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Klaviyo

Lily

How LILY’s switch to Klaviyo led to skyrocketing online sales

LILY celebrated its tenth anniversary last year. For many entrepreneurs, such a milestone would be the time to switch to autopilot and take it easy. Not for Kelli Van Hees and Johan Hollants, owners and driving forces of the Mechelen-based ladies’ boutique. Still as ambitious as on day 1, they continue to look for ways to do better than in the past. “We are a small boutique that wants to be taken seriously,” visual director Ellen Thys says proudly. “At LILY it’s all about life’s little luxuries. A feel-good store designed for women. All women, because I think our greatest strength is that we appeal to different target groups. Different styles, different budgets. And we don’t just sell clothes. In our boutique, women can also find jewellery, accessories and handbags. Even decorative objects for their homes.”

AT LILY IT’S ALL ABOUT LIFE’S LITTLE LUXURIES. A FEEL-GOOD STORE DESIGNED FOR WOMEN.

Ellen Thys

“A few years ago we expanded our store in Mechelen, our base. We noticed that we had outgrown the retail space. What we can do today mainly takes place in the digital world. Since the beginning of this year, we have started a process together with Radikal to facilitate our digital marketing efforts. We wanted to trade in Mailchimp, the platform we were using until then, for Klaviyo, but needed Radikal’s expertise to make it run smoothly.”

Klaviyo: versatile platform tailored to every webshop

Just like LILY, thousands of webshops worldwide have made the switch from Mailchimp to Klaviyo in recent years. This has everything to do with the fact that marketing automation and email marketing are increasingly higher on the agenda of e-commerce companies, but it also speaks for the quality and versatility of the Klaviyo platform. More and more companies foresee a prominent place for email marketing in their growth strategy and they quickly run up against the limits of their original platform. Not so with Klaviyo. Klaviyo is built to grow with ambitious companies. “The platform is not only easy to use,” explains Jonas Walravens, email marketing specialist at Radikal. “The possibilities are also enormous. The system offers dozens of pre-built campaigns and solutions and works almost seamlessly with Shopify, the platform on which LILY’s webshop also runs. The main advantage: Klaviyo works very data-driven. With Klaviyo you have a lot of underlying sales and visitor figures with which you can get started. That’s a big advantage over Mailchimp, for example, which isn’t an intelligent system at all. You have very little data there that you as a marketer can do something with.”

Campaigns tailored to LILY’s brand identity

“That’s right,” says Ellen Thys. “We noticed that we got stuck in different ways. Not only was the communication between Mailchimp and Shopify, the platform on which our webshop runs, very difficult (syncing was often a problem, but we also noticed that we had too little control over the campaigns we wanted to create. You know, the communication we send from LILY should be clear, but also beautiful and fun. We spend a lot of time and energy on our corporate identity and visuals are very important to us. The look & feel of our mailings must perfectly match our brand identity. In that respect, the difference with Mailchimp is big: we now have much more control over our mailings. And thanks to the drag & drop system, it still works as easily as before.”

IF WE WANT TO CREATE A NEW E-MAIL CAMPAIGN, RADIKAL RUSHES TO OUR RESCUE. IN A PRACTICAL WAY, BUT ABOVE ALL IN A STRATEGIC WAY. THAT IS ONE OF THE MAIN REASONS FOR OUR COLLABORATION WITH RADIKAL. GUIDED BY THEIR EXPERTISE AND ADVICE, WE MAKE THE RIGHT CHOICES TO MOVE FORWARD.

“You know, because our corporate identity is so important to us, we want to keep a lot of practical matters in our own hands. I like to keep control over the visuals in the communication we send out. There are also things I know less about. Format flows or triggers to send out flows, for example. If we want to create a new e-mail campaign, Radikal comes to the rescue. In a practical way, but above all in a strategic way. That is one of the main reasons why we work with Radikal. Thanks to their expertise and advice, we make the right choices to move forward. I feel like we’re really on the same page. The people of Radikal think along with us. They listen to our story and then come up with good ideas. They know what they are talking about.”

Marketing automation = long-term project

Because LILY resolutely pulls the automation card, the company is also the ideal partner for Radikal. “If you want to do email marketing well, you have to go all-in as a company,” explains Walravens. “You can’t do it a little, because then it will fail. The problem is: many companies are not ready for that yet. They dare too little. Perhaps it is due to our Flemish nature. Are we held back by a feeling that we are bothering people? I can’t say for sure, but that hesitation is completely unjustified. In 2021, people can choose for themselves whether they want to be emailed or not. And if the open and click figures of your mailings show that people are interested in your story, then you are free to try new things.”

IN ORDER TO RUN E-MAIL MARKETING CAMPAIGNS PROPERLY, A COMPANY HAS TO GO ALL-IN. IT CAN’T JUST DIP ITS TOES IN THE WATER AS THIS WILL FAIL.

Jonas Walravens, Radikal

“It is important to keep in mind: you have to be patient. After all, in addition to technical knowledge, a successful automation process also needs time. And attention. Twice a month we discuss the past campaigns with LILY and look at the figures. Each campaign must be carefully analyzed. How are the click rates and open rates? Why is something running? Why not? After a quality analysis, you can then make adjustments and start again. Data analysis is super important. I think that’s one of the reasons why more and more companies choose Klaviyo. The platform is very data-driven and contains a lot of underlying data. You can even view industry benchmarks. ”

“By the way, I cannot emphasize the importance of a healthy mailing list enough. Analyze your data and filter out the inactive people. It’s so hard to persuade them. My motto is: focus on what is good and try to improve that.”

Successful first campaign: 617% more sales

The first campaign that Radikal and LILY developed was an automatic onboarding campaign at the end of March. “That’s actually one of the basics,” says Walravens, “but an extremely important one. Many companies send too few e-mails during their customers’ onboarding process. We set up a fairly simple campaign for LILY: a welcome e-mail containing a unique discount code of 10%. This optimisation did not miss its target. Sales resulting from applying the unique discount code found in the welcome e-mail went through the roof. In April, the revenue from people who placed an order via this e-mail was 617% higher than in March 2021, when the promotion did not yet exist. This sales increase was maintained in the following months: +386% (May 2021) and +405% (June 2021).”

+ 617%
Sales through welcome e-mail after 1 month

Second campaign: Abandoned Cart

Spurred by the success of the welcome campaign, a second optimisation was soon to follow. In June, LILY focused on the abandoned carts. This refers to online shop visitors who placed one or more items in their shopping cart, yet did not proceed with the purchase for whatever reason. The default app that Shopify offers to take care of those abandoned carts has been replaced by a more personalised and more efficiently run campaign via Klaviyo. This intervention also had an immediate positive impact on the figures: the open rate rose from 41% to 58% and the click rate doubled from 9.5% to 19%. The sales effect of the new approach was even bigger: sales via the new e-mail campaign increased by a staggering 424%.

+ 424%
Sales effect of Abandoned Cart campaign

Since Radikal and LILY joined forces, a lot of work has been done on conversion optimization and important steps have been taken in professionalizing the digital marketing efforts. The two automatic campaigns above show how successful the collaboration is and can be. Behind the scenes, therefore, we are already working diligently on new possibilities.

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