Background:

Skio helps brands on Shopify sell subscriptions without ripping their hair out. Skio is a modern subscription management platform used by leading online DTC businesses offering subscription boxes, personalized products and other subscription based e-commerce offerings in the food & beverage, home goods, pet goods, cosmetics, and wellness verticals where subscription products are a significant part of revenue. 

Skio works with brands focused on growing their subscribers and improving customer retention by creating subscription plans which are intuitive and easy to manage, incredibly fast to load across desktop and mobile, and designed to surprise and delight customers for long-term relationships. 

Leveraging Shopify’s Subscriptions API and native checkout, Skio is built for merchants currently or planning to leverage Shopify and Shopify Plus. 

Brands using Skio include Liquid I.V., Bulletproof, Milk Bar, Bev, Fly By Jing, Taika, Immi, MatchaBar, KraveBeauty, Glamnetic, Insert Name Here, Doe Lashes, Stryx, Huron, Magic Mind, Remedy Organics, Siete Foods, & ZOX.

Investors include Y Combinator, Adjacent, Jason Wong, Shaan Puri, Julian Shapiro, Geoff Woo, & Sahil Bloom, as well as founders and executives of companies like Italic, Magic Mind, Immi, Bev, Taika, Smile.io, Okendo, Wonderment, Archive, Parker, Thingtesting, HVMN, & MuteSix.

Why did I build with Klaviyo?

What does your company/product do, and why is connecting it with Klaviyo important to you?

Our company powers recurring subscription orders for Shopify merchants in a seamless, easy-to-manage solution. 

With Klaviyo being the most common tool in our merchant’s tech stack, we wanted to offer an integration that covered all of their subscription needs. Our integration provides a plethora of different event metrics, valuable data specific to the subscription passed with each metric that can be used for conditional and trigger filters, and valuable custom profile properties for segmentation.

We wanted our integration to cater to all types of merchants, ranging from companies that offer only 1 product on subscription to companies that have subscribers purchasing multiple products on subscription. With our robust event metric data and triggers, merchants can optimize the post-purchase engagement experience in both simple and complex ways. Whether you want to set up some email flows quickly or want to work with an agency on robust winback and churn prevention strategies, our Klaviyo integration has you covered.

Klaviyo Insights:

How do you connect to Klaviyo, what APIs/product features are you using, explain how your company/product works with Klaviyo.

At Skio, we use Klaviyo’s Profiles and Events APIs to help our clients better understand how their customers are interacting with their subscriptions through our platform. While our clients appreciate the data they receive through the Events API, which offers a wide range of custom events that can be enabled and configured through our dashboard, we have found that they find the ability to include custom properties for each event even more useful. These custom properties enable merchants to customize the behavior of their flows which trigger on certain attributes, such as the number of consecutive failed billing attempts.

As a subscription selling platform, our custom events range from automated triggers indicating a customer’s subscription is set to renew, to events triggering when a customer cancels a subscription. Merchants use these events to build and automate custom emails for their customers. For example, in the event of a billing reminder, merchants might send a notification to customers to let them know their subscription is about to renew. In the case of cancellation, merchants may want to reach out to users with a winback email to save them from churning.

In addition to the Events API, we use the Profiles API to fill in general customer information. This is especially useful for merchants who have a large number of inactive customer accounts. Since these accounts are inactive and not triggering events regularly like other customers, we can perform a backfill of information onto Klaviyo. Then, merchants can set up campaigns for these canceled users at some point in the future to win them back with special deals or products.

Tips, Tricks, and Learnings:

How to translate your data into the Klaviyo data model?

Our data model easily integrates with the Profiles and Events APIs. When sending events, we select relevant information to include in the event’s custom properties field. For instance, when sending billing reminder notifications, we include the number of days before a subscription will renew, as this information may impact how or when a merchant reaches out to that customer.

To perform our customer backfill with the Profiles API, we send a large amount of generic customer information. The special properties in the Profiles API allow us to fit our data into fields recognized by Klaviyo to be used elsewhere on the Dashboard, such as customer emails or names. We have found that this creates a more seamless experience appreciated by our merchants.

When to send the data to Klaviyo from your app/product?

We utilize subscription-related event based webhooks to pass over event metrics and update custom profile properties every time a subscription is updated in the Skio platform. Merchants have the ability to select which event metrics they want to pass into Klaviyo from Skio and Skio will handle the rest.

Challenges that were faced/overcome?

The biggest challenge was around optimizing for merchants who have subscribers who cancel and sign up for new products regularly and those who have multiple active subscriptions. We found that passing subscription data specific to the subscription in the event metric data was key to offer target post-purchase email flows. 

Additionally, we made some improvements to how we handle custom profile properties so merchants can set up robust segmentation with simple logic and are able to avoid confusing logic that could easily mess with segmentations. 

Interesting caveats or edge-cases?

We optimized our integration so we can easily add new event metrics as Skio introduces new features to merchants. We introduced two very helpful metrics: Surprise and Delight Rule Applied and Mergeable Subscription.

Our Surprise and Delight metric allows merchants to notify subscribers of an upcoming free gift or auto-applied discount code to help reduce churn before the subscriber’s next order processes (a common churn point for subscribers).

We also built out a tool that allows merchants to notify subscribers to merge their subscriptions together as a way to reduce shipping cost for both the merchant and subscriber as well as to promote sustainable solutions for eco-conscious brands. 

Learnings

It’s important to build the connection with Klaviyo such that the integration can be optimized and improved over time. Skio and Klaviyo are always improving as platforms and we wanted to build a connection that also improves so merchants can always utilize the latest and greatest features of both platforms.

We also learned the importance of making setup as easy as possible. Merchants tend to set up the integration once. This was a good lesson for us because it meant we needed to offer detailed setup instructions and best practices to make sure that the initial integration is complete.

Conclusion

In conclusion, Skio is a cutting-edge subscription management platform designed to help brands on Shopify grow their subscriber base and improve customer retention. By integrating seamlessly with Klaviyo, Skio enables merchants to optimize their post-purchase engagement and effectively implement winback and churn prevention strategies. The integration utilizes Klaviyo’s Profiles and Events APIs to provide merchants with valuable data on customer interactions, and supports custom events to automate tailored emails for subscribers. Skio’s innovative features, such as the Surprise and Delight metric and Mergeable Subscription tool, further enhance the customer experience and promote brand loyalty. As Skio and Klaviyo continue to evolve, the partnership ensures that merchants can consistently take advantage of the latest features and improvements, ensuring long-term success in the subscription e-commerce space.