Sending your customers an email may seem simple, but there’s so much more to email marketing than meets the eye.

While social ads sometimes struggle to break through the noise of organic content, an email is a personal, direct and focused method of communication. And at a time when using data to personalise advertising is becoming increasingly difficult, email marketing offers a way to own and take charge of data to benefit your business.

Whether you’re sending emails to a small mailing list or sending them to hundreds of thousands of customers, creating and sending email campaigns needs much more than your company Gmail or Outlook account. Klaviyo is a platform that has been designed to make email marketing easy, while also helping you to maximise its potential and grow your business. Here we’ll introduce you to the platform, how it works and what sets it apart.

Sending Emails In Your Sleep.

Klaviyo takes care of the entire email marketing process from start to finish. To send emails, you naturally need the data first. With Klaviyo, you can collect the email addresses of customers with custom sign up forms and quizzes embedded into your website, building up a customer mailing list, even when you’re not actively working on your site.

Once you have the addresses, you need to work out what you’d like to say to your customers, and how. Klaviyo isn’t just about technical wizardry, it’s also an excellent design tool. Choose from a variety of templates, and with just a few clicks, you can create a contemporary, attractive, and enticing email. You can use a variety of typefaces, and incorporate images and logos to make your emails sing in tune with your overall brand identity.

With a mailing list and beautiful emails in hand, it’s time to send them. Klaviyo can do anything from a single email drop to all of your subscribers (such as when you have big news to announce) or for a highly targeted campaign, sent to very specific customers. Campaigns can be targeted towards new customers who leave something in their shopping cart (known as abandoned cart emails: find out more about how to do them right here) or to bring back those who’ve already purchased. These automated campaigns are only the start of what Klaviyo is capable of.

So that’s all well and good, but why should you use email campaigns anyway?

What Sets Emails Apart.

If your social media presence is on point, you might be asking why you should use such an old method of communication to interact with your customers.

While the earliest implementation of email was invented in the 1970s, email today is more prevalent than ever. It seems that almost everyone on earth has an email address, and for most, it’s become more important than their physical address. But for much of the time since email inventor Ray Tomlinson sent the first message from one computer to another in 1971, email has been used as little more than the virtual equivalent of a letterbox. Now, Klaviyo is changing that.

With all the attention on social media marketing in recent years, and by extension, pay-per-click more generally, emails are easily overlooked. But PPC and social advertising aren’t the all singing, all dancing panacea they once were. Changes in social media usage trends, as well as greater privacy restrictions from Apple’s iOS operating system, are creating difficulties in the world of online advertising.

Thankfully, emails are more resistant to anti-tracking software built into the latest mobile operating systems. While it’s become more difficult to accurately target audiences with social ads due to the limits on data that can be collected from cookies and other tracking technologies, Klaviyo’s approach to data collection is much more reliable thanks to the use of zero party, customer-first data, ie. data that you own. You’re not relying on a data broker such as Google or Facebook to provide the information needed to target customers - you control it yourself.

Owning your own data has many benefits. As well as being resistant to anti-tracking software, merchants can also do more with the data, at a lower long-term cost. To publish ads based on data from the likes of Google or Facebook, you’ll need to continually pay them for access to it. But with email marketing, and with Klaviyo, that data is generated entirely from your own entity - your online store.

This approach to data also helps brands foster more trust with customers, as site visitors actively choose to share data, rather than it coming from somewhat sneaky tracking technologies following them around the internet.

Integrations Are Everything.

Now it’s time to discover the kinds of data Klaviyo can collect, and how it can put that data to use. With Klaviyo, integrations are key. Previously we’ve talked about how useful Shopify apps and integrations can be for your online store, but what can Klaviyo integrations do for your email marketing?

Klaviyo has partnered with dozens of e-commerce heavyweights, including Shopify, to provide merchants with ways to integrate many of their processes with the platform. These integrations directly feed the data behind email campaigns, and form part of what is commonly known as your ‘tech stack’.

For example, if Klaviyo is integrated with your Shopify store, it can create an automated campaign based around customer behaviour. If a customer abandons their shopping cart, Klaviyo can automatically send them an email nudging the customer to follow through on the purchase. You could create an automation which emails a customer post-purchase, asking them to leave a review or to consider other items they may be interested in. Klaviyo makes these automations easy, but they’ve also become quite commonplace across a wide variety of email platforms. So what else makes Klaviyo stand out from the crowd?

Klaviyo creates detailed databases of customer data, tracking the journey a particular customer goes on throughout the entire purchase process. These databases track everything from an initial visit to your store, the products a customer views, items they add to cart, to the items they purchase. Using integrations from the likes of Gorgias, ShipStation, and Yotpo, Klaviyo databases can even keep track of reviews left by customers, whether they’re positive or negative, and it can also tap into shipping data, tracking when their orders have been shipped.

If a customer leaves a negative review, you could set up an automated email to be sent which offers them support and links to customer service. If ShipStation informs you a delivery is running behind, an email can automatically be sent out with an apology and tracking information. These kinds of innovative automations enable a level of agile and proactive interaction, something not previously possible without great expense and the time of your employees. The possibilities are endless.

Time To Get Started.

Now it’s time to turbocharge your email game. Whether you’ve never used email marketing before, or you’ve been using a different email platform, it’s time to make the move to Klaviyo. With minimal effort and only a few clicks, you can transform your communication with customers, making it infinitely more personal and customised. As you snooze peacefully in the knowledge your customers are being reached and engaged like never before, you can quite literally be sending emails in your sleep. Need a hand to make the move? Discover our email marketing services and get in touch.

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