Joseph is the head of lifecycle marketing at Fluency Firm, a DTC growth marketing consultancy in Los Angeles. He began his career as an in-house email & SMS marketer at a DTC bedding brand. It was there that Joseph found his passion for helping brands scale through empathetic marketing and data-driven strategy.
These are his favorite tools to drive retention:
I'm a die-hard Klaviyo fan. It's hands-down the best platform for any eCommerce store looking to level up their email personalization, automate the lifecycle journey, and communicate to the right audience at the right time. Klaviyo is also a data storage powerhouse, which is often overlooked. Anyone can learn the ropes of email and SMS marketing through Klaviyo's exhaustive list of blogs, webinars, and training materials. In fact, that’s how I got started myself. Klaviyo offers everything you need to execute an effective retention marketing strategy.
There’s a lot of debate between Attentive vs Postscript. I’ve used both and have no complaints with either. However, if I had to choose between the two, I’d go with Attentive. Their UI, white glove team, and easy-to-design sign-up units give them the edge. We leverage the Klaviyo-Attentive integration across all eight of our brands to:
Attentive understands that SMS marketing is designed to be conversational. They recently released conversational keywords to allow you to interact with your customers on a true one-to-one level. Early on in our welcome flow, we’ll ask subscribers to share what they want to see from us. Their reply is dynamically tagged, allowing us to tailor the following SMS messages to their preferences. This not only makes for a better customer experience, but it shows subscribers that you genuinely care about them, which goes a long way.
There are plenty of quiz builders on Shopify, but none are better than Octane AI. They make it easy for shops to collect valuable zero-party data through conversational pop-ups and custom quiz experiences. We’ll use product quizzes to recommend products to both new and existing customers. What’s neat about Octane AI, is that similarly to Knocommerce, each question and answer is tagged to the subscriber’s profile in Klaviyo. We take advantage of this data in our email flows, where we’ll build custom conditional paths based on the information unique to each individual. The best use-case automations to implement this in are the welcome series, abandoned cart, and customer thank you flows. We’ll also send monthly segmented email campaigns to non-customers, nudging them to take the quiz, which we’ve found to convert well
Wunderkind, formally known as Bounce X, offers best-in-class lead capture technology. We like Wunderkind’s unique ability to recognize site visitors and tailor experiences unique to them through dynamic site coupons and pop-ups. While we find Attentive better suited for SMS campaigns, we use Wunderkind to retarget leads and customers through automated abandonment emails. Keep in mind, their software and service are on the pricey side.
The more you know about your customers, the better experience you can provide. We use Knocommerce to capture birthdays, send post-purchase surveys, and collect NPS. What I love about their integration with Klaviyo is that tags are dynamically attached to customer profiles based on the information they provide. This enables us to send ultra-personalized product upsells/cross-sells and learn more about our customers' sentiment with our brand.
Tapcart is a hidden gem for any brand that has a high returning customer base. They make it easy for brands to create custom apps with no coding required. We drive subscribers to our app through on-site push notifications, campaign banners, and automated email sequences. Through their natural integration with Klaviyo, we set up all our automated push notifications from within the Klaviyo dashboard. Similar to SMS, app subscribers are higher in value to your brand than the average email subscriber. We treat them like VIPs by sending an early access text push for new product drops, promotions, and more. Just be careful not to over-message.
It’s proven that up to 90% of your customers won’t come back after one poor experience with your brand. We use Gorgias to manage email & SMS replies, product complaints, and bad reviews. By way of tags, rules, and macros, we automate answers to common questions, categorize sources, and clear tickets in record time. Their powerful integration library allows us to reply to text conversations, emails, and social comments all in one place.
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UPS suggests that customers track their shipment 2.42 times per order. We use Aftership to capitalize on this traffic by bringing eyes back to our website, rather than our carriers’. By hosting on-site delivery status updates, we effectively open new doors for increasing order frequency and value, all while improving the customer experience. A brand of ours in the fashion niche saw 24% of their email marketing revenue by way of shipping notification flows in 2021.
As online shopping has become more popular, switching barriers have never been lower. It’s 5x more expensive to acquire a new customer than to retain an existing one. That’s where loyalty programs like LoyaltyLion come in. We use their integration with Attentive for things like rewarding those who signing up for SMS or refer a friend. They make it simple to pull in dynamic point balances, which we’l leverage in our abandoned cart flows and one-off campaigns in Klaviyo. Our favorite time to push loyalty sign ups is customer thank you flow. In this flow, we feature a conditional block to notify non-rewards members of how many points they missed out on and the deadline to redeem them. We’ll also set up tiered rewards systems based on lifetime spend. The Girlfriend Collective executes this well.
Okendo Reviews is a budget-friendly alternative to Yotpo. We use their technology to collect reviews, UGC, and customer profiles - all on autopilot. The customer/product attributes allow us to collect more first-party data, while giving potential buyers valuable insights to benefit from at the same time. It’s a win-win for both parties. We typically send post-purchase review emails 14 days after an order is delivered, using the Aftership trigger in Klaviyo.
Catch allows merchants to save on credit and debit card processing fees by rewarding their customers with savings in the form of store credit. They integrate with Shopify Plus, Klaviyo, and soon Attentive and Postscript.
AfterShip keeps your customers updated of the whereabouts of their orders until delivery through an intuitive, customized tracking page and automated notifications. Build your own tracking page to include product marketing banners and Instagram images to impress, engage and upsell your customers.
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