Frances Valentine is a women’s apparel and accessories brand offering vintage-inspired fashion with a joyful perspective. Founded by college best friends Elyce Arons and Kate Spade, the brand celebrates personal style through bold prints and colors, with an unapologetically optimistic ethos.

Stocked by retailers from Nordstrom and Dillard’s online to indie brick-and-mortar boutiques, Frances Valentine also has its own ecommerce and physical stores—and powers smarter digital relationships with its customers using Klaviyo.

Learn how consolidating email, SMS, and sign-up forms in Klaviyo helped Frances Valentine thrive

Challenge

As soon as Frances Valentine launched their SMS channel, they saw what it could do for their brand.

Their apparel is slightly too pricey for impulse shopping—and an SMS follow-up after a paid ad or an email drove conversions, explains director of marketing Florencia Gilardoni.

But running email in Klaviyo while operating SMS in Attentive made it nearly impossible to create multi-channel flows that drove those easy conversions at scale.

Frances Valentine also struggled to drive ROI with Attentive’s automations. They couldn’t easily trigger automated SMS sends at key conversion moments, like when an item was back in stock. And on Attentive’s recommendation, they sent ultra-granular order status update automations via SMS—flagging when something shipped, for example—that generated weak returns.

They also ran into challenges with Attentive’s sign-up forms, which they used for email and SMS. Pulling email sign-ups from Attentive into Shopify and then into Klaviyo was a glitchy process, and some email sign-ups got lost.

They could only embed Attentive forms in Attentive-hosted landing pages, too—which made lead-generation campaign conversion rates a bit of a black box.

Frances Valentine saw an opportunity to save time, gain functionality, and drive SMS ROI by consolidating email, SMS, and sign-up forms in one platform.

Solution

Where exactly would they consolidate everything? “Klaviyo seemed like the natural best fit,” Gilardoni recalls.

Consolidating email and SMS in Klaviyo empowered Frances Valentine to run more sophisticated, multi-channel automations. Plus, the team no longer wastes time double-checking sign-up data, or toggling between tabs.

Being able to have both emails and SMS in one calendar view, vs. me having to go back and forth between the platforms and our creative management platform as well—that was really helpful.

“Being able to have both emails and SMS in one calendar view, vs. me having to go back and forth between the platforms and our creative management platform as well—that was really helpful,” Gilardoni says.

Migrating from Attentive to Klaviyo went smoothly—all told, it took about a week. Switching over the sign-up forms was even simpler: it only took one call with their customer success manager.

Strategy

Since switching to Klaviyo, Frances Valentine has been able to test and customize their SMS channel much more effectively. So far, they have:

• Optimized their sign-up forms: The marketing team can now A/B test their pop-up timing and creative, schedule pop-ups for sales and special occasions, and embed Klaviyo sign-up forms on landing pages they host, which gives them new visibility into views and conversion rates on lead-generation campaigns. “You just have a lot more flexibility to change things in Klaviyo than you do in Attentive,” Gilardoni says.
• Pared SMS automations down to core revenue drivers: In the switch to Klaviyo, Frances Valentine shifted their SMS strategy. To maximize SMS ROI, they started out adding SMS to only their highest-intent automations: abandoned check-out and back-in-stock. Revenue from these flows jumped 32% YoY in their first quarter as multi-channel flows.
• Integrated SMS more tightly with customer support: Using Klaviyo’s Gorgias integration, Frances Valentine makes sure that replies to their SMS marketing messages open a chat support ticket—and get answered by a human. This is important because their SMS subscribers skew toward baby boomers, who reply to SMS with questions and feedback more often than younger consumers.

Ultimately, Gilardoni sees the switch to Klaviyo as a win. Instead of receiving generic SMS best practices geared toward younger audiences, as they did at Attentive, the team now gets personalized recommendations from their Klaviyo customer success manager.

Klaviyo’s analytics help Frances Valentine understand their customers better, too. “Being able to see how customers are engaging with email and SMS, and having both channels in Klaviyo, is definitely going to help us continue to level up our marketing and make sure we’re giving customers what they want,” Gilardoni says.

Being able to see how customers are engaging with email and SMS, and having both channels in Klaviyo, is definitely going to help us continue to level up our marketing and make sure we’re giving customers what they want.