New to Klaviyo? Here's how to get started.
Want to know what's working for us with Klaviyo right now? We turn to ecommerce marketing wizard Kurt Bullock to get an update and learn the exact blueprint he uses to achieve 20% revenue increases for Shopify merchants.
First we'll discuss some quick wins for existing Klaviyo users, and then we'll walk through
You'll learn:
Grab a notepad and tune-in 'cause this one is full of actionable advice.
Kurt Elster: Hello and welcome back to the Unofficial Shopify Podcast. I'm your host, Kurt Elster, recording from Ether Cycle HQ in pretty okay, scenic, nice, finely green, Skokie, Illinois. Today on the show we are talking about one of the number one revenue channels for any eCommerce business, one of the highest ROI marketing activities you can engage in and one of my favorite ways to help people make more money with their store, because that is my why for being. I want to help my friends get paid, and I promise, you are all friends I haven't made yet.
We're talking about Klaviyo today. Yes, the email marketing automation platform that is the darling of the Shopify world. Klaviyo. We love it. We're biased. We're Klaviyo gold partners, proudly so. We want to share with you two-fold. Number one, if you're already on Klaviyo, hey, here's what's working for us, here's what's new, here are some things you might not be doing that you want to consider. Then if you are new to Klaviyo, you're considering setting it up or you just got on it and you haven't gotten through the setup yet, the second half of the episode, we're going to try and walk through, all right, this is the pro way to set up Klaviyo. This is the crash course that should make your life easier and help you get the absolutely most value from it.
Joining me to do it is none other than frequent repeat guest Kurt Bullock from Produce Department, another Shopify partner, and strategic partner with us. He does our handles, our Facebook ads management for clients and our Klaviyo management as well. We did that for years, it has worked very well for us. I'm happy to have him joining me again. Mr. Kurt Bullock, thank you for joining us.
Kurt Bullock: How you doing Kurt?
Kurt Elster: We got video going. We both got our hair cut recently, and we have the same damn haircut. This is just the standard white guy haircut now.
Kurt Bullock: It's true. When you go in, it's assigned a letter.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. Give me the C. It's just the average white haircut.
Kurt Bullock: Exactly.
Kurt Elster: In Klaviyo, we got to first establish something. What is it? Why do I care? What's the big deal with Klaviyo?
Kurt Bullock: Klaviyo, it's an email service provider. It's cool because it connects to your Shopify store and because it has awesome marketing automation capabilities. Now they're adding new capabilities like they're experimenting with AI to see how that can add to the whole process as well, but that's Klaviyo in a nutshell.
Kurt Elster: It's not even just BS AI. A lot of supposed AI is just really complex nested [inaudible 00:02:39] statements. In Klaviyo's case, they said they had hired two Harvard data scientists. They're not messing around here with machine learning. Okay, so Klaviyo, email marketing platform. MailChimp just broke up with Shopify, so we got a lot of people, there are 300,000 merchants on MailChimp and those people have to go somewhere with their email marketing. We know it's this tremendous channel. The big advantage to Klaviyo is it is from day one built with the Shopify integration in mind.
That's why its become such a darling in the Shopify space, especially among Shopify Plus merchants who are able to leverage, is because it just works for your Shopify store in terms of you've got the tightest, highest level of integration possible to enable these marketing automation flows. On that topic, what's new in Klaviyo? What are some of the exciting new features that have come around? What are you playing with these days?
Kurt Bullock: We talked a little bit about the AI, and that's cool. That's something I'm experimenting with. It gives us lots of options in terms ... They're calculating at all times for each of your customers how much they've purchased in the past, they're projecting how much they think they will purchase in the future. They're coming up with numbers you can use like the average time in between purchases, and these are all things that you can use in your automation and in your targeting. That's something I'm playing with and trying to find the best use for.
Another thing that they're doing is they've added recently split testing, which is great. I'm doing a lot of split testing right now in all of my Klaviyo installs, and we can talk about what some of those split tests are. Split testing has been super powerful, especially because you can use it in their automated flows, so you can have branches. You can have one branch that says let's do this with the coupon code and another branch that says let's try it without a coupon code. Then you can go and see what lift the coupon code gave you and see if it was worth it or not.
Kurt Elster: Yeah, I've recently talked to one of the guys from Chubby's. They were saying that aside from phenomenal content, they loved Klaviyo. They'd been using it forever, and they have been doing split testing. Before a email goes out, they take a small percentage of the list and who had received the full email, and they send multiple versions of it where they go, "All right, we're going to try two different subject lines, we're going to try two different headlines and we're going to try two different offers," something like that. Then assuming that these things succeed, if nothing works I assume they don't send it, but they pick the winners, mix and match it together and then send that tested and proven email to the entire list.
It's not a ton of extra work upfront. Doing that, they're able to get much more dramatic results I would imagine. When you talk about split testing in terms of flows in Klaviyo, walk me through it. What's a working example where you might use this.
Kurt Bullock: Let's go back to abandoned cart. I've got a few different abandoned cart scenarios, all of which I've used on a store that I run with my brother called Ballistic Fabrication. It's auto parts for off-road vehicles. One thing that we're doing right now is I look at our flow list and where all the revenue's coming from, is an abandoned cart split test where we have different emails going for new customers versus repeat customers. We've got one flow, and essentially it's testing for people add something to their cart but they haven't purchased. Then do this. Then we check to see, okay, have they purchased in the past? If they have, then they are going to get the customer flow.
In the customer flow, we're not including discount codes. If they have not purchased before, that's the new customer flow. Excuse me, so the other one's repeat customer flow. This one's new customer flow. If they have never purchased before, they're a new customer, that's where we use the discount ladder. We're introducing discount code, sending out a different one every few days and trying to bring them into our world with a discount and push them over that edge. Once they become a customer though, we don't need to continue sending them discount codes every time they come through our funnel or onto the store, so that's where we have the two different branches.
We found that the repeat customers, if I'm just looking at the values here, we're bringing in more revenue from the repeat customers than the new customers in just a 30 day period. It doesn't seem to be negatively impacting the flows, yet we're not having to give away that 10%, 15%, 20% to all of our repeat customers. They continue to purchase and generate revenue.
Kurt Elster: At scale, you're not acquiring additional customers, you're not really changing anything about the business, but this one tweak, now suddenly the business is more profitable?
Kurt Bullock: Exactly.
Kurt Elster: Very cool. Off the top of your head, you got any other cool examples or wins of late with Klaviyo? I like that one.
Kurt Bullock: Yeah. Another one I guess, another abandoned cart that I use for a different store is deciding to use a discount code by value. They come through the cart and this particular store, this was for outdoor sports enthusiasts, and there's a bunch of low value items. Let's say $20, $25, right? We were looking through the stats and seeing that a lot of people that were ordering a $25 product, were getting then a 15% discount code on top of that. We decided to try and split that by the amount of value, the number of items in their cart and the total value. I should just say the total value of the items in their cart.
We decided in this case to put it at $100, because there was a number of products that are $100 plus. Essentially if they put any of the high value items in their cart, then they're going to receive a different email flow, which then offers them the discount code. That also is something that's pretty cool and using the new branches feature in flows, you can do that. You can split it based on value or if they've purchased before or how much they've purchased in the past. There's a whole bunch of different things that you can use to make these decisions in the flows.
Kurt Elster: I'll throw one out. The thing that I've been playing with more is segmenting. I think the magic of segmenting is like, it's not about who you're sending it to, it's more about who you're not sending it to. A recent one we had with a larger client was define what VIP customers look like. Say anyone who spent over X value in the last six months, 12 months, whatever it takes to get you to a definition that's maybe, at most, 1% of your list. That's what we did, and then sent an email out to those people before a big sale and said, "Hey, you're VIPs, so we're giving you early access to the sale and you're getting access to this bonus part of the sale where it's like there was an additional category that was discounted.
That, even though it's going to a tiny fraction of the entire email list, you're getting to your VIP best buyers and making them feel special and appreciated, and they return the favor by making purchases. The open click and order rate on that email outperformed all the other sale emails. It was just like what you're doing now, the same way you'd be sending sale campaigns now, you're adding one additional email to that and having a marked increase on the revenue you make from your sales. At the same time, I think it's a nice customer appreciation tactic.
Kurt Bullock: Very cool. I love that example of that, and just along the lines of segmenting. That reminded me of another example of this auto parts. For Ballistic, we created segments based on the type of vehicle that we're purchasing for. As an example, let's say we find parts that are related to jeeps. In that way, we can tell that if you've purchased jeep parts, you most likely have a jeep and you will probably be interested in other jeep parts. Then we created follow-up emails, so these were just campaigns that we sent out. We essentially looked through and found the top three to five bestselling products, jeep products, and then we created emails with related products that they would be interested in.
Another way to get more value from your list but also not annoy your contacts, because it's not related to a type of vehicle they don't have or things they won't be interested in. You can say, "If they've already purchased this, don't send this email out." That's been another win, and we're starting to build that out for other car types and makes. It's a manual process, but once you've done it, you can just rinse and repeat.
Kurt Elster: I like your example with segmentation, for the implementation saying who do you not want to annoy with this? Where it's like for some people, if I haven't made a purchase in a while but I like the brand, a sale email shows up, I'm at least curious. I'm going to open it, be like, "All right, what am I getting 25% off on?" Even if I say, "I'm not going to purchase right now," I'm not mad about it, but if I made a purchase like two days and then I get an email that the thing I bought is now on sale, super annoying, right?
Kurt Bullock: Right.
Kurt Elster: Maybe I go try and shake down customer service to give me the refund, but I'm probably not going to bother. I'm just going to be annoyed about it.
Kurt Bullock: Right.
Kurt Elster: With segmentation, every time we do a sale email, you can say, "All right, let's make a segment that excludes everyone who purchased the thing that's on sale or the category that's on sale or made a purchase period in the last 14 days." I think that's a good quick win. I'm going to put that in the show notes as "How to get started with segmenting."
Kurt Bullock: Yes. That's a really good thing to add to your pre-send checklist. Just think through who you could be taking out, particularly people that have just purchased the product that you're about to mail out.
Kurt Elster: I will say, having used Drip in my own business ... We can't just do an episode and be like, "Klaviyo's the best in everything. We love it, and you should use it right now." I'll say my segmenting is faster and easier to do in Drip. That's it. It does not have the same integration with Shopify that Klaviyo does. I'm a big fan of segmentation, so I like that in Drip. In Klaviyo, the solution is you make segments and then you just send the email to that segment, right?
Kurt Bullock: Right. There's lists, which is a static list. There's no conditions on whether you're going to be a member of that list or not. If you were added, you're in there. Then there's segments, which are rule-based and they can pull from lists. They do pull from lists, and it kind of further slices and dices that list based on any of these ... there's tons of conditions available to you in Klaviyo. You add more conditions when you add integrations, like with other apps. Let's say with Justuno or Typeform, and those start to bring in additional data that you can use to segment your list as well.
Kurt Elster: Cool. I think I'll rephrase it as ... my segmentation criticism, I'll rephrase it as a feature request. What would be cool is if when I create ... when I say, "All right, I want to create a campaign," it says, "Oh which list or segment do you want to send it to?" It gave me a third option that was define a segment right now, and I just make a one-off segment that is tied to that campaign email. That would solve my invented issue here.
Then conversely, the thing I wish every email platform had that seems to be exclusive to Klaviyo is smart sending. Where you're doing, with a lot of automation, you don't know what email someone may have recently received from you. Maybe they just got your abandoned cart email and then five minutes later, you're sending them a sale email. The smart sending in Klaviyo lets you say, "All right, just automatically exclude anybody whose gotten an email from me in the last X hours."
Kurt Bullock: Right. An example, maybe you would normally keep that on to make sure that people aren't receiving emails within a 24 hour period and getting barraged, but then maybe when you're sending out, let's say your Black Friday campaigns, where your goal is just to reach everybody, then you turn smart sending off. We're going to get this message to everybody, we don't care.
Kurt Elster: Right. Then think like Black Friday, Cyber Monday, it's a free for all.
Kurt Bullock: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: Everybody's inbox is fair game at that point, and we expect this. Moving forward, what works in Klaviyo? The reason I ask this is I'm looking for, all right, what's the MVP Klaviyo setup and for someone whose maybe trying to figure out if they're missing any critical flows or they're intimidated by the sheer number of flows in that workflow library, and they don't know where to start. What would be like, okay, these are the flows that typically make the most money and provide the best experience? Which do you do? Where would I focus my time first?
Kurt Bullock: I sort of think of it as going for the high engagement flows. For instance, again, I've got a Klaviyo account open right now. I think this is pretty typical across my other accounts as well, but your welcome sequence is going to be a big earner. That's typically tied to maybe a popup on your site. Maybe you're offering a discount code or maybe you are offering some sort of a download, like a buyer's guide. If you're selling skis, you might link to a guide that tells people how to choose which skis to purchase and which might be the best fit.
That was surprising to me when I started really diving into emails, that welcome flows would generate such a big portion of the overall revenue.
Kurt Elster: I think you think of the welcome flow as part of the first impression. You've just met this brand, and you're like, "Hey, yeah, you can have my phone number, they asked for it. Yeah, here you go." It's your email in this example. Now they're sending you some texts, and you're starting a conversation and you're getting to know them. I think humans, we're a social animal. Everything's relationship based and that's the way I would look at those welcome series. As to why they work so well, you've got to nail that first impression. A good welcome series does that for you.
Kurt Bullock: Absolutely. It pays to spend a little time thinking about that.
Kurt Elster: Rattle off for me ... I'm going to go deeper in the weeds on welcome series. Sorry.
Kurt Bullock: Let's do it.
Kurt Elster: A lot of people have crappy welcome series. Straight up. It's not necessarily their fault, it's just it's very open ended. They don't necessarily know what to put in there. Just rattle off some examples of these are emails I would put in a welcome series.
Kurt Bullock: If you've got it connected to an offer, let's 10% off or something like that, your first email, deliver the offer. Deliver what you said you would deliver. That's the first thing you're going to put in there. The next thing I'll typically put in there is what do you want your prospects to know. When I think about it, what's the most important thing that I wish my prospects knew? Communicate that in your next email. I would not decouple it from products. Tie the message together and make sure that you're talking about what you want them to know and by the way, this is how it ties into our products. This is what leads to us having the higher quality product, let's say, or being able to offer it at a better price or whatever it might be.
That would be the next thing. Then I'd like to throw in a reminder email. I'll check in see, hey, if they haven't purchased, if they didn't take advantage of that initial discount code that we sent out, send them a reminder that says, "Hey, we noticed you still haven't used your code. This expires in the next 24 hours, the next three days," or whatever it might be. I find that those, particularly when you say that there's only let's say 24 hours left, those generally bring in quite a few sales. There's a nice uptick in sales for that last email.
Kurt Elster: I have consistently noticed across every email campaign ever run in the history of ever, the email that often does the best is the, "Hey, quick, just a reminder, the sale's ending. This is your last chance. Don't ask us again about this."
Kurt Bullock: Right.
Kurt Elster: Because you know you could just put off the decision prior to then. It's like, all right, you're building the awareness, but they're like, "Eh, I got time. I got time." We procrastinate as people. It's just what we do. I think that's the magic of those emails and the importance of them.
Kurt Bullock: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: In your MVP workflow, you had a welcome series. What else would be like this is what you absolutely have to have?
Kurt Bullock: Abandoned cart I would say is the other essential.
Kurt Elster: For sure.
Kurt Bullock: Yeah, abandoned cart. That, with your welcome email, those are going to be your biggest moneymakers. We talked a little bit about abandoned cart examples with those split tests, but oftentimes an abandoned cart series, maybe three emails, one that let's say in our example, the first one has no discount code, just says, "Hey, you left something in your cart." It's just a reminder, and maybe there's a customer service element to there. Is there anything that we can help you with or any questions that we can answer for you? I actually experiment with sending this first one as sort of plain text a lot of times and just make it seem almost like it's coming from a live person. That works really well.
Kurt Elster: Let me ask you a follow-up there. You said, "I want to send this as plain text." I have seen plain text emails work so well, and you said, "Ah, it looks like it's from a real person." How do you decide this email is text-based, this email is HTML and images, and this email is straight up brochure catalog looking kind of thing? Should we just be doing everything plain text now? How do you decide?
Kurt Bullock: The way that I've done it is when I set up a new Klaviyo account, I usually split test the first email of the abandoned cart series, and so I'll have it branch. I'll send out essentially the same email, but plain text and HTML with all the images and menu part or navigation bar. That's the first place that I would experiment is with that first email in your abandoned cart series.
Interestingly I've found that the plain text works most often there. I have not seen ... and that's the generalization. I have definitely seen times when the other email worked better for whatever reason, and I'm not sure why, but testing at least gave us that information. We don't necessarily need to know why for it to work.
Kurt Elster: This is an opportunity for split testing.
Kurt Bullock: Right.
Kurt Elster: It's going to depend on your audience, your brand, your approach, but if you're looking, you're saying, "Hey, I'm making good money with my abandoned cart emails, I want to make more money, I don't know what else to try," why not try split testing plain text versus fancy. Fancy schmancy. That's the designer term.
Kurt Bullock: Exactly, that's the technical term.
Kurt Elster: Okay. Welcome series and abandoned cart, and for sure I've seen as far as revenue goes, those two are going to print the most money, so that's where you want to start and put your efforts. It's not true of all brands, but I've definitely seen somewhere like the browse abandonment does unusually well and that one's so easy to implement. It's like it's one email, you're not doing a ton with it, and it's just like, "Hey, did you see something you like?" That's all it says. I rewrite it to just like, "Hey, did you have any questions about this item?" Just open the floor to questions from customers.
Kurt Bullock: To be totally clear, in case you're not familiar with the browse abandonment email, essentially if you look at a product page and we already have your email address on file, then you'll receive a quick email like Kurt Elster has described, but it won't work for people that have never signed up for your email list because we don't know their email address yet.
Kurt Elster: Right.
Kurt Bullock: One other interesting one, and as I'm looking at a couple different accounts I have open on my screen right now, another one that's sometimes surprising is the new customer thank you email. Post-purchase thank you email. They've just purchased, and then after that, I often send out an email that looks like it comes from the owner of the store. What I hear back from the people running the stores is, A, that so many people respond to that email and they'll go in and they start developing relationship, and so that's the first thing that I hear. The second thing, looking at the stats, is that this comes in, what, this is the third highest performing beneath our, in this particular account, abandoned cart and welcome series is the new customer thank you.
Yeah, very interesting. Now that's not, again, not the same for all accounts, but in this account, it's pretty close to being abandoned cart almost.
Kurt Elster: Even if this doesn't print the most money, I would include this anyway as a must have just because it is such a nice customer experience.
Kurt Bullock: Right.
Kurt Elster: Generally, that's an email that's going to be very plain text.
Kurt Bullock: Yes.
Kurt Elster: When I've set these up and messed with them, I've stuck a dynamic product block in there where it's like I let Klaviyo make some recommendations, and I make it look like it's a P.S., like it's an after the fact, last thing. I've had clients push back on that and they're like, "Well we don't want to be too salesy." What are your thoughts there, or is it just, "I don't know, split test it and find out"?
Kurt Bullock: The ultimate answer is split testing, but a lot of times I actually plug it in there. If there's an opportunity to show them some new products, because Klaviyo's making these recommendations based off of what they've looked at and what they've purchased, and comparing that to what other people have looked at and purchased and ended up buying in the end. It's a chance to expose them to some new products and get them excited again. I usually include it.
Kurt Elster: The merchant that's pushing back on it, I think the cognitive dissonance that's happening here is they're being a good person at a dinner party, they're being humble. You wouldn't show up at a dinner party and be like, "This is how much I made this year. I brought my tax returns. Who wants to buy some shit?" That person would be a giant monster, and they're taking those typical rules of polite dinner conversation and applying them to their email marketing. It isn't the case. They're looking at it through a different lens. You also have to think like they just bought a product from you. They placed an order. They're excited about it.
That's like peak excitement, is that suspense between "I bought a new toy" and it arrives in the mail. You send out that email thanking them, it's a nice experience and at that moment they love you, they love your stuff. I don't think it's harmful at all to let Klaviyo make some product recommendations. If you believe in what you're selling, you know the person's into it and you trust in Klaviyo's ability to make sane recommendations, cool, do it.
Kurt Bullock: Absolutely.
Kurt Elster: I will say, a thing I only discovered recently when we had to solve some issues for a client was when you're setting up those dynamic recommendation engine ... the catalog feed for Klaviyo, it's got this widget you can drop an email where it shows like three, four products, whatever you define it, but it has personalized them to the recipient based on ... and you can choose how it weights it. It's very cool. You don't just have to pick, the default is it just pulls a feed of here's everything in the store, and Klaviyo knows to not show stuff that's out of stock.
You can make your own versions of that feed, like just pull stuff from this collection. You can try and really narrow it down and personalize it. I think that is a buried feature, a lot of people don't realize is there.
Kurt Bullock: That's one way that you can set up those ... let's go back to auto parts.
Kurt Elster: Yeah.
Kurt Bullock: Right? Once you've figured out that they purchase jeep products, then your product recommendations, you put them into a certain flow and it's always going to pull from the jeep collection, let's say, when it's recommending products. That's another way you can play with that.
Kurt Elster: You go into Shopify, and it's like, all right, let's say you're selling Wrangler parts. Let's say Ballistic Fabrication today only do jeep stuff, but it's like Wrangler, Grand Cherokee, Cherokee, and one of those bastard vehicles like a Patriot or a Compass or whatever. Then you create a ... I'm just walking you through this. In Shopify, create a smart collection called Wrangler, and it's like only include products tagged Wrangler and with Wrangler in the title. Done. Product price is greater than zero, so we don't have free items show up in there, and inventory stock is greater than zero. There, these are all in stock eligible Wrangler products.
Then I create a product feed in Klaviyo called Wrangler that just pulls from that collection, and then now I can use that for all of my Wrangler specific flow emails.
Kurt Bullock: Exactly.
Kurt Elster: Cool. Let's move forward, if you don't mind, to getting started with Klaviyo. We've established, either you're on Klaviyo and you go, "Oh, I just walked away with some great ideas," or you're considering jumping on Klaviyo or you're going to get started with your setup. You're going to walk us through how you approach that. You're a Klaviyo super pro, you're going to walk us through it. You've broken into three pillars. Tell me about that.
Kurt Bullock: Right. We can break it down, this is the way Klaviyo teaches it as well in some of their materials, is get data, organize data and use the data. Get data, this is going to be, again, if you're setting up a new Klaviyo account, you need to set up all the different places that you're going to pull data from. That's going to be connecting it to Shopify, connecting it to your old email platform. Let's say you were using MailChimp. We can talk about how you actually do that if you like, and then pulling in your contact lists and your forms.
That's get data. I'll do organize data and use data real quick as well. Organizing it is essentially creating your lists and segments, and then using data is putting it into action with your campaigns and flows. You want to jump into some of the specific steps for setting it up? Get data?
Kurt Elster: Yeah. Step one is this thing only works if it can pull info from my store and presumably my past email service provider. Run me through that quickly.
Kurt Bullock: They've made it super easy when you first sign into Klaviyo, there's a setup wizard, and that's going to walk you through the first step of connecting it to Shopify. It'll walk you through all these steps, you can set up your name and connect it so that now all of your Shopify data, so people that have purchased from you, which product pages they've looked at, people that have abandoned carts, all that data's going to be sent to Klaviyo so that they can use now, so that you can use it in your flows. That's a pretty automatic process and Klaviyo will walk you through it in the setup wizard.
Kurt Elster: Yeah, it's not tough.
Kurt Bullock: Yeah, it's simple.
Kurt Elster: They know that's the biggest hurdle, so they've really ... it is on point.
Kurt Bullock: Yeah. I mean even there's a little java script snippet that you used to have to go into the template and add manually. Now you can click a box and Klaviyo will add that for you. It's super simple. Next thing to consider probably is if you're moving to Klaviyo, there's a good chance you're moving from some other email platform, and so let's say MailChimp, sort of an of the moment platform here. You just go to the integrations tab, and under integrations, you would select MailChimp and then there's another wizard there that will connect it.
Once you connect it, it's going to synchronize all the data, and again, it'll pull from MailChimp information like if they've opened emails recently, if they've clicked on emails. You can use all of this to create an engaged list later. You can sort based on, I think it's 90 days worth of MailChimp data after you connect that.
Kurt Elster: That's sweet.
Kurt Bullock: Again, that wizard walks you through it. Yeah, super easy.
Kurt Elster: I didn't even know this until this year, because in the past it's for migrating between any platform, it's export everything as a spreadsheet, upload it, assign what the columns are and take what you can get. Like, "Oh I got the names of the emails in there? Good enough." Now you're losing nothing. Really, it pulls everything across. It's very cool.
Kurt Bullock: Yeah, it is. It's a really good way to do it. Just to follow through with the MailChimp idea, the next thing is going to be to migrate your email templates over. There's two ways to do it. One is drag and drop editor, and the other way is HTML exports. I would highly recommend using the drag and drop editor because that way it's going to be easy to edit moving forward. You don't need to go in and actually edit the HTML code every time you want to change something, and you can use those features like the product recommendation blocks and you can have ... it'll be mobile responses.
Drag and drop's the way to go, if at all possible, but otherwise, there is the option to the HTML.
Kurt Elster: When you say the drag and drop editor, you mean like I need to sit down and recreate these email templates, right?
Kurt Bullock: You do, yeah. You'll want to go through and Klaviyo does have a template section. Let's say you can create just a basic email template that has your logo at the top. If you have any kind of navigation, that can show up there as well, your footer, and a lot of times I'll set things up, just like I'll have a title or a header and a block of text, just a few things that I use frequently, and I'll always start with that. Then I'll delete the elements I don't need and modify the elements that are there, and that makes the process go really quickly.
Kurt Elster: Okay. Then I got to do, my next and final step there is to connect my forms so people can sign up.
Kurt Bullock: Exactly. Yeah. That's going to be in a lot of themes, if you were using MailChimp, there was a URL for the forms. It had a MailChimp URL in there that connected to the list. There is a Klaviyo correlate that you can put in there as well. That's really simple and compatible, and there's third party tools, like your popup. If you were using Justuno or Privy or any of those things, you want to connect those as well. That is how you're going to get all your data.
Kurt Elster: At this point, Klaviyo's large enough where anything that collects an email is probably going to have a Klaviyo integration. I like using ViralSweep. It's like, oh, you just add the API key. You got to point all that stuff towards Klaviyo, and then you've got whatever form on your site in the theme. Generally you could just go find the formaction URL in Klaviyo and swap it for the same space in MailChimp. Worst case scenario is you need to slide a developer $50 to take care of it for you.
Yeah, not terribly hard. Look for, hey, what's every place we collect an email. Okay, point to Klaviyo instead of MailChimp.
Kurt Bullock: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: You're right, worst case scenario is Zapier will probably do it.
Kurt Bullock: Right.
Kurt Elster: That gets us then to, that's pillar one done. We need pillar two, organize the data.
Kurt Bullock: Yes. Organize the data. The way that Klaviyo recommends that you do this is once you get all those people in there, let's say from MailChimp, continuing that example, to create an engaged subscribers list. There's lots of ways that you can do that, but as an example, since we get that 90 days worth of MailChimp data, you would probably want to include things like people that clicked on an email in the last, let's say, 90 days or 60 days. People that purchased from you recently. People that signed up for your newsletter recently. Those are all going to be people that you know are alive and kicking, and that's going to be ... So when you're moving to a new email platform, the first few weeks or the first month that you're there it is important to send to ... to use your engaged lists when you're sending, at first.
Because when you start sending emails and there's emails coming from a new IP address, all these platforms like Gmail, Hotmail, any email platforms, they are monitoring engagement. If they see a bunch of emails come from your IP address that people are marking as spam and they're not even opening, not clicking on, then they learn very quickly, Gmail learns to put your stuff in the spam folder. They recommend first create your engaged segment.
Kurt Elster: If we back up, I can give you some background on this that's interesting.
Kurt Bullock: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: When you sign up for a new email service provider, it's a bigger risk to the service provider than it is to you, the business owner, changing platforms. I know people worry about deliverability. That's a big risk for them, because if they get a bad actor, then suddenly that's going to affect all their other clients, so they got to kick the bad actor off and then try and repair the damage done.
The two ways these email service providers typically handle it is, one, when you sign up, you are randomly assigned a pool of IP addresses. You are also then put into quarantine and once you've met some metric where it's like, all right, you managed to send 1,000 emails and they didn't get marked spam, then they'll move you ... They'll go, "All right, let's move them into the slightly better tier," and then on up. It levels it out to where it's like, "All right, we know your spam complaints typically a half percent. You live in the pool with the other half percent of people."
The other way they go about it is ... Yeah, either that ladder system or we've got random pools that you're going to get assigned to, but either way, when you first sign up, you're in quarantine. That's why Klaviyo's saying, "Hey, play it cool, especially when you start."
Kurt Bullock: Right. Interesting. That's something to keep in mind as you get going. Send your engaged list. Also, build out your engaged flows. The flow that maybe you don't want to build right out of the gate is your re-engagement. Sending to people that haven't interacted with you in a long time and trying to get them back, that maybe isn't the flow that you've set up. Yeah, we're playing it cool.
That's part of organizing your data. I would say the second part of organizing your data is going to be cleaning your list, so you can come up with your least engaged lists. People that haven't clicked on an email in a long time, people that haven't purchased from you in a long time, and you want to play with these numbers. There are some starting numbers that you can use as starting points there, but you can say, as an example, people that have received an email at least 10 times and they have opened that email zero times, and they've clicked zero times. That could be a good starting point.
What you want to do is just play with the numbers. Increase them, decrease them. If you find that you do that and it excludes 95% of your list, then maybe you need to lighten up a little bit on the numbers and find something that makes sense.
Kurt Elster: Right. Including my own list, I'll play with this and be like, okay, give me a segment of everyone who has not clicked or opened an email and it's the last 20 emails. You do that, and it's like, "All right, I got 100 people." Okay, so maybe that's too severe. Let's go, all right, let's do 10. Now it's like 1,000 people, and so then the right answer's 15. Play with it to find something, and it's subjective, find something you're comfortable with.
Kurt Bullock: Exactly. Once you've done that, there's a couple ways that you can handle that. You can mark them as suppressed or you can delete them. You usually want to go with suppressed. Suppressed is cool because they don't count towards your monthly plan, so you're not paying for them. You keep all the data in the account still, so you can see all the past purchased data, what they've looked at, all that sort of thing. They can always become unsuppressed if they reengage later on. Suppressing it's a good way to go. The other option is to delete.
Kurt Elster: Unsuppressing them would be like they came to your site and they made a purchase, and now they're back in the list and unsuppressed, but you still kept all that data.
Kurt Bullock: Exactly.
Kurt Elster: Okay. I wondered about this. It's good to have the clarification.
Kurt Bullock: Yeah. Yes. If they purchase is one way, or if they came to your site and let's say, they opted in for a download or signed under your newsletter. That's another way they would become unsuppressed where they kind of initiated instead of you.
Kurt Elster: Right.
Kurt Bullock: Okay. You can come up with that list of people that there's going to be others that you want to exclude. People at hard bounce, Klaviyo's going to automatically suppress those people and hard bounce people that let's say their email address is misspelled or it's just the wrong email address, it's no longer active. Soft bounce is more of a temporary thing. Let's say their email inbox was full or the server was temporarily down or there was some other issue there.
Kurt Elster: Which both of those things happen way more than I would think is reasonable. People misspelling their own email address, that is a common problem. Especially when you're using contact forms instead of just putting your email out there. You'll go to reply to a contact form email, and it's like oh, it was going to Gmail. You clearly meant Gmail, but these services don't know that. They can't figure that out. People having suddenly, a good subscriber whose email box is suddenly at capacity, happens way more than you think.
Kurt Bullock: Yeah. It's good to keep those as part of your data hygiene process. Just one other thing here. You can suppress that way. There's a couple ways to suppress people. You can also run segments of people, export it as a CSV and then you reimport it into their list maintenance tab and then that's how you can actually clean off your list. If you say these are people, we know these are hard bounces. They're never going to come back, let's just get them off entirely, then you can export that list. Then you go to account maintenance and just remove profiles and upload the list. That is part of your list hygiene.
Kurt Elster: I'll say there's services that will do list hygiene. Kickbox is the one I like. It has an integration with Klaviyo so you can have it run through your list and it'll tell you, okay, these we know are not legitimate emails. These we know are high risk emails. This is especially good if you're switching email platform and you're trying to make sure you get that high deliverability rate. You could use one of these verification services. The disadvantages, it's yet another thing to pay for, and if you've got a very large list, it can get pricey.
I will link to Kickbox. It does exactly what it advertises. It works well, and if you don't have a big list, it's totally worth it to just try it. I'll put that in the show notes, Kickbox.com.
Kurt Bullock: Cool.
Kurt Elster: Does that get us through our pillar two, organizing data?
Kurt Bullock: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: Okay.
Kurt Bullock: If you're going a little further in that, you can always create more segments as you send more emails, but when you're getting your account set up, those are the main segments you want to create and have going. That moves us to the final pillar, which is using that data. That's primarily going to come in the form of sending out campaigns, which campaigns are the one time ad hoc event. You have a sale, you want to message a segment of your list, you send a campaign. Then there's flows, and flows you can liken to just an automation sequence or a drip sequence. Essentially there's triggered behaviors like somebody's added something to their cart and they haven't purchased. That can trigger the abandoned cart flow, or they have signed up through your newsletter form. That can trigger the welcome series flow.
Campaigns and flows. Excuse me. When I'm setting up new campaigns, or sorry, new Klaviyo accounts, I start with the high engagement flows. Get that welcome series set up, abandoned cart set up, post-purchase thank you. These are all things where they're going to be highly receptive to your emails, and it's going to help with sort of establishing that you are a good sender and not a spam sender to all the email platforms out there.
Kurt Elster: All right. Where do I go from there?
Kurt Bullock: After you've got those set up, the next place to go is just diving deeper into the world of flows. Klaviyo has really ... if you're in your account, they have a library of flows that you can click on. I would recommend just going through that and seeing all the different flows they have already built out for you that you can just modify. That would include things like a win-back flow or re-engagement flow. That would go to people that maybe purchased from you a long time ago and they haven't made a purchase in X number of days, 90 days, so then you send them an email with the discount code showing them the new products that you've added to your store.
There's delayed fulfillment is a new one.
Kurt Elster: Yeah, this is one of the recent adds. They regularly add to these. This one I think is so clever. Everybody should do it and hope they never use it.
Kurt Bullock: Right.
Kurt Elster: Tell us what it is.
Kurt Bullock: Delayed fulfillment. Essentially you can set a time, so let's say that you normally fulfill within two days or something like that. If you still haven't marked that order as fulfilled, and Klaviyo doesn't see it as been fulfilled in one day after that, then it will send out an email that lets them know that things are delayed and not to worry, the product is on its way. Excuse me, we'll let you know when the product's on its way is really what it says.
Kurt Elster: Okay. I think it defaults to like eight days. If it doesn't send, it goes, "Oh sorry, we know we owe you the order, we're just slammed right now." Yeah, it's just a nice safety net to have.
Kurt Bullock: Right.
Kurt Elster: Nice safety net, nice best practice.
Kurt Bullock: Right. As you're building all of these things out, we had mentioned smart sending. I usually like to keep smart sending set up on my automated flows. That way, there's not a traffic jam of emails if they sign up for a few different things at the same time. Smart sending, I recommend that you keep that on. Then Klaviyo's got a whole bunch of different resources that you can use as you build out these additional flows. After I build out my key flows, which we've talked about abandoned cart, welcome series, post-purchase thank yous, maybe win-back series, browse abandonment, you get those built.
Then you want to start split testing things. You can split test things, I'd given a number of examples at the beginning where we split test abandoned cart by value or by whether they're a new customer or a repeat customer, but you can also send the same email out and just use split testings like the headline or which offer. If you look at the Klaviyo blog, they've got a bunch of cool research they've done for you on subject line best practices. They give you a whole bunch of examples and tips for how to come up with a subject line that works well. Some of the takeaways are in most cases, emojis work well.
Kurt Elster: I'm a big fan of jamming a snowman emoji in my Black Friday emails.
Kurt Bullock: Right.
Kurt Elster: It works. It helps make it stand out and make it seem more human. Yeah, those two blog articles are Five Data Back Best Practices for Email Subject Lines and How to Craft Email Subject Lines that Drive Open Rates. I have put both of those in the show notes. List or no, tap or swipe up on your phone on the episode art, and that will generally open up the show notes, and scroll down to show links.
Kurt Bullock: Okay, super. Good. After you've built out your flows and as part of using the data, Klaviyo gives you a bunch of analytics that you can use as you build these out to see if things are on track. For your flows, you can click on a little tab, I believe in the upper right hand corner that says Show Analytics, and it's going to give you things like open rates for the emails, click rates, the purchase rates. Those are all things that you want to keep an eye on. The way that I typically look at it is I'll start out with baseline numbers, wherever they land when I first put these together and I look for outliers.
Say on our abandoned cart series, our open rate was whatever, 5% or something like that for these three and it was really high for this one or really low for that one. I start looking at those things. I do it, I look at them relative to one another as I'm starting. Same thing with campaigns. You're going to get the same sorts of stats. There's a reporting dashboard that you can open up, so you want to check on things like the open rates, click rates as we mentioned, but also look at things like how many of your emails are being marked as spam, unsubscribes.
Kurt Elster: Do you have example ranges for these KPIs? What's a typical open rate, click rate and spam complaint rate or unsubscribe rate? Give me some ranges. I know it's going to vary.
Kurt Bullock: Yeah, it is definitely going to vary, but let's see. As I look in some of my accounts right now, good open rates are going to be in the 40%, I would say that that's a good open rate. Normally, you might see in the 20% or 30%. Anything above that, I would say is quite solid. Is that what you have seen as well Kurt?
Kurt Elster: Yeah. I would say a good typical one would be like 35%. If you get above that, that's great. If you get below that, okay. Maybe start getting some value in these emails, doing something different. If it slips below 20%, you have a problem.
Kurt Bullock: Yeah. The next thing maybe I'm looking at is click rate. Click rate, these are going to be smaller numbers in general. If you're in maybe the 5% range, I would say, 5% to 10% range is maybe a good place to be. If you're lower than that, again, look at your offer, look at your headline, things like that. Headline's going to influence your open rate a lot, but it's the offer in general to get people to click through. How about you Kurt, in terms of the number? Do you have a number you look at?
Kurt Elster: For click rate?
Kurt Bullock: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: Yeah, it's like 5% would be pretty normal. If you could get over 5%, maybe this is a really good offer and you should do that again. You quickly realize what a numbers game emails are, so if you've got an email goes out to 10,000 people and only 40% are opening it and 5% are clicking on it, the click rate is not on people who opened it, it's on all recipients, right?
Kurt Bullock: Yes. I believe that's the way the ... Klaviyo and MailChimp measure it differently, but I believe that it's on all recipients.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. It's like, all right, if my click rate's 5% and it's good, and I sent it to 10,000 people, that means 500 people only made it to the website. Very quickly, this is why the really effective email marketers send so much email. It's because one email by itself really does not do a ton, but now when you do this multiple times a week, you start to, over the course of a month and then a year, this really adds up.
Kurt Bullock: Yeah. Absolutely. I think another one I mentioned was unsubscribe. When I look at most of my campaigns, that number's not ... you don't want that to be more than a percent or two typically in my view. You may see more ... it's going to depend, again, on if it's an automated campaign or automated flow or a sale campaign that you're pushing out to everyone. In general, you don't want that to climb more than a couple ... 1% or 2% in my view.
Moving forward, I think that that's, as you're sending up a new account, that's really the basics. That's where you want to focus on initially is just keeping your fundamentals strong, looking at your numbers, paying attention to them over time. It is a comparative game. Trying to improve your numbers, experimenting. Focus on the fundamentals initially and get those working well because those are the things, it's going to generate the majority of your sales, are going to come from those basic campaigns.
Then you can get fancy and start coming up with new ideas and birthday campaigns and all sorts of things like that. That's how I would get started.
Kurt Elster: The stuff that gets talked about is the really, like the fun stuff, like the happy birthday flow, it's just a cool one.
Kurt Bullock: Right.
Kurt Elster: It's effective, but you don't start messing with that until you've got the abandoned cart working right and the welcome series. You have all these tools, you still got to start with a baseline for good.
Kurt Bullock: When I'm managing the account, I like to keep a spreadsheet. I'll just record some of these numbers on some sort of regular cadence, whether it's weekly is good. You're looking at maybe four different data points per month, or at least monthly, so that you can track how things are going over time. I like to include notes as well. When I make a change to something, I just make a little line in my spreadsheet that says, "Hey, added a split test here," or I change the abandoned cart offer here. Then later as I'm looking back and I see that bump in the stats, I can actually remember why and look at maybe replicating that in some other way.
Kurt Elster: Fantastic advice. Do you have any other quick win tips before we wrap it up?
Kurt Bullock: I think that as you and I were talking about before we started, it's all about increasing the number of touchpoints in a smart way. I would say a smart would be just making sure that you're adding value with these emails and that a good way to do that is to make them customer service related. Just think about as you go through some of these individuals, what they bought, you can open up their individual profiles, go through their journey and think through it and think about what other messaging might they respond to. What would be helpful to them now that they have performed these actions? What's a good next step?
Then you can take those individuals and broadly apply that to everyone with a few smart rules.
Kurt Elster: If someone wanted to learn more about you, where should they go? How should they do it?
Kurt Bullock: You can find me on Twitter, which is my name, Kurt Bullock, and the other way is just to go to the website, which is Produce Department, and so it's Produce D-E-P-T dot co. Maybe we can link that in the show notes.
Kurt Elster: I will include that in the show notes as well. I don't have anything else. Any other thoughts you want to throw in there?
Kurt Bullock: That's it. Just work on your fundamentals. Get those going strong. That's going to be the real engine of your email sales.
Kurt Elster: I love these chats because I get excited that I pick just a ... The next time I have to go into a Klaviyo store, I start, like, "Oh can you check on this? Can you fix this." Then I log in, suddenly I start reviewing analytics and flows and campaigns, being like, "Oh here's some things," and then come back with, "Oh you should do this. Yeah, fix the thing. I should do this stuff too."
Kurt Bullock: Yeah, it's fun.
Kurt Elster: All right, Mr. Bullock, thank you. I appreciate it. If people have questions about their Klaviyo, hit him up on Twitter. See if you can get a hold of him. He is brilliant. I go to him, all my Klaviyo problems get solved by Kurt Bullock.
Kurt Bullock: Thanks. It was fun talking Kurt.