How did Klaviyo enable novel and effective email marketing tactics?

One of the other trends that was starting to blow up around 2016-17 was subscription commerce, along with the growth of Recharge and other subscription platforms for commerce.

Lots of merchants were trying to figure out how to layer in MRR into an ecommerce business so that they could have more sustainable, repeatable business models.

Including your subscription data in your email platform became critical to prevent customer churn. It became equally crucial to follow up with somebody if it looked like they might be about to downgrade or cancel and try to get them to reactivate later. 

One of the problems we noticed here was that if people had too much of a product, they would cancel their subscription or pause it for a certain period and return later. Being able to understand that behavior, collate that data, and keep it updated inside your email platform became key. Given the data structure problem, many of the other SMB platforms were incapable of doing anything interesting with that the way Klaviyo did. 

This rise of subscription commerce was a happy coincidence that really worked out for both sides. Now, brands could message based on subscriber behavior and products customers subscribed to. You even saw these follow-on products such as GetARPU, created by one of the founders of Kettle & Fire, that helped improve it further. This little app figured out when your subscriptions would send and send a message like, "Your package is about to go out. Do you want to add or remove anything from it?" This touchpoint made it easy for a merchant to leverage and deploy now that all the targeted data had come together at one precise place. 

With that access to data, it also meant that Klaviyo became the hub that everybody wanted to sync all their data to about their ecommerce journeys, whether it was subscription data or form data or data from any other way that people might interact with their product.