As many of our customers and followers know, we're huge fans of Klaviyo at Blend Commerce. Of course, we were super excited to hear about a live product announcement for March 30th. While you can find out the full details using the link below, here's our highlights and thoughts on what we learned.
Highlights from Klaviyo
As an Shopify brand or agency using Klaviyo, its always great to hear about the growth at Klaviyo. Klaviyo founder Andrew Bialecki shared some great growth stats from team Klaviyo:
- 60,000 new customers in 2020 (tripled)
- 100K startup businesses using Klaviyo for free
- 200K users worldwide
- Klaviyo partners have doubled
- $15 bn in sales by Klaviyo users in 2020 through Klaviyo - a 50% YOY increase
As Andrew remarked, Klaviyo is completely committed to 3 things
- A single place to store all customer data.
- Tools to use data.
- The use of data science to make the most of that data.
As part of this commitment, Klaviyo gave us details of 2 major product updates.
Klaviyo SMS - Announcement 1
While many of us have been using Klaviyo SMS for a while, today saw the global roll out of the tool. Interestingly, Andrew showed how email and SMS usage combined was larger than all social media platforms - something that we were surprised by in a way, but not shocked.
While Andrew and Jake Cohen shared a number of specifics on SMS, a few areas we were interested in were:
- Conversational SMS - We saw how you'll now be able to communicate back and forth with customers in a conversational format - great news and we see this as something that will start to level Klaviyo with the bigger SMS players.
- Better mobile forms - We saw on screen how Klaviyo forms can now be used to kick off an SMS flow from initial click. We think this is a great way to encourage SMS usage in a conversational format.
- Use of profile data in all SMS - One of the reasons we love Klaviyo so much is the data we can collect - this is all now usable in SMS, which for us, is a game changer.
- Attribution improvements - As a Shopify brand, attribution is always tricky. Jake explained how Klaviyo will NEVER double attribute a sale to an SMS and an email in a flow, which is going to be crucial if we all want to assess which channel will work best for us.
Our questions on Klaviyo SMS
While the announcement is still new (at the time of writing, 15 minutes ago) we have the following questions of Klaviyo SMS:
Can you use custom profile properties in SMS? We tend to integrate a number of apps with Klaviyo, so being able to use the custom profile properties into SMS would be super helpful.
Can you automate conversations? While we love the new conversational SMS, being able to automate this based on responses by customers would be very helpful for larger brands.
Klaviyo Benchmarks - Announcement 2
We've always used Klaviyo Benchmarks to help guide our clients with Klaviyo, so we were delighted to hear about the new update on benchmarks for all clients. In a nutshell, Klaviyo will provide all users with personalised benchmarks based on 6 metrics against similar businesses.
While Klaviyo is a hub for data, we always find it surprising on how little of this data is used by some merchants. We think this should help change the game for many merchants and we'll be posting a video soon on how we advised using this.
While some Klaviyo users have had this for a while, go ahead and check yours out now.
Our questions on Klaviyo Benchmarks
Here are some thoughts and questions from the Blend Commerce team:
Better accountability - As one of our team pointed out, not only will benchmarks give Shopify merchants a better understanding of performance, it will also make agencies (like Blend) be accountable to their clients.
Can you change your peer group? - While we like the peer group idea, we'd also want to investigate if this can be changed or modified if we want to use alternative metrics.
What to do next
Test it! The absolute best way to get an understanding of these new features is to dive in, and you can find the full update details here.
If you'd also like to get further updates and commentary from Blend on future Klaviyo releases, be sure to sign up for our updates using the sign-up form on this page.
