Since the dawn of email marketing, the view has been to build your lists big and keep hammering. In some ways that train of thought still applies but needs some severe tweaking to get up to the latest standards, not only for the current times but going forward. At Swyft we believe one of the next evolutions of shopping online is going to be in personalization and how deep that goes.
Think about this for an example, if you visit [departmentstorename].com and navigate to the baseball gloves for your kid, then why should you see content about washing machines when you return? When your interest has been in sporting equipment.
That may be a bit of a wide-open case but you can at least get some context of what we’re talking about there. It’s about relevance to the search. So the next question is, why should your email experience be any different?
Our belief is that the “One size fits all” email message is a recipe for low click-through rates and even less revenue from your email activities. Klaviyo is a segment-driven platform and allows us to create segments based on actions our customers perform. Essentially it allows us to break our customers up into groups of how and who is most engaged with our store and what exactly they are engaged with. This is huge when you think about the opportunities to grow your sales.
We should note here though, that within Klaviyo a contact is not limited to one segment. A contact can be in multiple segments if they meet the conditions you’ve created.
(Segment Builder Overview)
Lets Role play some scenarios
First let’s create the numbers we are going to work with for context. You have 10,000 people on your email list. 5,000 of them open your emails on a regular basis, 1,000 of them are existing customers that have made a purchase, and 2,000 have NOT opened a single email you sent them in the last 6 months.
Scenario 1: The 20% OFF Email
As we get close to a big holiday or some relevant sale date you put together an email that you want to blast out to your lists that has an amazing offer in it. The issue here is, Will all 10K people on your email list respond to the same way? or are you just lobbing the same “softball” to the same group of engaged users on your email list giving discounts for the sake of giving discounts? The answer to the latter is yes. The answer to the former is no. The chances are you will see the same open and click rates and a lower revenue generation number due to the discount. So lets look at it from the two angles:
First in a List based situation, you create your email and fire it off to all 10K. Thats it and the results are what they are.
In the Segmentation situation we have some options. You can send the 20% off to the highly engaged people on your email list. Say anyone who has opened or clicked an email that you sent within the last 30 days. Chances are that those people are interested in what you have and are willing to make a purchase just by you saying there’s a deal. Using our numbers from above, you send this email to 8K people on your list.
For the other 2K of people who don’t interact with your content at all, you create another version of your email. Something that can “shock the system” like a different color palette, emojis in your subject lines, completely different messaging in your email, or a different layout. Something different than what you typically send so you can elicit a different response from the contact. In Klaviyo, doing this is incredibly easy because you can create a segment of contacts from your Master List in less than 60 seconds. In List based systems, this line is much harder to draw if at all.
Scenario 2: You bought a shirt, how about pants?
Say you want to send a promotional email to anyone who has purchased a specific shirt in your store that has the perfect matching pair of pants as a compliment. Typical List based systems will require an extensive tagging setup to ensure you only send to the people you want. This is a giant pain in the A$$.
Klaviyo makes this easy but you need to consider 2 sides to this. Within the Klaviyo you would create a segment for anyone who has completed a purchase for this mythical shirt. However, you also need to consider the negative. Meaning that you will want to exclude anyone who has purchased the mythical shirt and mythical pants together. This ensures that our segment only contains customers who have purchased the shirt. The Klaviyo segmentation rules will automatically comb through the purchase data of your 10000 contacts and place them in the segment if they meet the criteria. This way your message only goes to the people who should get it.
I know you have to be seeing the power of segmentation at this point…. C’mon, you see it. Admit it 🙂
Scenario 3: You don’t click my emails, What’s wrong?
Now imagine you have been hard at work for 6 months creating emails, dumping money into advertising, building funnels, creating products, etc., etc. But you have 2000 people on your list that have done absolutely nothing. Not even opened a single email while they have been on your list….. DELETE THEM!
I know that is a direct shot at your ego sometimes being able to say we have a list of 20K people but the reality of it is if 20% of your list is dead weight then there is no reason they should count against your account. Plus, you run the risk of hurting your sender score by sending it to people who aren’t opening or are at higher risk of marking your email as spam. So let’s get them off the list. This move saves you money and ensures that your content is being digested the way it should be.
Luckily, creating this segment is pretty easy but just like #2 try to consider the negative and what other re-engagement opportunities you might have. To build this segment what we suggest is creating rules that someone has not opened an email in the last 6 months AND has not made a purchase over all time. This is a good practice from the 6-18 month mark with Klaviyo. Past that, you’ll want to adjust the purchase rule as you go to ensure you are not putting good customers on the proverbial “Bad List”. Remember, the “health” or your list dictates the quality of your list, so get the bad demons out.
Why Klaviyo Segments?
More and more email marketing platforms are realizing that we as marketers/operators need to be better at reaching the right people with our message. Segments are the answer. This has directly trickled down to the providers needing to update their tools for this demand. In our opinion, the Klaviyo platform is just on the leading edge of segmentation capabilities. Others may catch up at some point but the entire suite of tools combined makes Klaviyo hard to beat.
Til the next installment.
Leon
