Klaviyo is a unified customer platform that empowers brands to turn customer transactions into long-term relationships with personalised email, SMS, push and more and allows brands to track this data easily.
1. What’s your name and title, what do you do day-to-day in 20 words or fewer?
George Underwood: Agency Partner Account Manager UK, IE & Nordics @ Klaviyo. I work to make my partner agencies ‘famous’ by supporting their growth with co-marketing, competitive intelligence and training.
2. At Klaviyo you help scale businesses with personalised email/SMS marketing. Can you give us a success story for a D2C brand you’ve worked with? Eg what was the problem? what did you do? what were the results?
Grind, a London-based organic coffee company that makes Biodegradable pods for Nespresso Machines scaled their business with Klaviyo.
We worked with Grind to organise their email list based on how customers interacted with their brand. This helped them create targeted campaigns with content and offers that customers actually cared about. They also used Klaviyo’s dynamic coupons to give customers personalised discounts that helped boost engagement and sales.
They also used A/B testing to test subject lines and email content to make sure they were connecting with their audience. They also used Klaviyo’s integration with their eCommerce platform Shopify to send abandoned cart emails, which recovered lost sales.
Thanks to Klaviyo’s reporting and analytics, Grind could track the success of its campaigns and make data-driven decisions.
Grind’s new email strategy led to a 60% increase in email open rates and a 40% increase in revenue from email campaigns.
3. You specialise in email marketing – what piece of advice would you give to DTC brands who want to improve customer retention?
Live your customer journeys first-hand – get everyone in your team to buy something from your store and have them experience the same thing the customer does. That’s the only way to know where you need to focus on.
Remember, when a customer clicks buy is just the beginning. The customer journey doesn’t end at checkout. Every detail from shipping and delivery to onboarding quizzes, to interactions with customer support will colour your audience’s experience of your brand. Klaviyo has got postpurchase flows, surveys, and more to make that journey work for you.
4. What do you think the biggest challenges facing eCommerce/D2C businesses will be over the next 12-18 months?
Resisting the urge to discount and preserving brand equity and getting senior stakeholders’ buy-in to invest more in marketing.
5. Complete this sentence – DTC brands that survive and thrive in 2023 will …
Read How Not to Plan: 66 Ways to Screw it Up by Field and Binet.
The best brands do emotional long-term brand equity building really well but, they also do punchy rational short-term sales activations. But, here’s the trick, don’t try too hard to entertain or seduce when you are running activations and don’t try to sell when you are running emotional campaigns. Rational selling messages may dilute emotional power and entertaining people in active shopping mode can irritate them.
In addition to collecting reviews, successful DTC brands will also use customer feedback to inform their product development and marketing strategies. They will regularly analyse and review data to identify trends and insights, and use these insights to make data-driven decisions that improve their offerings and drive customer loyalty. Finally, they will be responsive and proactive in addressing negative reviews, using them as an opportunity to demonstrate their commitment to customer satisfaction and continuously improve their products and services.
6. Name three D2C brands that are killing it and whom you recommend others to emulate/learn from.
Freshly Cosmetics – Natural cosmetics that take care of you and the planet. A clear brand message, clean simple UX with a great customer experience.
UK Lash – Scaling very quickly and has just got national distribution in the UK with Boots. Seriously lashy. That’s our aim. We want the whole world to be masters of lashfulness. The longer, the fuller, the better. Our eyelash and brow serums bring the love with vitamins, peptides and strengthening extracts.
PDPaola – They know their consumer, they know how to merchandise online they use personalised marketing very effectively