Laura Geller grows quarterly SMS revenue 3.9x in first year with Klaviyo SMS

Laura Geller makes makeup and skincare products for mature skin. Created by celebrated New York makeup artist Laura Geller, the brand caters to women over 40 with pioneering products like the Spackle Skin Perfecting Primer—one of the first primers on the market—and a bestselling “baked” foundation, a natural-looking product that has sold more than 7 million units.

The brand serves women of all ages in other ways, too. In 2022, they created a new holiday on April 9: National Mature Women’s Day, to honor women over 40 nationwide.

Learn how AS Beauty Group unlocked “immeasurable” value consolidating 5 brands and 2 channels on Klaviyo

Challenge

Laura Geller is one of the 5 beauty brands in AS Beauty Group—and in total, those 5 brands once used 4 different email and SMS marketing platforms.

Every brand had their email and SMS marketing split across two platforms, which made it hard to manage overall send frequency and create a cohesive customer experience.

Plus, most brands had different stacks—and struggled to identify overlap between their lists to cross-sell strategically.

“When you have email and SMS running from two different places, it’s a nightmare,” says senior director of retention at AS Beauty Group, Katherine Cabe. “Your data isn’t in one place, so you’re reducing the power of the data you own.”

When you have email and SMS running from in two different places, it’s a nightmare. Your data isn’t in one place, so you’re reducing the power of the data you own.

The platforms posed usability challenges, too. Most lacked strong guardrails around compliance, which left the Laura Geller team afraid that updating their pop-ups or SMS messages would create legal liabilities.

It was time to consolidate email and SMS marketing for all AS Beauty Group brands in one user-friendly marketing platform.

Solution

One AS Beauty brand already used Klaviyo—and as the team learned more about it, they realized it was a perfect fit for the larger group.

“Klaviyo was the platform we felt most confident would give us the tools and data we needed to put email and SMS in one place,” Cabe says. “In Klaviyo, we could take an abandoned cart series and target customers with their preferred method of communication—we just didn’t see that from the other platforms.”

Klaviyo also offered robust, automated compliance support—if a user starts to edit their SMS sign-up pop-up language, for example, they get an automated compliance reminder, Cabe notes. She also admires the steady drumbeat of innovations like Klaviyo portfolio, which has given AS Beauty Group a bird’s-eye view of analytics across all 5 of their accounts.

“Klaviyo was advancing as we were advancing,” Cabe says. “We saw a readiness to build new features, and it was large and dependable enough to support our growing business.”

Klaviyo was advancing as we were advancing. We saw a readiness to build new features, and it was large and dependable enough to support our growing business.

The smooth migration took 5 weeks or less per brand, and Klaviyo truly won Laura Geller’s team over during their National Mature Women’s Day sale—a time when the team offers heftier holiday discounts to older customers. Before Klaviyo, a manual and laggy process meant personalized codes were delivered 2 days after a shopper signed up.

With Klaviyo automations, customers got their codes right away.

“Klaviyo made the day much more impactful,” Cabe says. “Revenue-wise, we did more than 4x what we’d done the prior year on that day, because we enabled our customers to start shopping immediately.”

Strategy

Laura Geller now uses Klaviyo to power a higher-volume, engagement-tracked approach to SMS marketing. The team is confident that it’s driving incremental lift, because Klaviyo empowered them to run a holdout test across email and SMS.

It started in 2023. Laura Geller ramped up SMS volume for their most engaged subscribers nearly 2x, from 4 to 7 sends a week.

Then, in spring 2024, they ran a 30-day holdout test to evaluate the impact of this higher-volume approach. They split customers into 4 cohorts that received:

• Full volume of email and SMS
• Full volume of email, and 50% SMS volume
• Full volume of email, no SMS
• Full volume of SMS, no email

They found that sending the full volume of email and SMS drove the best profitability and revenue results by far, across almost all of their 12+ customer segments.

“It’s given us confirmation that we are not scaring our customers away or costing ourselves from a profitability standpoint to have such high send volume,” Cabe says—though she hopes to do more testing on the strategy’s long-term effects.

The unlock is almost immeasurable for us to have email and SMS in Klaviyo. It saves us time going platform to platform, and having one unified customer profile, where everything we know about a customer is in the same place—it’s huge.

The ease of testing multi-channel strategy has been yet another benefit of combining email and SMS into one platform.

“The unlock is almost immeasurable for us to have email and SMS in Klaviyo,” says Cabe. “It saves us time going platform to platform, and having one unified customer profile, where everything we know about a customer is in the same place—it’s huge. Now we see a customer’s journey, every touchpoint they get, and every way they interact with us, and we can act on that data.”