Twinings earns 30% of its direct-to-consumer revenue through Klaviyo

Every tea drinker has heard of Twinings. The iconic British brand has been trading for 300 years and still operates the London tea shop it opened in 1706. While having a cuppa is still very much a British institution, consumer tastes are changing and younger people are more likely to choose a health and wellbeing infusion from Twinings’ Superblends range than a traditional brew. When the business moved its ecommerce platform to Shopify in 2021 it decided to adopt Klaviyo as its marketing automation platform.

Learn how Twinings uses personalisation to successfully cross-sell its Superblends range

Challenge

Twinings has a huge online sales target but as a heritage brand, it needs to carefully balance brand messaging with selling: simply blasting an audience of 170,000 with offers isn’t an option. As part of its customer retention strategy, the brand aims to help customers discover new flavours and wellbeing drinks they’ll love, using its expertise to educate them about the latest blends. But since everyone’s taste buds are different, it needs to understand people’s taste preferences before it can make personalised recommendations.

Solution

Twinings decided to switch from SmartFocus to Klaviyo in order to upgrade its segmentation capabilities and use more first-party data to create targeted communications. Charlotte Stephens, the Ecommerce Manager, found that SmartFocus was more difficult to use and didn’t easily connect with other systems, making it almost impossible to deliver a segmentation strategy. With its one-click integration with Shopify, Klaviyo was up and running in no time. 

Charlotte is also experimenting with other apps that integrate with the platform to enhance audience engagement and provide more data points – such as quiz tools and a referral programme.

I just love how easy Klaviyo is to use, it’s a really intuitive platform. One of the things I really like is how simple it is to build segments. In a few clicks I can select customers who’ve signed up to email and bought a particular product, but haven’t purchased anything in three months.

Charlotte Stephens, Ecommerce manager, Twinings

Strategy

Using subscriber data that’s collected from purchases and product views, Twinings can separate Earl Grey drinkers from English breakfast tea lovers. It uses this Customer-First Data™ to build segments for different taste profiles and run cross-sell campaigns promoting its range of botanical beverages. For example, customers with a penchant for Earl Grey are targeted with herbal blends containing citrus, since they probably enjoy subtle lemon flavours.

To create a richer brand experience, most emails include links to recipes that use tea, such as trendy kombucha, bubble tea and vegan smoothies. Twinings combines this content with subscribers’ profile data to create highly-personalised automated flows for its welcome, back-in-stock, and abandoned cart emails, which are all strong performers.

We’re trying to build the brand saliency into health and wellbeing so that people associate Twinings with healthy drinks, not just black tea. We’ve moved away from site-wide promotions to run smaller, more targeted campaigns using our 200 recipes and features to engage with customers.

Charlotte Stephens, Ecommerce manager, Twinings