Doe Lashes keeps customers coming back with Klaviyo integrations

It’s getting harder to launch an online brand. Competition has never been higher—and neither have customer expectations. And with ongoing data privacy changes, brands are left with inefficient advertising that isn’t worth the price tag.

In this landscape, the best way for brands to earn—and maintain—customers’ attention is to build personalized experiences on owned channels using Customer-First Data™. And for Jason Wong, founder of Doe Lashes, that’s been a focus from the start.

Starting a business in a competitive environment

Since founding Doe in 2019, Wong keeps customers coming back for hand-crafted false lashes by improving the areas where his direct-to-consumer (DTC) company can make an immediate good impression—like Doe’s website and email messaging. Those positive experiences also motivate customers to get friends and family on board, reducing the company’s spend on paid ads.

I know how important it is to own our audience to hedge against the volatility of paid ads. Email becomes a way for us to interface with our clients, nurture those relationships, and make them loyal customers who will come back over and over again. In a way, email is really the channel for us to express ourselves and show the inside of our brand—to communicate to our customers in ways we just can’t on social media.

Jason Wong
, Founder, Doe Lashes

Email has always been an important marketing channel for Wong, who previously helped build several other ecommerce brands. Frustrating experiences with other email providers made Klaviyo the obvious choice for email when he was launching Doe.

The way I stumbled upon Klaviyo was just frustration with other services. I’ve used MailChimp, SendGrid, ActiveCampaign—these are Klaviyo competitors that, frankly speaking, don’t compare. They’re just not fit for ecommerce the way Klaviyo was built around ecommerce. The integrations we can get with Klaviyo, the way we’re able to sync data and specific properties to personalize our emails, and the ease of use are just unparalleled. So when I started the brand, it was Klaviyo or nothing else.

Jason Wong, Founder, Doe Lashes

Great customer experiences are possible with Klaviyo

Using Klaviyo, Wong and his team launched onsite quizzes as well as a loyalty program in an effort to personalize interactions from the start of the customer journey.

Lash quiz offers a personalized welcome to the brand
When a brand offers many variations of a product, shoppers can feel overwhelmed by choices. Doe’s product recommendation quiz helps new lash wearers find their perfect look based on factors like eye shape, lash experience, the context in which they’re planning to wear them, and aesthetic preferences.

The quiz, powered by the Octane AI integration in Klaviyo, not only earns Doe 3x more email sign-ups than a traditional pop-up form—it also supplies information the Doe team uses to build a personalized welcome series for customers.

Personalization is a big part of our entire journey. What that means is, instead of just saying, ‘Hey, you get a blanket email like everyone else,’ we send you personalized emails based on what you’ve told us you like.

Jason Wong, Founder, Doe Lashes

And it’s working. Doe has managed to turn one-fifth of quiz takers into customers—which means their welcome flow has a conversion rate 9x higher than the industry standard for health and beauty.

Loyalty program keeps customers coming back
Doe also uses Smile Rewards, its loyalty program, to offer increasingly attractive perks the more customers buy—motivating them to keep purchasing again and again.

Our rewards program is my pride and joy. For DTC businesses, retention is the key signal for whether or not you’re here to stay. And the fact that we’ve been able to grow our rewards program to 30,000 members is phenomenal.

Jason Wong, Founder, Doe Lashes

And Klaviyo is the engine that makes it all happen. New customers are invited to join Smile Rewards by email if they’re not already part of the program. Then, the Doe team creates dedicated flows in Klaviyo that are optimized to engage rewards program members on an ongoing basis.

Wong noticed that when rewards members interact with Doe’s emails, they tend to buy more and come back more frequently. The initial Smile Rewards flow alone brings in 1.2x as much revenue as the brand’s already successful welcome series.

The integration we have with Smile really boosted our email revenue as a whole because we’re managing the program through Klaviyo.

Jason Wong, Founder, Doe Lashes

Doe makes smart decisions using Klaviyo analytics

In order for personalization to work as brands grow, they need integrated customer data. In Klaviyo, data is like a network of highways between cities, with data flowing in every direction.

Data fuels personalization
Using the abundance of Customer-First Data from Klaviyo analytics, Wong can identify which Doe emails are most successful for different types of customers. Then, his team can create specific email campaigns that cater to those customers’ unique interests and behaviors.

For example, a customer who has purchased from Doe two times or more and has spent over $100 might click on a certain type of email more frequently than someone with a different purchase history—and that can inform what kinds of emails Doe should send them in the future.

Klaviyo’s analytics are so granular. They tell you what flows are generating revenue and what people do within a specific email—if you click on a profile, it’ll tell you if that person opened, if they clicked, if they made a purchase. There’s an entire trail of stuff Klaviyo tells us, which really helps advise on what our next strategy should be. It tells us so much about our customers that we just can’t get through Shopify’s dashboard.

Jason Wong, Founder, Doe Lashes

The Octane AI integration is another source of invaluable information. Not everyone who takes the product recommendation quiz turns into a customer, but Klaviyo’s dashboard reveals which ones do. This helps the team at Doe consider which changes to the quiz results, welcome flow, or product lineup might help improve the experience for specific customer segments.

We get more granular based on the answers you provide on your quiz. How often do you go out? Do you like to wear light or glam makeup? Have you ever worn lashes before? Or maybe you’ve worn them for five years or more. Based on all these answers, we give you a different flow. That’s really why our email has been so crucial to our revenue—because it doesn’t feel like you’re getting another email. It feels like you’re being communicated to. That’s the key difference here.

Jason Wong, Founder, Doe Lashes

Similarly, the data Klaviyo pulls from Smile Rewards shows which incentives work and who Doe’s most valuable customers are—so they can continue growing those relationships.

And with Klaviyo, integration data and email data can inform each other for a seamless experience. For example, Wong’s team might use a customer’s quiz answers, their rewards tier, and their action on a previous email to personalize a future rewards email.

The result? The team at Doe is equipped with the knowledge necessary to make smarter business decisions, and customers receive content they actually want to engage with.

Doe offsets ad costs by focusing on retention

Eventually, customers will need more lashes. Fortunately, tracking how customers interact with Doe—and asking them for the right information at the right time—does more than just ensure they’re receiving content that makes them feel seen. It also improves conversion and retention.

With Klaviyo, Doe automates replenishment campaigns at just the right time. As a result, about 35% of Doe’s customers come back for another purchase within 90 days.

Retention is a huge part of what really drives our business forward. We’ve seen how powerful Klaviyo is in driving repeat purchases and retention revenue. That really offsets the rising cost of CPA, which I think is an important point to make amid all the changes in our space right now.

Jason Wong, Founder, Doe Lashes

What’s next: using Klaviyo’s insights to revamp personalization

Thanks to the data available in Klaviyo, Wong plans to take personalization to a whole new level by more precisely analyzing the effectiveness of Doe’s quiz recommendations. If Doe recommends a certain lash based on a set of quiz results, is that what the customer ends up purchasing? Are they happy with it? Will they buy it again?

If we recommend product A to someone, what is the conversion rate of that compared to when we recommend product B? At the end of the day, our recommendation is based on what we assume is the best product based on your eye shape, your makeup behavior, and your purchase behavior. It’s not ultimately a perfect fit. It’s not a ring size, right? So we’re now looking at, on a product level, what else we can optimize to make recommendations convert better? That’s going to be the next lever for our growth.

Jason Wong, Founder, Doe Lashes

Because Octane AI feeds a lot of information into Klaviyo, it’s easy for the Doe team to test which recommendations result in better conversions for different types of people.

Klaviyo allows us to do that so seamlessly. The key point here is ease of use.

Jason Wong, Founder, Doe Lashes