How to power smarter digital relationships with unified email and SMS marketing

With customers being constantly bombarded with marketing messages, savvy businesses are on the hunt for more effective ways to engage with audiences and build meaningful relationships. So it makes sense that many are realising the power of unified email and SMS marketing.

By synergising these two channels and ensuring messages are complementary — rather than competing — businesses across all industries can deliver the right message via the right channel at the right time, resulting in a more personalised customer experience.

The role of unified data

To power smarter digital relationships through unified email and SMS marketing, the first step is to harness the power of customer data. A customer data platform (CDP) plays a pivotal role in unifying data from multiple sources and delivering a holistic view of the customer. This consolidated data can then be leveraged for more personalised and targeted communications across both email and SMS.

With unified data, businesses can gain insights on a customer’s behaviours, preferences, purchase history and more. This knowledge then forms the foundation for building highly targeted marketing messages. Whether it’s sending a personalised email recommending products based on their browsing history or sending an SMS alert about a limited-time offer, unified data gives businesses the ability to deliver content that truly resonates with their audience.

Leveraging Klaviyo integrations

Knowing how unified data works is only one piece of the puzzle. To implement a successful unified email and SMS marketing strategy, you need the right tools and platforms that can simplify your marketing efforts. Enter: Klaviyo — an intelligent marketing automation platform that includes advanced features like segmentation, automation, personalisation and more, making it perfect for businesses that want to boost customer engagement and power smarter relationships.

Klaviyo’s unified interface lets users create and manage ongoing email and SMS marketing campaigns with a range of valuable tools. This includes everything from automation and personalisation solutions through to segmentation tools, metrics reporting and more. 

Here’s how it can take your marketing efforts to the next level:

• Audience segmentation: Divide your customer base into distinct groups based on a wide range of criteria, including purchase history, demographics and behavioural patterns. This granular segmentation allows you to create messages that resonate with specific audiences and makes your marketing efforts highly relevant. For example, you can segment your email and SMS campaigns to target customers who have previously made a purchase, but haven’t returned in a while. You can easily send them personalised offers to re-engage their interest. Or for new subscribers, you might send a welcome series that introduces your brand and products, helping them get acquainted with your offering.
• Automation: Set up automated workflows for both email and SMS marketing. These workflows can be tailored to fit different customer touchpoints, from abandoned-cart email and SMS sequences to welcome series and post-purchase follow-ups. With automation, you can deliver messages at the most opportune times. For example, if a customer abandons their shopping cart, Klaviyo’s automated system can send a reminder email or SMS with the abandoned items, encouraging the customer to complete the purchase.
• Personalisation: Create highly customised messages — you can dynamically insert customer names, recommend products based on past purchases and even send personalised SMS alerts for special occasions like birthdays. Say a customer has previously purchased something from a particular category of products, you can send them personalised recommendations via email that showcase related items. By piquing their interest with relevant products, you create a more personalised customer experience and increase the likelihood of conversions.
• Integration: Klaviyo integrates with a huge range of ecommerce platforms so that your customer and order data can stay up-to-date and synchronised. By eliminating outdated information, you reduce the chances of sending irrelevant messages. For example, if a customer makes a purchase through your online store, Klaviyo will make sure their purchase history is updated in real-time, which allows you to send them relevant post-purchase emails or SMS alerts.
• Analytics and reporting: Track critical metrics like open rates, clickthrough rates, conversions and more. Use these insights to assess the effectiveness of your marketing efforts and then make smarter, more data-driven decisions for optimisation. If you notice that a particular email campaign has a high click-through rate but a low conversion rate, for example, then you can use these insights to refine your messaging and calls-to-action to drive better results. You’ll have all the tools to continuously refine and optimise your marketing strategies for maximum impact.

Real-world success: Klaviyo x SABA

As one of Australia’s most recognisable fashion brand, SABA can’t afford to have any weak links in its operations. But before Klaviyo, they were struggling with a marketing platform that wasn’t fit-for-purpose. The system was set up in such a way that only one person could build and send marketing emails, which required HTML coding skills. That meant there were countless times where bottlenecks appeared or SABA’s marketing efforts simply fell by the wayside.

In 2021, SABA made the strategic decision to switch to a new tech stack, which included Klaviyo — an intelligent marketing automation platform. The platform’s user-friendly features, particularly the drag-and-drop email builder, made everything more accessible and efficient for SABA team members. Rather than being reliant on a single person, multiple people could now handle email marketing tasks.

SABA then used Klaviyo to expand its marketing strategy by incorporating SMS as a new channel. They set up a marketing program that included three email campaigns per week, a monthly SMS campaign and various automated flows. The results were remarkable, with a 26% quarter-over-quarter growth in email marketing revenue and a 148% quarter-over-quarter growth in SMS placed order rate in Q1 2023.

If nothing else, SABA’s success story proves that shifting to a unified email and SMS marketing platform like Klaviyo can lead to impressive results. By leveraging just a few of Klaviyo’s suite of features, SABA built a more engaging experience for their subscribers, and perfected the art of timely and relevant marketing messages.

Ready to power smarter digital relationships? Book a personalised demo today!