Klaviyo & Shopify (A Match Made In Ecommerce Heaven)

Even as the global ecommerce industry robustly expands, only 10% to 20% of small and medium businesses (SMBs) in the industry succeed. Finding the right market, delivering excellent customer experience, and visitor conversion are among the top ecommerce challenges SMBs face. 

Here is where the Klaviyo-Shopify strategic partnership can help your business ensure that you’re among the 10% to 20% who do succeed and scale the heights of ecommerce success.

First, you’ll learn about what Shopify and Klaviyo each do for businesses, then see why their recent strategic partnership is a match made in ecommerce heaven.

Read on to find out more.

What Does Shopify Do?

You’ve probably heard of the name. After all, it’s one of the top ecommerce platforms in the world. But what does Shopify really do, and why is it considered one of the best, if not the best, ecommerce platforms worldwide?

At its core, Shopify is a user-friendly, unified ecommerce platform that helps small businesses build online stores and sell online through one streamlined dashboard. 

Shopify’s merchants can build and customize their online stores and sell in multiple locations. Some even collaborate with a Shopify website design agency that can provide expert guidance and creative solutions to elevate their store's aesthetics and functionality. They can sell on blogs and other websites, at brick-and-mortar locations, via chat, email, in person, at online seller marketplaces, on mobile, through pop-up shops, via text, and at social media sites.

Started in Ontario, Canada, in 2006 by Tobias Lütke and Scott Lake, Shopify has since grown into an $80 billion ecommerce giant with 9,200 employees today. Lütke and Lake attempted then to open an online store for snowboarding equipment, and found themselves unsatisfied with the existing ecommerce platforms. Since it was founded, Shopify has generated over $700 billion in sales for 4.12 million ecommerce sites built.

How does Shopify work?

Shopify offers ecommerce business owners a single view of their business and customers and allows them to manage products and inventory, process orders and payments, ship orders, and build customer relationships. And take advantage of analytics and reporting—all from one integrated location. 

What are the key features of Shopify? 

Shopify provides the following unique and seamlessly-integrated key features for ecommerce business owners:

• Storefront themes and customization
• Store management
• Marketing and SEO
• Product and inventory management
• Abandoned cart recovery
• Payment gateway
• Shipping and security
• Analytics and reports
• 24/7 customer support

Shopify offers a comprehensive ecommerce web builder with many features, functionalities, more than 8,000 supporting applications, unique templates, and customization options that make it very easy for merchants to build their online store on their own.

At the front end, online shoppers can conveniently search for products, view product details, check the categories, add products to the cart, and purchase the product they want by easily making payments through various payment gateways. 

These Shopify payment methods can be through:

• Buy-now-pay-later (BNPL)
• Cash-on-delivery (COD)
• Credit card 
• Debit card
• Netbanking or online banking
• Unified Payment Interface (UPI)
• Wallets
  

For merchants, these multiple payment methods help provide their customers with a hassle-free customer checkout experience, displays their brand credibility, reduce cart abandonment, and increase their conversion rates.

How do I sell on Shopify?

Shopify has a very simple sign-up process, with a free 3-day trial to test out the platform. After 3 days, you can either pay for the tools, starting at $1/month for another three months and continue to build your online business. Or, you can try something else if it’s not the right choice for your business. 

Templates offered by Shopify can be customized with text, images, videos, and logos to complement your brand’s look. Once you are set with your store theme, you can start selling your products right away with the platform’s built-in shopping carts.

Essentially, the sign-up process just takes seven steps:

1. Create a Shopify account.

2. Familiarize yourself with the Shopify admin dashboard.

3. Choose a Shopify theme.

4. Add your products.

5. Configure nitty-gritty details.

6. Test your store.

7. Add a custom domain name and go live. 

Compared with other ecommerce platforms, the Shopify store setup is easier. Shopify, as a subscription-based Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution, is primarily designed to help merchants build an ecommerce store. 

It’s also a lot easier than building your own custom ecommerce website. Instead of building your own ecommerce site, with Shopify—

• You don’t have to spend more time and other resources in finding a proper domain and hosting provider, calculating fees and costs for web developers, and dealing with SSL installation, for starters. 
• You don’t have to research and try out reliable payment gateways and buy the additional extensions that best fit your ecommerce needs. 
• You don’t have to concern yourself with website maintenance and updates, so you can focus on finding your customers, building good customer experiences for them, and increasing your store visitor conversions to grow your business.
• You don’t have to worry about building and integrating your tech stack – that technology infrastructure that must be smoothly merged with your site to support the customer buying journey and drive them toward conversion. Your tech stack includes your help desk, the live chat function, email integration, call tracking, and an exit intent feature that encourages visitors to stay and complete their purchases.

Alternatively, instead of building your online store in Shopify from scratch, you can even just buy existing Shopify businesses at Shopify Exchange and grow your acquired business from there.

How can I make money from Shopify?

Can you sell anything on Shopify? Yes.

Shopify supports sales for virtually all types of goods and services.

You can sell both physical and digital products and in-person and virtual services on Shopify. Intangible things to sell on Shopify include memberships, consultations, fonts, installations, event tickets, and digital gift cards. 

You also don’t need to put up your own products on Shopify. You can dropship by using third-party apps to connect with dropshipping suppliers, source your products from them, list them on your Shopify store, and launch your online store.

For individuals who have a significant audience on social media, you can monetize your influencer status through Shopify Collabs and get paid to promote the products you love. 

If you’re a content creator, course educator, review site publisher, or any other influencer with an active website, a loyal audience, and ecommerce experience, you can also sign up to become a Shopify Affiliate. You not only earn $150 when someone you referred signs up for a full-price Shopify plan, but you also build your niche leadership.

You can also develop an app or theme for Shopify business owners and sell it on the Shopify App Store. Not only that, but you keep at least 80% of sales revenue from your apps, depending on your selected pricing plan. You can also join Shopify Partners, build development stores, and earn 20% commissions.

The possibilities are endless.

What makes Shopify unique? 

What is so special about Shopify?

Shopify allows you to create up to ten stores on a single account, each with its domain name, products, settings, and everything else. Creating multiple stores is helpful for entrepreneurs and businesses that sell different products targeting different target audiences. 

It’s not just a website builder; it’s also a robust content management system (CMS), which gives you complete control over your website design, navigation, and content pages.

Shopify also tracks and maintains customer data, with analytics and reporting for key metrics. This is very important for you to know and track customer behavior and your store’s performance, so you can plan your marketing and growth strategies accordingly.

Shopify online stores have built-in search engine optimization (SEO) features with easily customizable keywords. This allows businesses to customize their content. Shopify has also seamlessly integrated with Google Ads and its ecosystem. Advanced Shopify and Shopify Plus users can modify default reports and create custom reports that fit their unique needs.

Additionally, Shopify has built-in cart abandonment mitigation features, as well as shipping carrier integrations with major carriers such as Canada Post, FedEx, UPS, and USPS.

It even actively supports its merchant customers by providing them with all the ecommerce education they need at Shopify Academy.

With over 8,000 apps, specialized features such as inventory tracking and shipping tools, and a range of plans to choose from, Shopify is a powerful platform that’s exceptionally scalable. 

Shopify can be used by any store of any size, selling anything.

Why is Shopify so famous? 

Shopify is popular because of its low startup costs, seamless integration, accessible and streamlined interface, and easily customizable templates for online stores. The platform also offers secure site hosting. Users don’t have to upgrade their own software or web servers to keep up with digital security issues.

Most people don’t know this, but famous people are Shopify merchants, too. 

• Kim Kardashian has her SKIMS online store
• Rihanna has her Fenty Beauty makeup brand
• David Beckham has his Eyewear brand
• Hugh Jackman sells coffee and tea at Laughing Eyes
• Martha Stewart sells cookware at Martha
• Beyoncé sells her music at Renaissance
• Harry Styles sells nail polish and beauty products at Pleasing
• Taylor Swift sells her albums and tours at, of course, Taylor Swift.

I already have an ecommerce store. Is it worth switching to Shopify?

Yes. If you already have what you think is a solid ecommerce platform, but it doesn’t integrate well with other technology stacks, you’d probably want to switch to Shopify. If you want to start email marketing but you’re not a UX design expert yourself, you’re better off switching to Shopify.

You can try Shopify for free for three days, then sign up for $1/month for three months. After this, you can then choose one of its three annually paid plans that fit your business needs. 

The Basic plan is good for new businesses, as it has everything you need to create your store, ship your products, and process payments. 

The Shopify plan is good for early-stage growing businesses, as it enables you to level up with more staff accounts and professional reporting. 

The Advanced plan is best for later-stage growing businesses, as it has custom reporting and the lowest transaction fees among the three plans.

The Basic plan costs $19.95 a month, billed yearly at $239.40, while the Shopify plan costs $49.95 a month, billed yearly at $599.40. The Advanced plan costs $299 a month, billed yearly at $3,588.

There’s also Shopify Plus, an enterprise plan for high-volume merchants and large businesses such as Heinz, Staples, and Unilever. It starts at $2,000 a month.

Shopify Ecommerce Success Stories

All the glowing features and benefits of Shopify will just be empty words if they are not proven by documented stories of ecommerce brands that succeeded with Shopify. 

We feature three of these stories here from different contexts.

Started and scaled with Shopify

Paintvine was started in 2017 by three friends who saw a gap in the New Zealand market for creative events, particularly for painting and wine classes in bars.  

Denym Bird, Alex Hamilton, and Euan Lockie knew about the growing trend for spending in the Experience Economy among Millennials and how viral this can get. 

So, they decided to fill the gap in the market by creating and hosting micro-events in New Zealand.

It took them two weeks to conceptualize their idea for the painting classes, another two weeks to buy the supplies and organize the venue, and artists to host their first event. They then put on a bar tab and asked their closest family and friends to join. 

After the encouraging feedback from their launch event, they were inspired to set up their Shopify store. This only took them two days to set up. Then, they put up some events and exclusively sold all of them out within a week. The word-of-mouth from their launch event, some Facebook Ads, and getting a mention in the local “What To Do This Week” guide all contributed to their first success.

They were clear about their new business model: building micro-events across many locations and providing customers with the best memorable experiences they can have. Happy customers drive referrals and repeat sales.

They were also clear that they needed to build support systems that scale while they measure each area of their business. For this, they chose Shopify for its ease of use and its huge ecosystem of apps. 

They cite the Fomo and Privy apps, which have helped them tremendously in growing their business value. Fomo helps them drive demand during an engagement, doubling their conversion rates by literally creating a “fear of missing out” (FOMO) for their events. Privy captures emails and has skyrocketed their email list, ensuring they have a vast captive audience that they remarket to every week. 

Another Shopify app, Reconcile.ly, helps them with their accounting, automatically adding up the fees and saving them hundreds of hours of administrative work each month.

They used the flywheel concept to clarify their business model. A flywheel is a revolving wheel in a machine that is used to increase a machine’s momentum. Their business flywheel revolves around happy customers at the center, driving their growth. Around the happy customers are four core activities they focus on: 

• Building awareness through digital advertising
• Selling tickets
• Hosting amazing events
• Evangelism (wow events create viral and evergreen word-of-mouth feedback loops)

Today, they earn more than a million US dollars in annual revenue, with a 20% return rate and over 400% growth in the previous year alone. They create at least 25 painting and wine classes across eight cities in New Zealand every month. 

They have also expanded internationally with their launch of Paintvine UK. They have also added to their initial offering and now host Glow In the Dark and Watercolour and Wine events.

Paintvine founders attribute their “relentless focus on their customers’ needs” as their key to success.

Migrated to Shopify

The Hemp House, the seller of the world’s premium cannabidiol (CBD) brands, already had a flourishing ecommerce business on their previous Wix platform. But they wanted to scale big. 

They consulted with BrillMark, a software development agency that specializes in A/B tests and personalization campaigns. It was clear that they needed to migrate to another ecommerce platform that could more flexibly adapt to and grow with their needs. Shopify was their answer.

Particularly, they needed a more user-friendly product showcase and a more efficient customer browsing experience. They also needed to incorporate conversion rate optimization (CRO)-enabled elements to improve their conversion rates.

The challenge was to transfer their existing store on the Wix platform to Shopify while the users’ experience of and functionality of their ecommerce store remained intact, even as new features were added to improve customer satisfaction. 

It was necessary that the company’s user database and category treemap remained intact. It was also a key requirement to create a clean and modern user interface (UI)/user experience (UX) design that would enhance the overall customer experience. 

Since the website was already operating, it was also important that it maintained its revenues and even increased it during the migration process.

The whole process involved four phases: planning, design, development, and quality assurance (QA). 

To achieve the goal of a user-friendly Shopify website with a contemporary appearance, the team:

• Designed the website with a sleek new logo and an efficient payments gateway to streamline transactions
• Researched and found the best-suited Shopify theme to customize and engaged its UX designer to integrate the best CRO-enabled elements into it
• Designed the mock-up of key pages, which was promptly approved by The Hemp House
• Linked Shopify with Wix once access was enabled, and all Wix-stored data was sent to Shopify with a flawless migration experience
• Transferred the selected payment gateways and ownership to The Hemp House
• Migrated the customers’ data from Wix to Shopify, including their reward points earned and used
• Meticulously combed through the entire site for QA, even as design and development work was ongoing, to ensure a seamless user experience

The Hemp House’s business objectives were not only met but even exceeded with the successful migration to Shopify.

Migrated to Shopify Plus

Award-winning Great Little Trading Company (GLTC) has been the United Kingdom’s most successful retailer of high-quality children’s toys and upscale home furnishings for over two decades. 

However, its problem is a lack of control over its website. 

They didn’t have much control over their site in the old platform. They were restricted to release cycles that needed to be planned heavily and well in advance. Their old platform also didn’t have a lot of the functionalities they needed to create a better customer experience, such as:

• A/B testing
• Guest checkouts
• More intuitive product collection pages
• Product sets
• Sale and discount notifications
• Third-party payments
  

As its Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Jamie Reeve says, the site “was becoming dated and functionality that had been on our wishlist for years still wasn’t progressing.” 

They were also clear that they didn’t just need a new website on a better ecommerce platform; they needed a platform that would work, grow, and scale with them as customer demand evolves.

GLTC researched all the available ecommerce platforms and found Shopify’s core product offering and functionalities “fantastic.” Reeve says, “It opened up a new world of possibilities that they hadn’t even considered, such as having Black Friday sales go smoothly without any website glitches.

The huge challenge was migrating 9,600 product attributes, 1.1 million customers’ data, and 10 million orders. 

This massive and complex migration particularly required:

• Custom site design reflecting the GLTC brand and driving revenues across multiple collections with stock-keeping units (SKUs) from many suppliers
• Protection of sensitive data on products, customers, and more than a decade of order history information that GLTC absolutely needed to keep
• Integration with warehouses, suppliers, distributors, and Google Tag Manager with analytics and marketing partners
  

So, GLTC also researched agencies they could work with. After an intensive scoping and consultation period with several agencies, they decided on London-based Underwaterpistol (UWP). A Shopify partner, UWP already had a long history with the Shopify environment and had an extensive migration portfolio to show for it. 

Gary Carruthers, Underwaterpistol CEO, explains that “No two migrations are the same. But, on Shopify Plus, the combination of world-class integrations and a platform specifically designed to support international growth provides merchants full control over their business.”

Control. That is precisely what GLTC needed. 

Before migration could be implemented, there needed to be deep user experience (UX) and search engine optimization (SEO) audits, on which further research and design were built.

One key finding from the UX audit revealed that site navigation was a key issue. Heatmaps showed that the primary navigation leading to product categories was not used frequently. User testing showed that customers didn’t connect with product categories but wanted to sort by room selection or product purpose. 

So, they integrated these findings to improve their site design. For example, they created a “Shop by Room” page clever that uses a dropdown selector that renders blog posts with complete sets for inspiration and purchase:

The SEO audit yielded disturbing data: there were more than 100,000 404 errors, duplicate pages, and loading speed problems hurting traffic sales.  

It’s a good thing that the Shopify Plus platform takes care of several SEO concerns, such as site mapping, page loading speeds, and readable uniform resource locators (URLs). So, the migration could focus more on the areas of content, URL redirects, and monitoring.

The gargantuan data that had to be migrated also required that a custom middleware had to be created to automate many workflows. This enabled GLTC’s third-party providers to continue using their own software systems while communicating with the new Shopify Plus store.

From beginning to end, the entire migration process of around 11.1 million data points took 16 weeks. Three months after the migration, GLTC already experienced the following improvements:

• Increase in session duration of 10%
• Increase in pages viewed per session of 80%
• Increase in overall orders of 10%
• Conversion rate lift of 6%
• Decrease in sitewide bounce rate of 24%
  

Most importantly, with its Shopify Plus store migration, GLTC has what it needs now to work more effectively: control.

After these Shopify success stories, we now turn to Klaviyo and a sampling of its customers’ success stories.

What Is Klaviyo Used For?

After finding the right market, a key aspect of building and maintaining good customer experiences and relationships and driving customers to high conversion is effective communication with them. This is where Klaviyo comes in by providing the leading customer data and marketing automation platform in the global ecommerce industry today.

Using advanced email, SMS, and push notification communications capabilities, Klaviyo makes it easy for ecommerce businesses to form personal, one-on-one connections with their customers on an internet scale. It does this mainly through targeted communications.

In 2012, Klaviyo co-founders Andrew Bialecki and Ed Hallen saw a disturbingly sad pattern in ecommerce. Businesses had volumes of data about their customers but couldn’t even answer basic questions about them. 

How could these businesses use these data to drive their revenue growth through personalized marketing? The technology to unite the data, analytics, and marketing didn’t even exist then. So, they built it.

The name “Klaviyo” (clay-vee-oh) is inspired by the Spanish term “clavija” for mountaineering pins or pitons. Pitons support mountain climbers as they ascend and catch them if they fall. Klaviyo sees its customers as mountaineers. Its mission is “to support and accelerate their climb to the summit.” It goes by its main tagline, “Own your data, own your growth.”

Today, over 100,000 brands in more than 80 countries use Klaviyo and love it. At its core, Klaviyo is about using customer information to create deeper, high-value customer relationships by managing content that’s simple and automated, building multichannel experiences for customers, and managing all these from a single platform.

What are the key features of Klaviyo?

Instead of ineffective batch and blast emails, Klaviyo makes it easy for businesses to earn more revenue with targeted communications from a single platform. 

Using email, SMS, forms, mobile push notifications, and reviews, you can use multiple template libraries, so automation, campaigns, and reports are ready to customize at sign-up.

Klaviyo has features that help businesses capture customer data and deliver targeted communications. Specifically, they are:

• Ready integrations
• Product catalogs
• Behavior-based automation
• Customer profiles
• Segmentation
• Campaign templates
• Subject line AI
• Reporting and analytics
• Omnichannel coordination
  

With these features, you can:

• Integrate your ecommerce store in Shopify, Shopify Plus, BigCommerce, Magento, WooCommerce, Wix, SquareOnline, PrestaShop, and Wix with Klaviyo.
• Integrate your tech stack with more than 300 pre-built data and technology integrations.
• Segment and personalize your customers from the data you collect from them, which is based on historical and real-time behaviors, so you can target them better. 
• Unify these data – web activity, tags, catalog, coupons – with your ecommerce platform, especially with Shopify, which has formed a strategic partnership.
• Integrate Klaviyo’s marketing automation tools into your marketing plan ecosystem.
• More easily execute your marketing plans with Klaviyo’s email, SMS, and push notification marketing components.
• A/B test your campaigns.
• Monitor your campaigns and business growth with Klaviyo’s detailed analytics and reporting.
  

Unlike other general-purpose email marketing platforms like Mailchimp, Klaviyo is specifically designed for ecommerce businesses.

Is Klaviyo a CRM platform?

Using Klaviyo’s customer relationship management (CRM) functionality and customer data platform (CDP), you can gain a thorough understanding of your customer’s behavior and preferences. You can easily view their purchase history, email engagement, and website activity—all in one place.

Is Klaviyo easy to use?

Klaviyo provides an easy-to-use tool for launching one-off marketing campaigns and scaling automated email, SMS, and other marketing efforts. The platform offers a simple and effective way to segment contacts to deliver more relevant engagement.

At Klaviyo Academy, which provides free courses, there’s a tutorial on getting started with Klaviyo, which takes beginners through learning the essential steps. Learners are guided from the introduction down to the flows and next steps and will be able to do the following after completing the tutorial:

• Set up their Klaviyo accounts
• Integrate their stores and former email service providers with Klaviyo
• Add subscribers to their account
• Differentiate between lists and segments
• Create a flow
• Publish a campaign
• Explain why deliverability and warming their accounts are important
• Analyze data in their accounts
  

With Klaviyo, you can target the right people, grow your list, and drive more repeat sales at higher-cart values with hyper-targeted, behavior-triggered email, SMS, and mobile push notifications. 

Using email marketing, you can start with Klaviyo’s Welcome Series, Post-Purchase Upsell, and Abandoned Cart/Automated Win-Back campaigns. 

Using SMS and mobile push marketing is best when paired with a solid marketing strategy. If this strategy is in place, you can then use Klaviyo’s targeted SMS for welcoming and thanking customers, discounts, promotions, asking for reviews, and VIP early access updates, for example. (A reminder, though: SMS and mobile push marketing should not be treated like email marketing. SMS and push messages should be more personal and friendly, always short and to the point.)

Then, you can use Klaviyo’s built-in analytics, data science, and artificial intelligence (AI) system to fully understand your customers and guide your growth.

With its reliable infrastructure and centralized data system, Klaviyo has proven to repeat sales, increase retention, and provide higher lifetime value for every customer.

You can get a personalized demo for your business from Klaviyo. You can start free for up to 250 contacts at 500 monthly email sends, 150 free monthly SMS/MMS credits, and email support for the first 60 days. For paid plans, email starts at $20/month for 251 to 500 contacts. Email and SMS start at $35/month for 251 to 500 contacts. You only pay for what you need, as Klaviyo has no annual contracts or hidden fees.

Why is Klaviyo best for ecommerce?

Personalization sets Klaviyo apart. You can send personalized emails beyond “Hi, {first_name}” and use dynamic blocks for order details, cart content, product recommendations, and more. If you want to ensure that some parts of your email are shown only to certain recipients who meet more specific characteristics, you can do that with Klaviyo, too.

You can then loop emails, SMS, and push notifications into full-blown marketing campaigns to boost reach and engagement. For example, you can easily set up and schedule a one-off promotional blast, a recurring newsletter, or an automated flow.

Klaviyo is particularly targeted for ecommerce businesses. There is no more need for other third-party integrations. What you require is already there.

Most importantly, you have direct ownership of your customer data and interactions, enabling you to turn transactions into long-term, revenue-generating customer relationships at scale.

Klaviyo Success Stories

All business innovation begins with a problem. These three success stories of Klaviyo customers all share the same starting point: they were faced with problems and decided to use Klaviyo as part of their set of solutions.

Started and scaled with Klaviyo

Family-owned Chukar Cherries, which sells gourmet, snackable mixes of dried cherries, chocolate, and nuts, has been in Seattle’s Pike Place Market since 1988, long before ecommerce was an everyday thing. Its founder, Pam Montgomery, pioneered dehydrating Northwest cherries without additives in the 1980s. 

In 1998, they launched an ecommerce store with a non-Shopify platform. In 2019, they started with Klaviyo. But, income from their brick-and-mortar stores drove the bulk of their revenues for more than a decade since they started. 

In 2020, though, with the global pandemic on and market foot traffic dwindling, they needed to engage and re-engage their customers in a more innovative and proactive way. 

This is where their relationship with Klaviyo was put to the test and phenomenally delivered. Wynne Auld, their marketing manager, says, “I feel lucky that we had Klaviyo in place to help us take advantage of CoViD market forces shifting people to the internet and email because we saw tremendous growth from that. And we haven’t come down to where we were (since then).”

Using Klaviyo, they added new incentives to their Welcome Flow and launched Abandoned Cart, Cross-Sell, and VIP Flows. They also incentivized their holiday promotion and sent twice as much the frequency of their promotional emails for the rest of the year. They also launched Klaviyo SMS, enabling their marketing team to send one-to-one responses in Klaviyo itself.

The results? They experienced four times more growth in annual revenue from flows from 2020 to 2022, with a 122.3-times ROI attributed to Klaviyo, coming from a 32.7% growth in annual Klaviyo revenue for the same period.

Wynne Auld explains that they’re not exactly a startup that needed to break into new markets, but a long-established business with loyal customers who just needed to be reminded that they’re there, in step with the times.

Switched to Klaviyo

Ellen Bennett, a line cook at a Michelin-starred restaurant in Los Angeles, California, kept needing a new apron, as the cheap ones she used kept disintegrating. 

So, in 2012, she decided to solve her own problem by making and then selling premium aprons from her own home. Her enterprise took off and became Hedley & Bennett, now a multi-million-dollar culinary brand selling aprons, kitchen linens, and cutting boards.

Hedley & Bennett previously used Mailchimp to manage their email marketing, which also helped them grow in the early years. However, MailChimp didn’t have the segmentation tools it needed for its fast-growing and diversified audience. 

Hedley & Bennett started by serving professional chefs in their lead business-to-business (B2B) operation but soon extended its services to home chefs in their direct-to-consumer (DTC) operation. They required an email tool that would keep their different customers engaged with relevant content, a tool for sending personalized messaging at scale. They switched to Klaviyo in 2018.

Klaviyo not just lets Hedley & Bennett send tightly targeted messages to professional chefs and home chefs but also to sub-segments like grillers, browsers who haven’t bought yet, and even Mother’s Day gift shoppers. They had a lean team, so it was also important that they could send these messages out quickly.

By 2021, they were using Klaviyo to even reach customers in their preferred email or SMS inboxes, reward their chef’s knife’s first fans, and send out more emails confidently as they found out that these didn’t burden their subscribers at all. 

All their email marketing efforts using Klaviyo resulted in a 61-times increase in their return on investment (ROI) by 2022, with a 66.2% year-on-year (YoY) growth attributed to Klaviyo, from 56% Klaviyo revenue from flows in 2022. 

Ellen Bennett said, “If I could do it again, I definitely would have started with Klaviyo earlier.”

Hedley & Bennett is also using Shopify Plus.

Soared with Klaviyo

In 2004, when Caden Lane founder, Katy Mimari, had her first child, she disliked the existing diaper bags out there, finding them distastefully cheesy. So, even with no background in design and retail, she designed her own stylish purse-style diaper bags and sold them to big-box stores like Nordstrom, which loved her products.

Today, Caden Lane is a multimillion-dollar business that sells directly to consumers through its website using the Shopify Plus platform and its flagship store in San Antonio, Nursery Couture. 

Caden Lane doesn’t just sell diaper bags anymore. It now focuses on a wide range of stylish infant apparel and personalized newborn essentials for discerning moms who want comfort, quality, and style. It also offers crib sheets, changing pad covers, mommy robes, and other personalized gift items.

Still, when its Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Bryant Jaquez joined Caden Lane in early 2022, he found Caden Lane only had three people handling all its marketing channels. One of them was Mimari herself, still designing emails and writing subject lines in Klaviyo. Already impressive for what the team has achieved so far, Caden Lane aimed to scale big time, which was why Jaquez came on board.

Jaquez started by doubling the marketing team’s headcount and depended on Klaviyo to personalize and scale Caden Lane’s emails. Jaquez soon learned that their audience preferred more relevant emails than lower-friction emails. So, they went more aggressive with Klaviyo’s pop-up notifications.  

They A/B tested 30 versions and found that they had the highest conversion rates when they asked for more context, like whether users had a baby on the way, a newborn, or a child five years and older. People subscribed because they expected personalization, so Caden Lane made sure to deliver it from day one.

Caden Lane also constantly updated its Klaviyo user profiles based on their browsing habits. For example, they segmented based on who has visited the newborn and not the big kid apparel section, and vice versa, in the last 45 days. This helps them track when their shoppers’ child has aged out of baby clothes, even without the child’s birthdate on their records.

This resulted in a 157.3% YoY growth in Klaviyo-attributed revenue as of the first quarter of 2023, a 4.5-times jump in the number of live flows, and a 24.2-times jump YoY growth in revenue from flows for the same period. 

Jacquez says Klaviyo’s depth of integration with Shopify “makes it easy to do almost anything” and that “it’s like a breath of fresh air.” In his previous jobs, he has used other tools like HubSpot and Mailchimp and declares that “for ecommerce, Klaviyo is the best platform, hard stop.”

In 2002, Caden Lane appeared in the Inc. 5000 list due to its 1,974% growth over the previous three years. The Inc. 5000 lists the 5,000 fastest-growing private companies in the United States. 

Ecommerce Heaven: Klaviyo-Shopify Strategic Partnership

When you join two industry stars together in ecommerce, what do you get? A match made in ecommerce heaven, of course.

Last August 2, 2022, Klaviyo and Shopify announced that Shopify was making a $100 million investment in Klaviyo, forming a strategic partnership together. Their alliance effectively combines one of the most trusted ecommerce platforms with one of the most trusted digital marketing platforms in the ecommerce industry.

Harley Finkelstein, Shopify President, explained in a statement that Klaviyo has been “invaluable to hundreds of thousands of merchants to help them better understand their customers and engage them in highly personalized ways across so many touchpoints.” 

So, they want to make it even easier for Shopify merchants to grow their businesses and scale. Klaviyo now serves as the recommended email solution partner for Shopify Plus.

Andrew Bialecki, the Klaviyo co-founder, and CEO, shared in the Klaviyo blog that the partnership will now “empower brands to own their data and customer relationships at every step of the customer journey.” 

He further explained that “Shopify has built one of the most trusted ecommerce platforms in the industry to start, grow, market, and manage a retail business of any size with reliability, creativity, and speed-to-market for retailers. This has been crucial over the last decade as ecommerce demand surged and third-party platforms on which retailers relied to grow their customer base changed their algorithms, their rules, and their policies without notice.”

According to Bialecki, the next era of ecommerce will be marked by a “continued shift toward consumer privacy and the forming of strong digital relationships.” He said that their combined vision and strengths merged into this strategic partnership will not just help them and their customers weather the new era but even thrive in it. “Shopify shares our vision and mission of empowering entrepreneurs and operators to own their destiny and build lasting businesses.”

What does this mean for Klaviyo partners and customers not using Shopify?

Klaviyo customers using other platforms such as BigCommerce, Magento, Salesforce Commerce Cloud, PrestaShop, and custom carts will continue to enjoy new and updated Klaviyo features and functionalities released almost daily.  

Klaviyo also announced new, other platform partnerships in the future, as well as a “What’s New?” channel all customers can subscribe to for updates.

What does this mean for Shopify and Klaviyo customers?

Retailers will now have more data, more insights, more ownership, and more power to run and grow their businesses. Brands can now leverage both Klaviyo and Shopify together to build retail experiences for their customers in a new ecommerce era.

The Klaviyo App On Shopify 

The Klaviyo app can be added to your Shopify business from the Shopify app store. With it, you can:

• Unify data from Shopify, such as web activity, tags, catalog, and coupons
• Enjoy user segmentation for better targeting, using the integrated Klaviyo-Shopify historical and real-time data of user behaviors
• Use built-in features such as the Welcome, Back In Stock, Browse Abandon, and Price Drop templates
• Build coupon codes for easily tracking automated flows and campaigns
• Get real-time revenue data per automation, campaign, channel, and segment

Klaviyo’s Shopify Integration 

You can also integrate your Shopify business from Klaviyo. There are two ways to do this: use the Klaviyo Setup Wizard if you’re a new Klaviyo customer, or add the Shopify integrations from the Integrations tab in Klaviyo.

Klaviyo provides a detailed Shopify integration guide that takes you step-by-step through adding Shopify integration and configuring specific settings. After integration, you will be able to do many things, such as:

• Collect email and SMS subscribers
• Sync your Shopify newsletter or sign up from subscribers to a Klaviyo list
• Add metrics from Shopify to Klaviyo
• Enable Klaviyo tracking of customers and their viewed products to your Shopify store
  

Five highly effective Klaviyo email automation for Shopify stores are the Abandoned Cart Flow, Birthday Flow, Upsell and Cross-Sell Flows, Review Flow, and VIP Flows.

Why You Should Choose Klaviyo And Shopify For Your Ecommerce Needs

Although Shopify emails may be good for one-offs, its integration with Klaviyo supercharges your email and other communications with your customers. The Klaviyo-Shopify integration enables you more customization, more segmentation, and, therefore, more personalization.

You can seamlessly collect and store your customer data from your Shopify store right within either platform. Then, you can leverage this data to create more memorable experiences for your store visitors and customers, build stronger relationships with them, and drive more sales.

Additional features you enjoy from the Klaviyo-Shopify integration are:

• More than 70 one-click integrations
• Fully synced historical data
• Pre-built flow templates
• State-of-the-art data science
• Full customer lifecycle engagement
• Shopify offers combinable discount codes 
• Automatically generated predictions from integrated data analytics
  

FAQs

Is Klaviyo Shopify free?

Klaviyo offers its free trial for all new users until the 250-contact limit is reached and a discount on its monthly subscription for Shopify users.

Can you email customers directly from Shopify?

You can email customers individually or as a group directly from your Shopify app or admin console.

Does Klaviyo override Shopify emails?

Klaviyo saves all your Shopify email templates. Then, you can use Klaviyo to edit, update, and fully customize them, which you cannot do in Shopify. Once done, you export them back to Shopify to preview. If all looks good, you can then send them via Shopify, not Klaviyo.

How often does Klaviyo sync with Shopify?

Klaviyo syncs customer data, orders, and catalogs with Shopify in real time.

Growing Your Ecommerce Brand With Top Klaviyo and Shopify Experts

Growing your ecommerce brand essentially involves eight steps:

1. Identify your target audience.
2. Encourage repeat business.
3. Offer upsells and cross-sells. 
4. Provide excellent customer service.
5. Market to all stages of the buying process.
6. Operate globally.
7. Use marketing automation.
8. Leverage content and influencer marketing.
   

The Klaviyo-Shopify integration can help you with the first seven steps. But, if you don’t know how nor have a good team to optimize the use of the integration, simply relying on the Klaviyo-Shopify integration alone won’t help much. 

A knife in the hands of a master chef just cuts more powerfully because a master chef is wielding it. 

Smart business handles what one is best at and delegates the rest to others who are also best at those other things.

If you decide to take advantage of the Klaviyo-Shopify integration opportunity, you also need marketing experts who are able to wield their mastery of the ecommerce field to maximize the power of the integration. 

You need marketing experts who match your unique business needs. 

You require marketing experts who are able to devote their attention and time to your ecommerce brand that it rightfully deserves.  

Growth Collective offers these specialized marketing experts with its pre-vetted network of the world’s top freelance marketers. 

No marketer is an expert at all things marketing. We carefully screen and only certify marketers in the channels and tools where they have proven to excel. 

We have specialists on every marketing channel there is, including Klaviyo and Shopify experts.

Our consultants work freelance, too, so they can choose their own projects and decide on the use of their time. When you work with Growth Collective marketing specialists for Klaviyo-Shopify integration, you simply go through a three-step process:

• Create a role for the expertise you want
• Meet curated talent we hand match you within two days 
• Select your expert and work flexibly with them.
  

As your needs change, you can dynamically update your mix of specialists to address your evolving growth initiatives since you’re not mutually tied to any long-term contract with each other. 

Find out more about what our Klaviyo and Shopify specialists can do for your ecommerce brand here.

Seize This Heavenly Match

The Shopify and Klaviyo stories, as well as the sample stories of their successful customers, inspire the best in us. 

The Klaviyo and Shopify strategic partnership affords businesses, particularly ecommerce businesses, an excellent opportunity to also boost their growth and scale big time.

Still, heavenly matches require earthly acceptance and application for their full powers to manifest. 

As the Paintvine’s, The Hemp House’s, GLTC’s, Chukar Cherries’, Hedley & Bennett’s, and Caden Lane’s stories have shown, they studied, decided on, and seized the exceptional benefits and features that Shopify and Klaviyo offered.

Heavenly matches also gain greatly from “angelic” assistance – those good people who are very good at what they do. 

These ecommerce businesses’ stories also showed how they needed the expert assistance of specialists in UX design, customer experience, digital strategy, marketing automation, and many more.

If you decide to seize the myriad opportunities that could open up for your ecommerce business that the Klaviyo-Shopify partnership has to offer, you would also need Klaviyo and Shopify specialists to assist you in elevating your brand. 

Get started now.