Seeing rapid growth: L. Eyes Eyewear generates 44% of revenue from email

L. Eyes Eyewear is a New Zealand brand of sunglasses whose distinctive designs reflect the founders’ Polynesian roots. Maori couple Martin and Allies started the company at home and word-of-mouth helped them grow the business using Facebook Marketplace. With plenty of entrepreneurial flair but little experience in sales and marketing, Martin took an ecommerce course with Te Whare Hukahuka, a social enterprise that supports indigenous business owners. The course introduced him to Klaviyo.

Learn how the New Zealand eyewear brand used a retargeting and nurture strategy to convert subscribers

Challenge

In light of rising manufacturing and distribution costs, Martin wanted to turn L. Eyes Eyewear from a side hustle into a full-time gig by scaling the business significantly. The brand was using its social channels to drive traffic to the website, but Martin realised he had no visibility of who was browsing the site and no way to connect with this audience. In his eyes, sales were being lost – of course, he was right.

Solution

With Klaviyo as a partner, L. Eyes Eyewear can capture subscriber data on the website and start a conversation with browsing shoppers while the brand’s sleek sunglasses are still fresh in their mind. Since introducing Klaviyo’s pop-up form, the brand has seen a 2000% increase in sign-ups, building a growing list of prospective buyers it can target with personalised offers. 

Klaviyo’s pre-built automated email flows allow the brand to stay connected with customers through behaviour-triggered messages, for example when a subscriber exits the site or abandons their shopping cart, as well as during the customer journey.

The secret behind our growth has been having the ability to retarget our audience. Without that, you lose hundreds of potential sales daily. Customers might not purchase straight away, so having their data in Klaviyo allows you to retarget and catch them later down the track.

Strategy

The brand is focused on developing long-term customer relationships by using Klaviyo to nurture retention and increase lifetime value. It starts with a welcome email flow that offers subscribers an incentive on their first purchase and achieves a placed order rate of 7%. Further emails introduce the family business’s story and its ethos.

Customers are offered further incentives to buy additional pairs of sunglasses and the brand tailors its post-purchase emails according to their purchase rate – always thanking loyal customers for their business. The retention strategy is paying off, with 50% of revenue now coming from repeat customers. Prior to using Klaviyo, it was 16%.

I’m always trying to increase each metric to see if I can improve conversion. In Klaviyo I test everything – subject lines, images, headings, offers – and then look to see what my audience is responding to.

The company uses special promotions with great success to reward loyal customers and grow the subscriber list. One such campaign was an exclusive BOGOF promotion for Black Friday, which required email sign-up and generated six-figure revenue in just two weeks. 

L. Eyes Eyewear is firmly on an upward trajectory. The brand recently opened its first physical store – a pop-up shop near Brisbane – and it uses Klaviyo to drive foot traffic by targeting customers in the Gold Coast area.

Through our emails, customers feel as though they know us personally. We’ve had loads of supporters coming down to the store.