Alessi uses Klaviyo to grow revenue from email by 1,800% in two years

Alessi is famous for its playful and innovative design of kitchen appliances and homewares – making the ordinary extraordinary. The brand’s collaborations with eminent designers such as Michael Graves and Philippe Starck have created iconic products that look right at home in the Design Museum, where they’re displayed. Alessi adopted Klaviyo in 2020 when it migrated its ecommerce site to Shopify Plus.

Learn how Alessi’s persona-focused Black Friday sale drove 40% of revenue

Challenge

Like many brands, in 2021, Alessi faced challenges of supply chain issues, high rates of inflation, and increased advertising costs due to new data privacy changes. Still, the business had high expectations for its Black Friday campaign and set an ambitious target: a 50% increase on the previous year. In 2020 shops were closed and all sales were made online, so trying to exceed this unusual spike in sales would require a new approach.

Solution

Alessi took the bold decision to reduce its paid media spend and instead focus on increasing revenue from its own marketing channels. Fortunately, with Klaviyo as a partner, Alessi had all the capabilities it needed to scale customer acquisition: sign-up forms across its websites, and automated email flows to push subscribers through the sales funnel. 

And Klaviyo’s customer data platform has allowed the brand to do even more. This gives Alessi a comprehensive, real-time, single view of customer interactions with the brand: their profiles, transactions, browsing history, and more. Mining this rich seam of data has helped Alessi to identify six customer personas, such as the Window Shopper, Impulsive Buyer and Aspirational Gifter. The invaluable audience insight feeds into Alessi’s whole marketing strategy.

With Klaviyo, we have so much customer data at our fingertips. Our user personas have helped us develop a deep understanding of buyer behaviour, motivations, and purchase intent.

Pablo Daniel, Chief Digital Officer, Alessi

Strategy

In the run-up to Black Friday, Alessi ran a subscriber acquisition campaign on its social channels with five prize draws for a €1,000 gift card. The giveaways ran for three weeks and drove incredible list growth – 40x higher than usual – without having to sacrifice acquisition costs to Facebook or Google. 

For its Black Friday sale, Alessi ran multiple incentives, including early access, free gift wrapping, and a free gift with purchases. As a designer brand, it favours value-added offers over deep discounts. In Klaviyo, it used the customer personas to create marketing segments, and targeted them with more personalised, relevant content, taking a different approach for new and returning customers.

By reducing paid advertising channels and taking a persona-focused approach to nurture new customers into making a purchase, Alessi drove impressive results.

Black Friday 2021 was an incredible success story for us – in one week we generated more revenue than we did in the whole of 2018. In fact we’ve seen exponential growth of the channel since 2019 and it’s the main driver for customer retention and loyalty.

Pablo Daniel, Chief Digital Officer, Alessi