How Klaviyo pays off for the C-suite

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Mae Rice
7 min read
Success stories
August 1, 2023
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If you’re an email marketer, Klaviyo supports you at every career stage.

When your goal is to build emails, Klaviyo is a dream: The platform’s drag-and-drop editor is easy to master, and universal content blocks make it easy to keep branding consistent across sends.

When your goal is to grow revenue from owned channels, Klaviyo tracks—and accelerates— your progress.

Out-of-the-box analytics offer real-time insight into channel- and send-level revenue, and A/B testing helps you optimize subject lines and entire flows.

But what if you’ve reached the C-suite, and you have bigger picture goals? You’re no longer a marketer. You’re a leader.

Klaviyo helps there, too. Here’s how, according to executives from Jones Road Beauty, Manly Bands, Hedley & Bennett, 100% Pure, and more.

Klaviyo gives teams the agility to thrive in hypergrowth

Manly Bands is a fast-growing business. The men’s jewelry brand hit 8 figures in revenue in its first 4 years in business, co-CEO Johnathan Ruggiero reports, and currently manufactures over 3K wedding bands in-house every month.

Unlocking that kind of scale so fast requires an agile team and an intuitive tech stack. Before switching to Klaviyo, Manly Bands just had the former.

The nice thing about Klaviyo is it’s totally self-serve.
Johnathan Ruggiero
Co-CEO, Manly Bands

They used Listrak for their marketing automations, and the complicated enterprise software slowed them down. Basic functions, like editing a segment or flow, could require a support call.

Switching to Klaviyo helped the Manly Bands marketing team operate more quickly and autonomously.

“The nice thing about Klaviyo is it’s totally self-serve,” says Ruggiero. “Everything’s very clearly laid out and explained. It’s just a much better experience.”

Klaviyo makes it easy to get to know your customers

Jones Road Beauty CMO Cody Plofker uses Klaviyo segmentation to gain insights on email subscriber demographics and trends.

“We leverage the segmentation not just for email, but to help understand our customers better,” Plofker says.

We leverage the segmentation not just for email, but to help understand our customers better.
Cody Plofker
CMO, Jones Road Beauty

For instance: How many customers who have bought in the last 180 days have unsubscribed from emails?

Plofker can easily pull that stat by spinning up a segment for research purposes—and it’s a performance metric he and his lean team track monthly.

“If you want to grow any DTC business, you’re on Shopify and you’re on Klaviyo,” says Plofker. “You shouldn’t even waste time considering anything else.”

Klaviyo connects leaders with trustworthy data

David Baker, chief digital officer at Beekman 1802, can easily pull precise, actionable data from Klaviyo. 

“I have a high baseline level of trust in Klaviyo data,” he says.

I have a high baseline level of trust in Klaviyo data.
David Baker
CDO, Beekman 1802

This wasn’t the case with other marketing platforms. In prior roles, Baker struggled to pull enough quality, relevant data to gain insight into his customers and power smarter digital relationships. 

For example: By comparing campaign performance by segment across multiple Klaviyo sends, Baker can learn what sort of messaging resonates best with a given customer segment—a game changer, especially during peak shopping times like BFCM

“Klaviyo is the first email provider I’ve worked with in 15 years to be able to give us segment-level campaign data reliably,” Baker says. “It lets us provide much better service to our end users.” 

Klaviyo boosts all-up marketing efficiency

“This year is a year of optimization,” says Ruggiero of Manly Bands’ 2023 goals. “We just want to make sure we have everything cranking on all cylinders as efficiently as possible, because advertising gets more expensive every year.”

Klaviyo supports that with intuitive A/B testing tools that help optimize email sends and flows—and the platform also improves the efficiency of other channels, like Facebook Ads.

We just want to make sure we have everything cranking on all cylinders as efficiently as possible, because advertising gets more expensive every year.
Johnathan Ruggiero
Co-CEO, Manly Bands

Klaviyo’s Facebook integration can reduce cost per acquisition and drive ROAS as high as 30.8x.

And testing showed Ric Kostick, CEO of natural beauty brand 100% Pure, that he could entirely replace paid Facebook retargeting with Klaviyo emails. The strategy refresh boosted profitability with minimal revenue loss.

In other words: Klaviyo reduces customer acquisition and retention costs.

“It’s like a sidekick to growth strategy,” says Bryant Jaquez, CMO of maternity and baby apparel boutique Caden Lane.

Klaviyo automations stabilize email revenue

Email campaigns take “a lot of effort,” says Kostick. “Sometimes you’re not as good at executing.”

When campaigns don’t send on schedule—due to an unexpected fire drill or a designer who’s out on vacation—what happens?

The great thing about a flow is it’s automated. It’s going to go out no matter what, even if someone gets sick. Flows give you a base guaranteed revenue.
Ric Kostick
CEO, 100% Pure

Kostick finds that having “tons of flows” live and ready to send in Klaviyo creates a protective moat around his brand’s email revenue.

The marketing team uses Klaviyo’s Smart Sending to cap the number of emails a customer can receive in a given time period—so when they’re short on campaigns, flows automatically fill the gap in the cadence.

“The great thing with the flow is it’s automated,” Kostick says. “It’s going to go out no matter what, even if someone gets sick. Flows give you a base guaranteed revenue.

Klaviyo helps leaders solicit feedback—and find product-market fit

In 2022, Hedley & Bennett launched a new product: a chef’s knife.

It was more than a product launch, though. It was a risk: It changed the company’s identity, from an apron retailer to a culinary brand.

Founder and chief brand officer (CBO) Ellen Bennett felt confident in the pivot because it was based on customer feedback.

It’s a gift when you have your audience’s contacts, because then you get to ask them questions.
Ellen Bennett
Founder and CBO, Hedley & Bennett

Her team used Klaviyo to send surveys to their most-engaged customers, gauging interest in a broader product catalog.

“They were clamoring for more product,” Bennett says.

The new direction paid off immediately: Hedley & Bennett racked up a 4.2K-person wait list for the knife in less than 2 weeks, and a whopping 60%+ of the contacts in their CRM have bought it.

Hedley & Bennett continues to use Klaviyo to solicit feedback on products new and old, so they can iterate on their designs.

“I would recommend Klaviyo to any business,” says Bennett. “It’s a gift when you have your audience’s contacts, because then you get to ask them questions.”

Klaviyo is fairly priced

“The nice thing with Klaviyo is it’s a universal price—it’s not negotiated by account,” Kostick says.

The universal price includes a steady stream of new features, like campaign performance reporting by segment, and integrations with softwares like Zenoti and Buy with Prime.

It’s more than worth it, says Jaquez. “Even if Klaviyo is a big portion of your software budget, it’s worth every penny.”

Even if Klaviyo is a big portion of your software budget, it’s worth every penny.
Bryant Jaquez
CMO, Caden Lane

The value only gets better when brands use multiple Klaviyo offerings. Manly Bands, for example, uses email, SMS, and more.

“I’d have to buy 2-3 additional tools to replace everything Klaviyo offers, between SMS, email, all the automations, and the API updates,” Ruggiero says. “It’s nice that it’s all under one roof with Klaviyo, and everything’s working together. It helps us make better business decisions.”

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Mae Rice
Mae Rice
Senior content marketing manager
Mae Rice is a senior content marketing manager at Klaviyo, leading case studies and writing customer-focused blog posts. A longtime journalist and content marketer, she has covered marketing, technology and the ways they intersect since 2019, and her freelance work has appeared in Insider, Vox, Buzzfeed Reader and beyond. She graduated from the University of Chicago and lives in Chicago.

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