“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.”

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.”

“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.”

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.