Why Brava Fabrics says email is their most profitable marketing channel
In 2015, Ivan Monells and Ramón Barbero founded Brava Fabrics in Barcelona after they realised that direct-to-consumer (DTC) brands were gaining traction in the United States. Before the term ‘digitally native vertical brand’ became popular, Brava Fabrics brought the concept to Spain, specifically for men looking for fair-trade fashion.
Brava Fabrics grew and began creating more diverse designs to appeal to a wider audience. They also adopted sustainable practices that have resonated with European consumers, particularly in Germany, the UK, and Scandinavia.
Just last year, the small, entrepreneurial team at Brava Fabrics grew their customer base by 74% and doubled their online sales.
Ivan, co-founder, and Ilia Laliashvili, marketplaces and performance executive, recently shared why they see email as their most effective marketing resource, and why they made the move to Klaviyo.
Why Brava Fabrics switched from Mailchimp to Klaviyo
As Brava Fabrics grew, they needed to upgrade their email service provider (ESP), which was too limited for their needs.
Investing in email marketing made sense to the Brava Fabrics team. While they’ve used paid advertising, like Google or Facebook ads, to find customers, those third-party channels often fall short — they don’t offer the control and data that owned channels give brands to create long-lasting connections with customers and higher customer lifetime value (CLV).
Plus, those channels have also become increasingly costly and difficult to yield a profitable return on investment. That’s why Ivan says Brava Fabrics sees email as the brand’s best digital marketing channel.
How Brava Fabrics uses Klaviyo
Ashley also added that email segmentation allows her to introduce new products and collections. Brava Fabrics uses Klaviyo to create a memorable experience across the entire customer lifecycle without excessive time and resources.
With Klaviyo, the Brava Fabrics team has created automated emails (flows) that trigger based on a customer’s behaviour. Every time someone takes the defined action (e.g., adds something to their cart), they get an email that’s personalised to their behaviour (e.g., an abandoned cart email).
These automated email campaigns account for 60 percent of Brava Fabrics’ total revenue from email.
Another key to Brava Fabrics’ success with email is how they use data to inform their marketing campaigns and strategy.
Brava Fabrics’ top automated email series
1. Back-in-stock email
One of Brava Fabrics’ highest performing automated email series is their back-in-stock flow.
Because they ethically source all of their products, when something goes out of stock, it typically takes time to come back. While Brava Fabrics want to notify interested customers when the product is available, they can only support as many additional purchases as their stock allows.
This helps Brava Fabrics promote their products without worrying about creating a poor customer experience.
2. Review followup email
Brava Fabrics creates personalised flows based on product reviews.
Along with inspiring previous customers to purchase again, Brava Fabrics uses this email to give their advocates a discount code they can share with their friends.
For customers who give three stars or fewer, Brava Fabrics tries to turn the customer experience around in two key ways: by reaching out to them and by testing different discounts to entice them to shop again.
An A/B test that surprised (and helped) the Brava Fabrics team
Without data to guide your marketing decisions, you make a lot of assumptions about what your customers think, feel, and want.
And take it from the Brava Fabrics team — sometimes you can’t be sure of an idea until you test it.
In fact, they shared an example of an A/B test that truly surprised them and cemented the importance of A/B testing in their marketing strategy.
This finding was surprising and beneficial to their bottom line. Giving only one customer a prize rather than a universal discount helped Brava Fabrics protect their marketing budget.
And the surprises didn’t stop there.
How Brava Fabrics uses Klaviyo to benchmark their performance
Along with testing, Brava Fabrics use Klaviyo’s benchmarking feature to determine what areas of their email marketing perform well and what areas they could improve.
Brava Fabrics uses this data, which Klaviyo aggregates and anonymises for 100 similarly sized brands in related industries, to put their metrics into perspective. This gives them a more accurate comparison than just a generic average across all industries and business sizes so the data is more relevant to their business business.
What’s next?
As Brava Fabrics looks ahead, they want to decrease reliance on paid advertising. Email will play a big role in that strategic change, but they’re also experimenting with other channels.
They also plan to further refine their email marketing strategy to create even better returns on their investment.