019. You'll hear interviews with real merchants using Klaviyo to own their marketing and grow their business, plus learn the new features coming to Klaviyo.
Described as, "the ultimate experience to take your ecommerce marketing to the next level. It’s where the brightest industry leaders, fastest-growing brands, and expert product specialists come together to share real-world examples and actionable strategies that’ll help you own the entire customer experience and grow your brand."
Paul Reda: So, you went to the Red Sox game in Boston?
Kurt Elster: Oh yeah, I love sports.
Paul Reda: Okay, yeah. You checked a lot of cool historical places, I'm sure?
Kurt Elster: Sadly, I just got back from Boston, but it was in and out. Wednesday morning I got up at 4 a.m., discovered my Uber driver was still asleep, ordered another one, got to the airport, showed up in Boston for Klaviyo Boston, which confusingly, the conference name is Klaviyo: B-O-S, so I kept referring, I'm like, is it Klaviyo bos? Is it Klaviyo B-O-S? And someone's like, I think it's just Klaviyo Boston. Klaviyo is headquartered in Boston and they do, this is their second big conference, and it was really impressive and really cool, especially for a second conference.
Kurt Elster: Having been to several conferences, for a company of only 300 employees, I say “only 300,” we're less than 10 people. It really was quite an impressive, thorough, great experience. But anyway, I showed up there 9 a.m. on Wednesday, hung out for two days, flew back last night, and I really enjoyed it. I got a ton of value out of this thing.
Paul Reda: I slept a lot, hung out in my apartment, came to the office, did a little bit of work, pretty much didn't do anything.
Kurt Elster: That also sounds like a valuable experience. Sometimes you just gotta chill. You can't be going hard all the time.
Paul Reda: And that is my problem. You know me. I'm just like Mr. Worldwide, 110% at all times.
Kurt Elster: Yeah, I call you a Type A personality.
Paul Reda: Oh yeah.
Kurt Elster: Yeah, that's your nickname.
Paul Reda: Oh yeah. I saw some stuff come out about text messaging. That's going to be a couple billion dollars worth of revenue right off the bat, isn't it?
Kurt Elster: Yeah, well, all right. The feature announcements, it's not like Shopify Unite where it's like we just get buried in feature announcements and it'd take me an hour to explain half of them to you. Very focused at Klaviyo. The things they covered were optimized send time, which we knew about, but they showed us the stats on it. Smart sending, where it self-optimizes the send time, creates an average of a 10% increase in open rate, so that's an easy win for your Flows, you turn Smart Send on. And they improved the Flow editor, and we've got better analytics in that you can generate really complex reports and export them, so you can drop them into whatever spreadsheet, whatever tool.
Kurt Elster: Yeah, yeah, that stuff's all great. I'm glad it's there, it's cool, it'll make people money, the reporting will make my life easier, but the giant thing that for sure overshadowed everything was they added SMS as a channel, meaning I can send in the Flow builder-
Paul Reda: Before when you would send someone an email you would build Flows where you'd send people email, you can now build Flows and tags where you're sending them text messages.
Kurt Elster: You're straight up sending them text messages, and it's the easiest thing in the universe to set up. They literally did it as a live demo, which must have been nerveracking for this poor guy. I can't imagine having hundreds of people in a room being like, “We're gonna share this cool feature, let me pull out my personal laptop and set this up for you.” But anyway, they did it as a live demo and he goes, “All right, here's how you set it up.” It's a preferences pane and a single checkbox, enabled SMS, done, that's it. And once it's on, then you go into just the regular Flows you already had.
Kurt Elster: They did a demo Flow where they told people, "All right, go to Klaviyo.com/SMS, register now," because as soon as it's enabled, the form works, and you can sign up. So, "Register now, and then you set up a Flow," and then sure enough you can hear people's phones going off in the room. It literally, start to finish, including him explaining it, three minutes.
Paul Reda: So, was anything required on the people in the room, or he had a list built-
Kurt Elster: You had to go opt in. He was like, “Hey, go opt in.”
Paul Reda: So, hey go opt in on the website-
Kurt Elster: And it just adds their phone number to the customer profile in Klaviyo.
Paul Reda: And then he was just like, “Watch this,” and he literally sent everyone in the room a text message giving them a coupon for next year's Klaviyo meet up.
Kurt Elster: Yeah.
Paul Reda: And you just heard 100 phones bonging all at the same time.
Kurt Elster: Not 100, but yeah, several. It was cool to see. But it literally was like the regular Flow editor, he goes into it, sets up a split Flow where it's like you could do stuff like if they don't open the email then you text them. The catch with SMS is you've got to pay for every text you send, and this is just true of all services, like, that's just how SMS works, there is a per unit cost. But yeah, the miraculous part was just how quickly they set it up and how easy it was. It was just like, it's just a native checkbox feature in there. It's super cool.
Kurt Elster: We've been beating the drum on SMS is going to change... it's this just wildly untapped opportunity. I think everyone is texting, open rates on SMS are like 99%, unlike email where you just scan the sender, subject line, select all, delete. SMS, you check it and then you delete it. But yeah, it is this tremendous opportunity, and, get this, it's going to be available October. It will be available in Flows.
Paul Reda: So this black Friday you should be banging out some texts, is what you're saying.
Kurt Elster: Yes. And you could set it up for browse abandonment, cart abandonment. They're launching it as part of Flow, as an automation feature, and then they'll do it later in campaigns.
Paul Reda: So, if I'm a Shopify store owner and I want to opt, I want to text my users, is that a separate checkbox they needed to have agreed to? How do I get... I got a mailing list already with thousands of people on it, now Klaviyo is giving me the ability to text them. How do you text them and have it be okay, like legally, morally, technically, all that?
Kurt Elster: There is a lot of legislation rules and guidance you need to follow with text message, and certainly there's liability there. And we have an upcoming bonus episode with Mike from SMSBump, where he breaks down like, okay, here's all of the liability, and here's how you avoid it. So, we'll take a deep dive into the details on it to keep you safe. It's in October. I forget when we're doing it though.
Paul Reda: You can't just text people out of the blue because they're on a mailing list. If they have their email in, yeah, but they've got to re-opt in, don't they? So, you have to send out a mass email that's like, "Hey, opt in for text messaging now."? If I've got a mailing list with 10,000 people I can't text them.
Kurt Elster: All right, so the guidance they give on the landing page for this, which is Klaviyo.com/sms, it says "easily manage opt ins in compliance," which is the big fear around SMS.
Paul Reda: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: “You'll rest easy when you use Klaviyo's Form Builder to collect form numbers and SMS opt ins. We provide quick access to consent details for every customer so you know when and how they subscribe. Compliance made simple.” And the demo screen shot they show is a form that's like you can do it as a welcome form, they land on the site and it goes, “Hey you, let's be friends, sign up for SMS updates to stay in touch.” And then you get them to re-opt in. But you can't go backwards and be like, well, I have all these phone numbers from shipping addresses, I'm going to text everybody.
Paul Reda: Yeah, no, don't do that.
Kurt Elster: That's danger zone. Don't do that.
Paul Reda: That's, you're a real bad boy, don't do that. But yeah, maybe you could email your mailing list and be like, "Hey, you want a 20% off coupon for anything in our store? Sign up for text messages."
Kurt Elster: Yeah. “Hey, you want a one-time use 20% off coupon for anything in the store? Sign up for SMS.” Boom. You're going to build that-
Paul Reda: And we'll SMS you that coupon.
Kurt Elster: Then you use the Flow builder to send them the coupon immediately. That's very cool. Or you could do it as, "Hey, you could wait till our Black Friday sale, or if you want to be on the early bird list, that's only available by SMS."
Paul Reda: Oh, that's good.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. I like that one.
Paul Reda: That's good.
Kurt Elster: Brainstorming ways to get people to give up their phone numbers.
Paul Reda: Well, and then, that just goes to more about how the mobile version of your site really needs to be locked in, because email, people could be looking at email anywhere. SMS, they're looking at it on their phone.
Kurt Elster: Yes.
Paul Reda: So if you want them to buy straight off the text messages you're sending them, your mobile site needs to be great.
Kurt Elster: Yeah, they're going to get that link in a text message. They're going to open it on their phone and now we're looking at it on that mobile device, so it better load correctly, right?
Paul Reda: Yep.
Kurt Elster: So we need to make sure we've got a reasonable load time, and then be, all right, it needs to be easy to use and quick. So, you combine it with something like you have a fairly robust site, a quick site, and then you have dynamic checkout buttons. Oh man, so I get a text message, I click the link, I click Buy Now, like with ApplePay, so this is like literally 15 seconds.
Paul Reda: Yeah, from firing the text out to an actual purchase happening is under 30 seconds. Could happen.
Kurt Elster: 100%.
Paul Reda: Ooh. Free money.
Kurt Elster: Yes. This thing potentially prints money. And they gave revenue stats. They said last year Klaviyo users generated $2 billion through the platform through all of 2018. This year, it's the end of September, they're already at $3 billion. This thing's growing fast.
Paul Reda: And the big time's not even coming yet.
Kurt Elster: No, yeah.
Paul Reda: Like, it could [crosstalk 00:09:11] conceivably be $4 billion before the year's over.
Kurt Elster: Absolutely, which means, throwing out valuations that I'm making up, Klaviyo is easily a billion dollar company. That's kind of cool.
Paul Reda: Oh, that's nice.
Kurt Elster: Yeah.
Paul Reda: Obviously, the text messaging is the 900-pound gorilla in the room. Did anything else interesting happen?
Kurt Elster: All right, so the big difference with this conference, the thing I really liked, is the attendees were like 50/50, it felt like to me anyway, marketers like ourselves, and actual real deal merchants with a heavy lean for everybody toward the Shopify community. And I talked so some Magento people. I'm sure there were some BigCommerce there. But Shopify was THE platform.
Kurt Elster: More interesting, what made it super valuable for takeaways was the talks. A majority of the talks were given by actual real-life merchants who are just pulling back the curtain and going, “Okay, here's what's working for us right now.” Ministry of Supply spoke and they said, “Hey, these are the Flows we're running, here's how we're approaching this, and oh, by the way, plain text emails have way higher open rate of engagement than anything else.”
Kurt Elster: Ministry of Supply said this and Chubbies, they gave a talk, said this. They said you don't have to just stick to a single sender. It's always like, company name, and company email. They would switch up the sender name, depending on what it was, so it might be like, “Kyle at Chubbies,” like whatever. In the case of Chubbies they would make it part of the punchline. But Ministry of Supply said anything customer service related comes from “Kyle,” air quotes, right, so that people started to... and those would always be plain text, so it made it feel very real, and those would have very high engagement.
Kurt Elster: But it was just tons of these real-life takeaways because it's real-life merchants and saying, this is how we're using this product, let us show you what's working for us right now. I didn't get to attend as many talks as I would've liked, because I was too busy in the hallway having... on the hallway track, as they say, having interesting conversations with folks, and I recorded those as a series of five-minute lightning interviews. For the rest of this episode, let's drop value bombs via the attendees.
Paul Reda: And so, let's hear some of those lightning interviews now.
Kurt Elster: Thank you, there you go.
Eric Hellstrom: My name's Eric Hellstrom. I am a digital marketing strategist for Chubbies.
Kurt Elster: And what brings you to Klaviyo Boston?
Eric Hellstrom: I'm here to learn from everybody, and also speak. I will be speaking in front of other people.
Kurt Elster: What are you speaking on?
Eric Hellstrom: We are speaking about a campaign we run each week called Best of Non-Openers, where we target people who are active, but haven't opened in the last week.
Kurt Elster: And it's still early yet in the conference. Have you gotten anything out of it yet?
Eric Hellstrom: Yeah, I've gotten a lot. There's only been one session, but I went to the Flow session where I learned about things that we know we should be doing and we've talked about doing already, but have put on the back burner, and being here, even the first session was a motivator to build a new Flow campaign this week, which is awesome.
Kurt Elster: What do you think is the most underrated Flow, the thing that every merchant is sleeping on and shouldn't be?
Eric Hellstrom: It sounds like the next expected order dates. They have a thing where we think, based on data, this person's next purchase will be this day, and they have a Flow set up that you can literally plug in and all you have to do is make the content like they already do all the logic, which is great, which we haven't used yet, which we should be using, which we hopefully will be. Now that I'm on the record I've got to.
Kurt Elster: If you had to pick one Flow, this is the one Flow, all others go away, you can only keep one, which is the favorite?
Eric Hellstrom: It's near and dear to me, we have a browse abandon Flow and I wrote it in 2017 and we still use it.
Kurt Elster: Is it general, or product-specific?
Eric Hellstrom: General. It's super general. It's very branded. It involves three graphics that I made myself on Canva that are back-to-back-to-back.
Kurt Elster: How often are you using Canva?
Eric Hellstrom: Much less now.
Kurt Elster: Okay, because I love Canva [crosstalk 00:13:34]
Eric Hellstrom: Yeah, Canva's great.
Kurt Elster: ... feel guilty.
Eric Hellstrom: I know. I feel guilty too. I've used it for events or little tiny flyers sometimes.
Kurt Elster: Yeah, but if I just need something quick I love Canva.
Eric Hellstrom: I love Canva too.
Kurt Elster: Why should I feel guilty about that?
Eric Hellstrom: I know. And it looks... it's solid, and it's free. It's so-
Kurt Elster: [inaudible 00:13:46]
Eric Hellstrom: We should accept Canva. Don't listen to this any graphic designer. It's a secret.
Kurt Elster: Right now, a lot of merchants are thinking about Black Friday. How many emails should they be sending?
Eric Hellstrom: On Black Friday?
Kurt Elster: Yeah, on Black Friday or-
Eric Hellstrom: Well, if they are competitors, I'm going to say one every hour. If you send 24 emails the day of Black Friday it's great for your business. For people who are not our competitors, I would say you probably want at least one, potentially early in the morning, or after people have finished shopping for the day, and stopping each other in malls.
Kurt Elster: Quality advice. Are you thinking about SMS marketing?
Eric Hellstrom: Yes.
Kurt Elster: Do you do SMS marketing?
Eric Hellstrom: Not yet.
Kurt Elster: But it's-
Eric Hellstrom: It's in the works.
Kurt Elster: [crosstalk 00:14:30] considering?
Eric Hellstrom: Yeah. It's currently in a big pot that we're stewing, and we're having conversations with Klaviyo about. We will be.
Kurt Elster: I think at this point the assumption is SMS marketing's coming to Klaviyo.
Eric Hellstrom: Yes.
Kurt Elster: All right.
Eric Hellstrom: And hopefully we'll be sending you lots of text messages, late night texts, early morning texts.
Kurt Elster: I get a lot of people pushing back on texts, merchants pushing back on it.
Eric Hellstrom: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: What do you think the big fear with SMS is?
Eric Hellstrom: I think people are scared that people will feel freaked out by it. I kind of don't think that's the case anymore, as far as text goes. I've gotten texts from multiple things I've signed up for over the years, like people that are a little ahead of the curve, and it doesn't freak me out that they text me. It's the same way as an email, if I'm not interested I don't respond, or I delete it. If I am interested I lean right in and use it and engage with it the same way. It's something that I look at more than email, so there's infinite possibilities.
Kurt Elster: Thank you. All right, if I'm going to go buy one Chubbies item right now, what's the thing you're most excited about, what's the new product?
Eric Hellstrom: Yeah, the trucker jacket. We were just talking about it before this. We have a trucker jacket, and they are most likely sold out if you're listening to this now. I would run, virtually, to the website, chubbies.com, type in "trucker jacket" and then go crazy.
Kurt Elster: All right, I got to go order a trucker jacket. Thank you.
Eric Hellstrom: Yeah, thank you.
Steve Deckert: My name's Steve Deckert. I head up the partnerships team at Smile.
Kurt Elster: As a partner at the Klaviyo conference, you have a slightly different perspective. You work with a lot of merchants. What are the common themes you're seeing in the Klaviyo, in the talks, and among discussions with the attendees?
Steve Deckert: I'm seeing a lot of people talking about, in this case, owned marketing and owned channels. I'm hearing a lot of people talking about direct-to-consumer, D2C, and how this is a different way of engaging with customers and a different set of priorities. And some things that we're talking about and thinking about at Smile are how we can shift these transactional relationships that we have with customers into more emotional connections with customers. I think all of these things are actually talking about the same thing, and that's if we treat customers as people, and if we're a good person to them, and if we stop thinking about, how can I, let's say, get a sale out of this email, how can I get a sale out of this post on social, instead of that being your priority, instead of having a transactional priority, we have more of an emotional connection as a priority.
Steve Deckert: How can I write this email that will improve this person's day in a way where they don't necessarily need to buy, but they still love opening this email and consuming it.
Steve Deckert: I think all of us are talking about this in different ways. I think it's good that we're talking about this. And I think it's going to improve customers' experience everywhere.
Kurt Elster: If I'm a merchant, what's the one key takeaway? How should I be internalizing this theme and applying it to my business?
Steve Deckert: I think it's a cultural shift that you need to make. If you are already optimizing all channels for transactional metrics, try and at least throw one emotional connection, some sort of metric that measures how your customers actually care about you.
Steve Deckert: Let's say, if it's email, are they reading the email? Are they actually opening this email and reading it? I'd like to see more of those metrics added in and layered in, and hopefully, ideally, taking over from transactional metrics like, did they buy?
Kurt Elster: Shifting gears to technology features, the shiny toys for a loyalty program that Smile is, do you see any new features, new things coming down the pipeline, from Klaviyo that are going to impact your business or change how you look at things?
Steve Deckert: Absolutely. There were two things that were announced that I'm super excited for. One is SMS, and everyone's talking about it. To me, this is great because it now gives people another channel to connect with their customers. It also, if we listen to customers, allows them to tell us how they prefer to communicate with us, and I think that's really important that we start asking customers that. Some people will prefer SMS, but some people will prefer email. Let's make sure that we're giving them the choice because they're the ones that matter at the end of the day.
Steve Deckert: I'm excited to see rewards SMSs being sent out. I'm excited for people to be sending their top tier VIP customers an SMS about a new item coming out before everyone else hears about it. I'm excited to see reporting with the new reporting tools that Klaviyo is launching this week.
Kurt Elster: Tell me about these reporting tools.
Steve Deckert: There will be some improved reporting coming out, I think announced at this conference.
Kurt Elster: Who are you and what do you do?
Speaker 5: Like I said, my name's [Damon 00:19:19]. I work with Mission Focus Media, so I'm a growth hacker, or growth specialist. I consult with other companies.
Kurt Elster: What's been the big theme, or takeaway, for you here?
Speaker 5: For me, I think it's just backing up the fact that email's not dead. We were speaking before, everyone is saying email's dead, you need to try the latest thing, TikTok, Instagram, whatever, and they're leaving all this profiles, or leaving all these emails and all this money on the table by not making the most out of it. I mean, it's not as good as what it was five or ten years ago, but if you use a tool like Klaviyo and you have automations in there, and you split test, and you look at your analytics, you can still squeeze a lot of blood out of that stone.
Speaker 5: Email is probably still the best return on ad spend or return on investment that I have with my clients.
Kurt Elster: If you had to pick a single Flow, a single Klaviyo Flow, that you use with your clients, what would it be?
Speaker 5: Abandon cart. I've got one abandon cart with a client and I've only come over to Klaviyo from [mauchimp 00:20:25] six months ago, and it's already produced about a million dollars in saved revenue, or extra revenue, come in. So, we get 40% open rate, we get a 10% to 11% click through rate, and we're converting at about 5% to 7%. Within that, I've got two or three different Flows, or different variations in there, so a 30-minute send versus a one-hour send, and different content between the two.
Kurt Elster: In your really extraordinary Abandon Cart Flow, how many emails are you sending to people?
Speaker 5: Three. Three. They get three emails. They get one within 30 minutes or an hour, they get one within 24 hours, and they get one three days from the start, just reminding them that the incentive that they got in the second one is about to expire.
Speaker 5: First off, you're just offering help, was there something wrong with the checkout, this is a little bit about us, so you're not doing the hard sell. The second one is a little bit more with USP, unique selling propositions, so using reviews or what people are saying about us on Facebook or Google Reviews, and offering a discount. And the third one is just reminding them their discount's about to expire, so a sense of urgency.
Kurt Elster: What's the most successful campaign you've ever run? Give me the high level overview.
Speaker 5: Oh gee, that's hard, I've worked for a lot of different companies. I started working with an Australian company that I brought across to Klaviyo. They were doing around $100,000 a month, and this was just before Black Friday/Cyber Monday last year. We sent out an email to all their subscribers and basically, over that weekend, through all their channels, it was about $547,000 in sales in one weeks, and nearly $200,000 of that was attributed to email.
Kurt Elster: Were there any new features, announcements, anything that you've heard so far that's got you excited where you go, all right, this is the thing I'm going to play with when I get back home?
Speaker 5: I think allowing Klaviyo to check send times, what send times work best. I've usually done it using a Flow and splitting when we send and testing it and making sure we get a statistical variance of 95% or more, so we actually change our send time. But, using Klaviyo themselves to predict what's the best send time, and also having a look at gender predictions as well. We can change our content slightly whether we're sending it towards females or males or undecided.
Kurt Elster: What do you think is the most underrated, or under utilized feature in Klaviyo?
Speaker 5: I would say it would be predicting when the next sale is, if you know what I mean. Using their predictive analytics to work out when someone is likely to buy next, and using a Flow to hit that person just before they're about to do that.
Kurt Elster: If you had to tell listeners, Shopify merchants, Klaviyo users okay, this is the one thing I wish you would do, just go do this thing in Klaviyo, what would it be?
Speaker 5: It would be Abandon Cart, and just taking it seriously, because you've already paid to acquire those people, whether you've paid by generating [inaudible 00:23:33] content to get them to come, or whether you've paid by SEO, paying somebody to do the SEO, or paying someone to do the Facebook ads, Google ads, whatever, you've already paid for that person to come, so why not just give it one more little push to try and get them over the line and get them to purchase. You're leaving money on the table.
Kurt Elster: You sound like an advanced marketer. Where can we go to learn more about you?
Speaker 5: Okay, so, it is missionfocusmedia.com.
Kurt Elster: Who are you, what do you do?
Rebecca Melsky: My name is Rebecca Melsky. I'm the Co-Founder of Princess Awesome and Boy Wonder. We make clothes for girls with themes on them usually only on boys clothes, so think of dresses with dinosaurs, trains, things like that. And for boys, Boy Wonder we just launched, has boys clothes with pink and sparkles and unicorns.
Kurt Elster: Did you speak at this conference?
Rebecca Melsky: I was just on a panel.
Kurt Elster: Do you have any hot takes? Was there one key takeaway that you wish people got out of it?
Rebecca Melsky: The panel was featuring four different brands that use Klaviyo in different ways, and I was there as the smaller company, and I think the takeaway is that there's so much that you can use Klaviyo to do, no matter what size you are.
Kurt Elster: Out of this conference, what do you think the common theme is?
Rebecca Melsky: The theme is owning your own marketing and owning your customers journey and being able to speak directly to your customers.
Kurt Elster: How do we do that? What's driving that need and desire to own your own marketing?
Rebecca Melsky: Costs are rising, competition is increasing, and the more that you can take it in-house and do it on your own, the less you have to worry about those costs and competitions.
Kurt Elster: In Klaviyo, if I said, listen, there's only one Flow you can run, which is your favorite Klaviyo Flow?
Rebecca Melsky: The Welcome Series.
Kurt Elster: You're the first person to say the welcome series, and I think that's such an important part of onboarding users, of nurturing leads, of getting those sales. What do you think goes into an effective welcome series?
Rebecca Melsky: Telling the customer about who you are as co-founders, or as founders, or CEOs, who's running the company, what the brand is about, and then also, if you promise them a discount, delivering on that.
Kurt Elster: If you had to tell listeners, other Shopify merchants, here's the one thing in Klaviyo I wish you would go do, what would it be?
Rebecca Melsky: Segment out your best customers, decide what that is, like they've purchased a certain number of times and spent a certain amount of money, or something, segment those people out and do something separate with them. Send them extra emails, give them early access to products, something that makes them feel special and that will get you more value out of the people who already love you the most.
Kurt Elster: Have you started planning your Black Friday sale yet?
Rebecca Melsky: Yes. We have.
Kurt Elster: Are you doing anything different or special this year for your holiday marketing campaigns?
Rebecca Melsky: I wouldn't say we're doing anything different, but what's worked for us in the past is releasing a new product on Black Friday as well as doing a sale. The new products are not eligible for the discount, but then the rest of the site is, so some people come just for the new products and stay for the sale, some people come for the sale and stay for the new products, or come to get all of it.
Kurt Elster: If I wanted to go check out your products and learn more about you where would I go?
Rebecca Melsky: Princess-awesome.com.
Kurt Elster: Thank you.
Kurt Elster: Who are you? What do you do?
Grace Druecke: My name is Grace Druecke. I own The Bali Market. It's a Turkish beach and bath towel company.
Kurt Elster: Why did you decide to come to Klaviyo:BOS?
Grace Druecke: I was invited, I'm one of the finalists in the owned [girls 00:27:08] competition, but...
Kurt Elster: Congratulations.
Grace Druecke: Thank you. But the opportunity to learn more about marketing and just meet others in this industry was invaluable.
Kurt Elster: [inaudible 00:27:19] what's your biggest takeaway so far?
Grace Druecke: To email my customers a lot more, definitely, and to create more specific and personalized content, not just sending out, “Hey, buy my product,” but actually connecting with customers through emails.
Kurt Elster: When you get back home what's the first thing you're going to do to achieve those goals?
Grace Druecke: Oh my gosh, I am going to work on creating more of a schedule for sending out valuable content that isn't just promotions, but actually creating, like on a Tuesday, or every Wednesday, something goes out that is content and valuable to my community.
Kurt Elster: The word I keep hearing over and over again here is "owned." Owned marketing, owned channel, whatever it is. What are they talking about? What do they mean by owned?
Grace Druecke: For me, that means, I started on Amazon where I didn't own my customers at all. Being able to own my customers through email and through being on Shopify, to me, that's what the "owned" means.
Kurt Elster: Right now, in Klaviyo, if you could only pick one Flow, what's your favorite Flow?
Grace Druecke: The Welcome Series. That one brings the most money, just every day.
Kurt Elster: What do you think goes into a successful Welcome Series?
Grace Druecke: Sharing, well, really welcoming them, being personable, letting them know that they're not going to receive just a bunch of junk if they stay on the list. And, then also sharing the story, educating. People don't always know what our products are, so educating what the products are, and what the brand stands for, and our philosophy behind the product.
Kurt Elster: What's the most successful email campaign you've ever run?
Grace Druecke: The most successful is based around my, it's called the bin sale. It's the biggest sale that we run. It's for products that aren't quite perfect, so they're really discounted, and only email subscribers get access to the sale, so it's the biggest sale that I run. That brings in thousands and thousands of dollars every time I do the bin sale emails.
Kurt Elster: Are there any announcements, new features, surprises, that you're excited about that you learned about here?
Grace Druecke: Well, I haven't learned about it yet, but I'm really looking forward to the SMS and learning more about texting my customers.
Kurt Elster: It's a shame, they haven't, at this point in the day, they have not yet announced SMS marketing, but you're like the fifth person to tell me, “I'm so excited about SMS marketing.” And I go, “Wait, did they actually announce that?” And they're like, “No, we just assume they are.”
Grace Druecke: Yeah, it looks like there's a session this afternoon about it, or maybe it's tomorrow, but there is a session, and I will be at it.
Kurt Elster: And for listeners, if you could tell them, “All right, here's the one thing I wish you would do," what would it be?
Grace Druecke: Connect more personably with your customers, and email them more often. It's understanding what they actually want in their everyday life. For my business it's about minimalism and simple living, and so sharing those stories with them in emails, letting them know that's something we believe in, and are supporting their beliefs in that same philosophy.
Kurt Elster: Where can we go to learn more about you?
Grace Druecke: You can find The Bali Market at thebalimarket.us.
Kurt Elster: Thank you.
Grace Druecke: Thank you.
Ben Parr: Hi everyone, my name is Ben Parr. I am the President and Co-Founder of Octane AI. We are the Facebook Messenger and SMS platform for eCommerce.
Kurt Elster: How long have you been aware of, working with, using Klaviyo?
Ben Parr: We have been partners with Klaviyo since we first came into the Shopify ecosystem, which was about maybe a little over a year ago, so maybe a year-and-a-half in tops.l
Kurt Elster: As Klaviyo has evolved, so too has the messaging around Klaviyo. What's your take on it, how has it changed?
Ben Parr: I had a conversation with some of the Klaviyo partners and some of the Klaviyo execs recently around their topic of owned marketing, which is great brand and great term, all of those sorts of things. I think their message has evolved a little bit where they were used to being like, you can't trust these channels, like Facebook, Amazon, that sort of thing. But, for a lot of merchants, for every merchant, you've got to go to Facebook, and you've got to go to other channels like that, or TikTok, or Google, or wherever your customers are, because that's especially really important for the top of the funnel. You've got to run ads and bring people in.
Ben Parr: I think the really key message, and I think where owned marketing really makes sense and where I think the messaging is going is you need to own that customer data and really use it to personalize, and you need to have contact information and ways to contact them that go beyond the social networks. That means email, that means phone number, that means other key pieces of information. The kind of result though, is if you are collecting owned information, owned marketing, which is what they're trying to have everyone do, you will make a much better and more effective experience for your customers and for your prospects across all the different channels.
Ben Parr: You have better data, your ads are going to be more personalized and, thus, perform better. If you have better data, the messages you send out on Facebook Messenger or SMS are going to perform better. Your emails are going to perform better. Your customers are going to be happier because you're not going to hit them up 50 times with things that don't make sense, but one thing that does. That's what I think owned marketing is and where it's all been going towards.
Kurt Elster: What's the common theme, or takeaway here?
Ben Parr: I think the common theme is that really owning and really creating a detailed profile of your customer, and that data, and having ways to contact them directly through channels that they really use is the most effective thing that you can do. Klaviyo essentially is the data warehouse, it has the data from all the different other apps that you're using connected into one. You can create really personalized experiences and messaging to each individual customer using that data and that profile that Klaviyo's created. I think that's the number one takeaway I've gotten from here.
Kurt Elster: Anything I'm missing? Anything else you want to share?
Ben Parr: Klaviyo's done a really excellent job of not just bringing in data, but being really good to its partners overall, and being really good to its customers overall. The reason Klaviyo has grown so much in the last year is because they have built something that is beyond email, it is a data platform, and that actually helps every other product that is connected to it. It helps make your Facebook messages better, it helps make your outbound better, it makes your ads better, it makes your loyalty better.
Kurt Elster: Who are you, what do you do?
Lucas Walker: I'm Lucas Walker, you may have seen me in the Shopify ecosystem as the Co-Founder of Treats Happen Natural Dog Treats, or recently I've just joined the team over at Gorgias. We are the number one help desk for eCommerce and Shopify merchants.
Kurt Elster: At Klaviyo, I don't even know what to call this conference. How do you... Klaviyo B-O-S?
Lucas Walker: It's Klaviyo Boston, but for the grand finale of their city tour, so they showed earlier they were in New York, L.A., Austin, London, and this is really their favorite stop on the tour, so the same way that the Rolling Stones will do a big thing in Toronto because they love Toronto, they want to do a big thing in their home territory which, naturally, is Boston. So, they rolled out all the stops, all the big product announcements, all the VIP speakers, they're bringing them here for the Klaviyo Boston I guess is the official title.
Kurt Elster: At Klaviyo Boston, what's the overarching theme that you're noticing?
Lucas Walker: I really think it's going into the demarkation of all these tools for entrepreneurs. I'm sure you're seeing this at a very technical level a lot more of the [inaudible 00:35:13], and how tools are being integrated with that at the very sophisticated level. But, for what's traditionally been hard for small, medium, and even medium-large sized eCommerce businesses to really do things like really advanced segmentation. I know they announced, or during the keynote, they really showed how, if you can make a bulleted list, or a flowchart, you can be a programmer, and in this case, really programming something for marketing automation.
Lucas Walker: You don't need to have a technical skillset, you don't need to hard code a bunch of things, of knowing if/then statements, so if someone starts to checkout, but their cart level is under $20, then send them an abandon cart that sends them to your Amazon page because they don't want to pay $7 shipping and handling on a $20 cart, but they can get it for Amazon Prime. So, really making it easy for really, any merchant to rollout a pretty advanced strategy, even three or four years ago, which would have required a lot of custom coding, dev time, or really a veteran in the space that you're paying $170 an hour to as a consultant to set up. You can pretty much get up and running if you use Gmail or Google Sheets to create what that Flow looks like, and be able to roll that out.
Lucas Walker: We just saw the guys from John's Crazy Socks, a phenomenal story that really shows how anyone can go out and become an entrepreneur. And you hear story after story of a single mother, a college dropout, maybe someone with a criminal record from 20 years ago and they can't go out and get that traditional job, and really getting into one of my personal whys of why I love entrepreneurship, is anyone can go out and build a business, and it's easier than ever before to build a $10, $20 million company with four or five employees. Even 10 years ago that did not exist, the ability and the ways that you can go out and do that.
Kurt Elster: My why, my reason for being, has always been, help my friends get paid. That's how I see entrepreneurship. I've loved that technology has democratized these tools. In respect to new technology coming to Klaviyo, what are the big changes, what is the key feature that's exciting that's been announced?
Lucas Walker: I don't know if it's been announced yet, but it will be announced by the time that this goes live, which is really the SMS integration, which we've seen at Gorgias, a lot of successful merchants using, whether it's a tool like PostScript or Octane AI, Privy launched SMS yesterday as well. It feels like the time of SMS is here and that really gets into the overarching theme of Klaviyo Boston, which is your own customer data, your own tech stack. If a customer wants to opt in to SMS for shipping and product updates, if you're doing a drop and it's a very limited edition, they don't want to miss that, and they know they will check their text messages before their email inbox.
Lucas Walker: Anecdotally, you and I, how often in Gmail do you just click the buttons Select All, Mark As Read, but how often do you at least skim the text messages that you've gotten. So, from a merchant and the seller point of view trying to make money, that's really where your top customers are going to be, especially the customers who opt in to say, "Yes, notify me of new products or deals by SMS." I'm betting the conversion rates on that are going to be north of 50% for the next few months.
Kurt Elster: From what we've seen, that will probably be the case. It's exciting to see the SMS revolution happening very, very quickly here. For Gorgias, Gorgias being a wonderful customer help desk software that I really enjoy, which I'd never thought I'd say about help desk software, so that speaks to how good it is, what impacts, what changes are we going to see coming out of Klaviyo?
Lucas Walker: The big thing will be our deeper integrations with SMS, and we haven't built a Klaviyo integration out yet, because we haven't really needed to where Shopify can act as that hub, and both Klaviyo and Gorgias are the spokes impeding through. But now with SMS integration, you might have a customer who comments on an Instagram ad, sends you an email, replies to an SMS message, uses your webpage's Contact Us form, and messages you on Facebook. You really need to efficiently be able to go back to that customer, who's essentially opened up five conversations with you, identify that's the same person, and respond back to them as quickly as possible. We've seen in our data, about 70% of all tickets that are created with eCommerce stores are either related to wanting to know where their order is, so getting a tracking number or an update there, changing or editing something with the order, maybe it's the address, they realized they put in the wrong address and they want it shipped to their workplace or change the product, and then 5% is related to canceling orders.
Lucas Walker: If you have someone asking you in five different places, that can create a lot of work if you're manually responding to that person who's asking that really simple question. Being able to take all that data into one centralized location, identify that it's the same customer, and close that ticket out quickly, that's really what we're helping our merchants do, because it does two things. One, your end customer is going to be a lot happier because they got their answer they were looking for quickly, and also, it frees up your time to work on more revenue generating activities, which we're really starting to see the cutting edge brands do.
Lucas Walker: Wendy's started it on Twitter a few years ago, sort of that sassy attitude, but if you have customers commenting on your ad saying, “Wow, where can I buy this?” Send them to your website. Your customer service has already begun before they've hit the website, and you start to see a lot of good things happen. Your ad becomes a lot more efficient, but also, if you have a detractor commenting on those ads, either you want to hide it, or say, “Thanks much for letting us know, we've emailed you where your tracking number is,” and it shows you're a brand that you care. I'm sure we're both in the Shopify ecosystem, we see people spitting up drop shipping every day not caring about their customers at all, and it has [inaudible 00:41:11] for brands like Treats Happen, and I know your wife, with the...
Kurt Elster: [inaudible 00:41:19]
Lucas Walker: ... W-W-W asking questions, but some people still don't trust putting the credit card online. So if you can show as a brand that you're responding to customers who are having issues, it does build up a lot of trust with those prospective customers that are maybe on the fence because they haven't heard from you before.
Kurt Elster: It's Treats Happen, right?
Lucas Walker: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: In Treats Happen, did you use Klaviyo?
Lucas Walker: Yeah. We've been a Klaviyo customer since probably 2016, so we've been on it for about three years now, four years.
Kurt Elster: What's your favorite Klaviyo Flow? If you only had to keep one, what's the one that you desperately need to keep?
Lucas Walker: The one that I want to keep, or the one that I've seen you suggest I should be rolling out to double myself? [crosstalk 00:42:05] It's got to be our Welcome Flow. Because we're not really an immediate pain pill, in the sense of being a pain solution or a vitamin solution, we're a little bit more of an educated sell of why should people trust us to feed our treats to their dog. We use our Welcome Flow to really educate customers on our products, why they're good for your dog, but also our brand story.
Kurt Elster: Who are you, what do you do?
Parker McMahon: Hi, my name's Parker McMahon. I manage our eCommerce platform relationships at Klaviyo. Right now, our current eCommerce platform partners are Magento, Shopify, BigCommerce, and Salesforce Commerce Cloud. My day-to-day is bringing Klaviyo closer together with those strategic eCommerce platform partners across out entire organization. Today we had Shopify, Magento, and BigCommerce speaking at Klaviyo Boston. We also have them all as brand sponsors for the actual conference. And yes, it's been an amazing event, really happy to have our major partners here.
Parker McMahon: As you asked, what would I say that I hope people take away from this conference is real actionable value and community building. As you see here, we have the entire Klaviyo team actually here. Our entire success team is standing around taking questions from brands, meeting customers that they actually manage. Our entire partner team is here meeting with different partners, different agencies that we work with. Our sales team is here meeting with prospects that are considering Klaviyo. Our marketing team is meeting with partners about co-marketing.
Parker McMahon: But the brands who come here get to meet other brands who are thinking about the same challenges they are. Our tracks, one track is dedicated completely to getting more value out of Klaviyo. You go in there and you actually walk in, and when you walk out you have something, you have knowledge about the partner that you've seen demoed live in front of you, that you can then take and implement the second you walk out of the door, to make more money for your business.
Parker McMahon: And if you want to try something different, you can walk a few doors down and listen to what brands are actually saying, because we have brands on the stage expressing their stories and sharing their learnings firsthand. And then, yeah, to kick those sorts of days off, we usually have big announcements about the Klaviyo product and what Klaviyo is doing from a business perspective.
Kurt Elster: What are the big announcements, what's the exciting news?
Parker McMahon: You'll have to wait until you hear from Jake Cohen tomorrow morning.
Kurt Elster: I can absolutely attest to this, to the collaborative, the actionable nature, of the talks and the conference content here, because I'm super selective in going to conferences because I'm strapped for time, I've got three kids, and I need to be careful about where I spend that time and invest it. So, I love going to conferences that have a collaborative nature, like Shopify Unite, or conferences that have talks largely from the customers, from the members of the community, and that's what I have found so valuable about Klaviyo Boston is hearing from thought leaders and from merchants who are just saying, hey, we're having success, we happen to be using Klaviyo, and here's how we're doing it. And so, seeing that and being able to take away this clear actionable advice has been really enjoyable, and fabulous from a creating content. Parker McMahon, thank you sir.
Parker McMahon: Thank you Kurt.
Kurt Elster: Who are you, what do you do?
Gwen Jimmere: My name's Gwen Jimmere, and I'm the CEO and Founder of Naturaliscious.
Kurt Elster: What brought you to Klaviyo Boston?
Gwen Jimmere: I am a long-time user of Klaviyo. We make a lot of money on Klaviyo. I love Klaviyo. It's super user friendly. We used to be on Infusionsoft, which required a whole college PhD degree to be able to use. Klaviyo is super user friendly, love it, support's great. Yeah, that's why I'm here, to learn even more, and I brought my team of five this time.
Kurt Elster: We talked earlier, you said there's stuff that's not even new features, just things already in Klaviyo you didn't even know about. So, when you get back to your business, what are some of the things you're going to implement where you're like, man, I can't believe we're not doing this?
Gwen Jimmere: Well, one of the first things that we're going to implement is the Smart Send Time. I did not know that was an option. Also, the gender-specific Send Time. We're a beauty company, so most of our customers are women, but we do have some men who purchase from us for their wives, but also some who purchase for themselves, and it will be great to be able to see a lift in the male segment based upon the fact that we can segment them out. So, that's the first thing we're going to do.
Gwen Jimmere: And the next thing we're going to do is switch our SMS provider and move over to Klaviyo's SMS provider.
Kurt Elster: Of the new announcements here, what's the big one that you're excited about.
Gwen Jimmere: Probably the Smart Send Time. We've been trying to figure out what is the best time to send emails. We've figured it out pretty much for social media, we figured it out sometimes for text messages and even Messenger, but email's been kind of hit or miss. We tried to send everything at 10 a.m. We even tried to send them in a user's local time, but some things perform better than others. So, I'm really excited to be able to granularly hit every person's optimal time with Smart Send Time. So, that's probably the most exciting for me.
Kurt Elster: And of your current Klaviyo setup, if some strange apocalypse happens and you're only allowed to keep one Flow, what would it be?
Gwen Jimmere: One Flow, probably... I can't keep two, I can only keep one?
Kurt Elster: All right, you can keep two.
Gwen Jimmere: Okay.
Kurt Elster: Only you though, nobody else.
Gwen Jimmere: Okay. If I can keep two, Abandon Cart, for sure, and I want to say Welcome Flow. Those two probably make the most for us, as far as Flows go.
Kurt Elster: What makes a successful Welcome Series?
Gwen Jimmere: Well, first of all, our Welcome Series lasts almost a month, and it's over a period of time. You're not getting an email every day, but every couple days you're getting some sort of content. It really helps to help the user or the new customer to get acclimated to the brand, the culture, they see me, as the owner, they see the team, they see some of the good will that we do. For example, we have a whole team of special needs workers that works on our production line. So, they get to really understand the brand behind just beauty.
Gwen Jimmere: For me, I think, and for everyone else, a really good Welcome Flow is not just about selling more, but really helping the person to become emotionally attached to the brand.
Kurt Elster: If I wanted to go learn more about you right now, where do I go?
Gwen Jimmere: You could go to naturaliscious.net, but an easier way, a vanity URL we have for that is savetimeonwashday.com. Very easy to remember, very easy to spell.
Kurt Elster: Very good. Thank you.
Gwen Jimmere: Thank you.
Kurt Elster: Who are you, what do you do?
Jake Cohen: My name is Jake Cohen, I'm the Director of Products at Klaviyo.
Kurt Elster: This morning you announced several new features for Klaviyo. Give us the rundown, what are these new features we should check out-
Jake Cohen: There's two big new features that we announced here. One is Customer Analytics, which is going to give you the ability to query all the data that we collect on your behalf and store on your behalf so that you can derive insights very quickly without having to set up data warehouses, move data around, clean it. It will just work as if it's a tab on the side of your dashboard.
Jake Cohen: And then, the other big feature is SMS, native in Klaviyo, so that you can send SMS in Flows, eventually in Campaigns, and build multichannel experiences incredibly quickly.
Kurt Elster: Normally, setting SMS up as like this extra channel, this new thing, this sounds difficult. Give me the rundown. How do I turn this on, how long does this take?
Jake Cohen: I like when you ask that you smile, because you saw what we did this morning. Literally, it's my favorite part of the whole feature is how easy it is to set up. It's literally three clicks. You click into Account Settings, you click into SMS, and you click Turn It Live. We automatically go and configure a long code for this account and we turn on the ability to send SMS just like that. No forms, no calls, no negotiation, no haggling, just turn it on and send. When it starts working, sure, you can decide to scale it as much as you see fit, but the point is we want it to be so easy for you to get it going live that you can't even believe why everyone else doesn't do this already.
Kurt Elster: Once I set up SMS on my account, how do I go actually make it send, what's it take?
Jake Cohen: I thought the easiest thing in the world would have been how we made it to set up SMS, but actually, the easiest thing in the world is to dragging an SMS into a Flow and make it work. It's literally that. We have little Flow actions on the side like we do with email or push notifications, if you use them, we'll have SMS in there too. You literally drag it in. You can configure the content and set it live, and you're done. SMS will be part of your Flow and sending out to people who sign up.
Kurt Elster: Any other new features? Anything else we're missing?
Jake Cohen: That's all we're going to share for right now.
Kurt Elster: For people who... I talked to a few merchants who are on Klaviyo now, they're here and they're going, “Just not even the features that are announced, there are features in Klaviyo I didn't even know were there that I'm turning on.” What are some of the most overlooked features, the missed opportunities, that are already out there?
Jake Cohen: Well, it's funny, I was talking with, I think I can say it, Staples is one of our customers, and I was talking with them, and they were asking me, "Hey, I want to go look at this report, and I want to see this about our campaigns." And I said, "Have you seen our Campaign Trends reports?" And they're like, "No, what is that?"
Jake Cohen: And there's a baked in feature where we'll plot all of your campaigns side by side so you can see how your open rates, your revenue, your placed order rates, and even your [inaudible 00:51:46] rates are trending over time, so you can see which is performing best and worst and learn from that and improve going forward. People don't even know about that.
Jake Cohen: Also, we tell people all the time and not enough people do it, Browse Abandonment, which by the way, there is literally a Flow preconfigured in the Flow Library, for you to turn on Browse Abandonment so you can set it up and start to capture all of that revenue that's waiting for you. You and I have talked about it, others have talked about it, as like the fastest, easiest way to start growing your revenue, if you're not already doing that.
Kurt Elster: You're sitting on all this data. Klaviyo collects all this data about my customers, you have all this aggregate data, what are the Flows that are making the most money? If the apocalypse occurs, and in this apocalypse only two Klaviyo Flows survive. Which are the two you saved?
Jake Cohen: If I'm purely looking at a revenue perspective, it's probably Abandon Cart and Browse Abandonment. If I'm thinking about it also from a branding perspective, I'd want to put in there a Welcome Series and maybe a Thank You Flow or a Replenishment Flow for after purchase.
Kurt Elster: I think Welcome Series is a really critical part of lead nurturing of the customer brand experience, and it gets overlooked. What goes into a successful Welcome Series?
Jake Cohen: Well, first you have to figure out how you define success. I think different people have different ways of thinking about it. I, personally, would not define success as revenue from my Welcome Series, I would define it as longer term engagement. Getting people who engaged with my brand by visiting or opening my emails. So, in that case, I believe the best thing to do is to start to collect information about your customers as early and as often as possible, as they'll give it to you, so you can curate the experience downstream and personalize it.
Jake Cohen: When someone signs up, you should have on your form, yes, their name and their email address as an input, but start to collect the customer type. Everyone has a rough sense of who my customers are. If they're buying for themselves, buying for someone else, buying because they're trying to sell to someone else, buying for wholesale, whatever. Come up with what the categories you think are and start to collect that, and what you'll find is people who have different intent that are buying for different reasons, they want different experiences, and you can curate those in such a way that will increase your conversion with them, and allow you to find more people like them so you can really grow.
Kurt Elster: What am I missing, what else?
Jake Cohen: I don't know. I don't know if you're missing anything. I think one thing that we want to make sure people understand about where we're going and how we're thinking, we want merchants to have the control, the power, like they used to in the past, over their future. We want them to be able to invent and dream the experiences that are going to be amazing for their customers and contacts. We want to give them the tools and the platform for them to do it. And we don't want them to pay an arm and a leg for them to get that done. It should be their power, their control, their ability to chart their own destiny, and we want to be the people that help them do that.
Kurt Elster: I have goosebumps. Jake, thank you.
Jake Cohen: Amen.
Kurt Elster: What are your names, what do you do?
John Cronin: I'm John Cronin and this is my father, Mark Cronin. I am Chief Happiness Officer. My dad is an old plain [person 00:54:54].
Mark Cronin: Old plain person. What's the name of our business?
John Cronin: John's Crazy Socks.
Mark Cronin: What's our mission pal?
John Cronin: Spread happiness.
Mark Cronin: Yeah, you've been doing that today?
John Cronin: I did.
Mark Cronin: All right.
Kurt Elster: And where are we right now, what brings you here?
Mark Cronin: How can we better connect with our customers. Part of our overall approach is to make everything personal, like what goes in every package.
John Cronin: I give a thank you note and candy.
Mark Cronin: Right. But we want to use the tools that are available to us to find ways to more personalize the experience for our customers. That's what we're doing here.
Kurt Elster: What's your key takeaway, what's the overall theme at this conference?
Mark Cronin: I'd say two things. One, it's reinforcing what we're doing. We are who we are. I joke, John has to guile, I'm too old to care.
John Cronin: Yeah, you're old.
Mark Cronin: We're just who we are, and we put that out front. We put out front we're showing what people with differing abilities can do. So, instead of hiding that, that's up front of who we are. A lot of what we're hearing is just reinforcement. Be who you are. People want to connect to actual people.
Mark Cronin: And then the second is we still have to do much more to personalize the experience for our customers, to personalize the communication, to connect and give them what they need and what they're looking for.
Kurt Elster: And I heard that there is a special giveaway, special swag at the event. What is it?
Mark Cronin: What are people getting here, what are they wearing?
John Cronin: Socks. Socks. More socks.
Mark Cronin: Right. You're wearing them. Yeah, but we're on a podcast. People can't see them.
John Cronin: Oh, right.
Mark Cronin: Yeah, we do custom socks, we do a lot of corporations, and Klaviyo called us up and said, “We want to make socks,” and it's been pretty cool. All day long people have been coming up saying, “John, I love your socks,” right?
John Cronin: Right dad.
Kurt Elster: John, where can people go to get your socks?
John Cronin: [inaudible 00:56:54] at johnscrazysocks.com.
Mark Cronin: All right buddy.
Kurt Elster: Thank you, thank you.
John Cronin: Thank you.
Kurt Elster: So, tons of value at Klaviyo Boston. I wrote it was my first time attending. I really enjoyed it. I loved the fact that it's very merchant-centric. If you're on the fence about it, if you're thinking about it like, should I go to this, would this be valuable, should I be doing this, I think if you use the product, if you see the revenue it's generating, the answer is absolutely. Because, number one, you're going to be talking to and brainstorming with other people in exactly the same position sharing what, okay, hey, here's a problem I'm facing, oh yeah, we have that, here's what worked for me.
Kurt Elster: And then, additionally, they made Klaviyo staff super accessible. It felt like, and it may have been, the entire team may as well have been there, and they had this whole big support bar set up where you could just go and say, "Hey, here's the problem I'm having within my account," or "Here's the thing I'm trying to do." I had an issue for a client. I got to sit down with Jake Cohen, Director of Product, and go, as a thought exercise, here's the thing we'd kill to do, this is what we're struggling with." And he goes, "Oh, let me show you how to do that." And he pulled his laptop out. Two minutes later I knew how to do it.
Kurt Elster: So, really valuable. I would sign up. Sign up for their newsletter, and then that way you'll be able to know when it's available and sign up for it next year.
Paul Reda: Yeah, this sounds super useful for store owners, because Shopify Unite is very much-
Kurt Elster: It's the partner [inaudible 00:58:14]
Paul Reda: Internal, yeah, it's for dorks like us. Store owners I don't think are even allowed.
Kurt Elster: A few sneak in, but they're not supposed to be there.
Paul Reda: A few sneak in, but yeah, whereas this is much more outwardly facing where it's like if you own a store and want to become a Klaviyo god, go to this conference and you will get a crash course in everything from the greats.
Kurt Elster: Yeah, absolutely. You want to go next year?
Paul Reda: I like my couch.
Kurt Elster: Well, you could go for part of the conference, and then go see a Red Sox game.
Paul Reda: That stadium's so old and gross though. Also very evil.
Kurt Elster: You're so hard to please.
Paul Reda: I know, I am.
Kurt Elster: You're a curmudgeon.
Paul Reda: I am. It's true.
Kurt Elster: I'm dragging you.
Paul Reda: All right.
Kurt Elster: You gotta go now.
Paul Reda: All right, bye.