After switch to Klaviyo, email drives 11x bigger slice of Lifestraw ecommerce revenue

Lifestraw makes water filters for home, outdoor, and emergency use with hollow fiber membrane technology. The filters are essentially bundles of straws with microscopic holes, which work like a sieve to filter out parasites, microplastics, and other pollutants.

Not only is Lifestraw Climate Neutral Certified—they’re on a mission to make clean drinking water more accessible. For every product sold, they provide a year of filtered water to a child in need.

Learn how Lifestraw leans on “workhorse” Klaviyo flows and AI to grow their DTC business

Challenge

Email didn’t drive much revenue for Lifestraw in their first years as a DTC operation. In 2020, when they used ActiveCampaign, it drove about 3% of total ecommerce revenue.

In hindsight, Eugenia Martin, head of DTC sales at Lifestraw, chalks the low performance up to a few factors:

• They had no automations set up in ActiveCampaign—not even a welcome flow.
• They didn’t have clear insight into deliverability in ActiveCampaign analytics.

At the time, though, Lifestraw thought of the channel itself as ineffective. To avoid annoying their customers, Eugenia sent as few emails as possible.

“We didn’t understand the importance of email in ecommerce,” she explains. “We would send one email a month, if that. There wasn’t an incentive to keep going, because we weren’t seeing results.”

We didn’t understand the importance of email in ecommerce. We would send one email a month, if that. There wasn’t an incentive to keep going, because we weren’t seeing results.

Solution

The Lifestraw team kept hearing from industry colleagues that email was driving major DTC growth for them—and that they were using Klaviyo.

“We knew Klaviyo was much better,” Eugenia says.

It also cost more—but they decided to try it out, figuring they could switch back if it wasn’t worth the price tag.

During onboarding, the Klaviyo team advised Lifestraw to warm their sending domain slowly and build reputation. This was new to the team, and sending from two separate platforms during the warming period “was a lot of extra work,” Eugenia says—but they grudgingly complied.

Klaviyo is a core marketing tool for Lifestraw, the one with the highest ROI. Everybody, including the board, is aware of our success story with email marketing since we moved to Klaviyo.

When the migration and warming was complete, Lifestraw’s campaign results improved radically. Deliverability was strong—and Eugenia realized that ActiveCampaign’s minimal warming guidance may have invisibly depressed performance in the past

Today, “Klaviyo is a core marketing tool for Lifestraw, the one with the highest ROI,” says Eugenia. “Everybody, including the board, is aware of our success story with email marketing since we moved to Klaviyo.”

Strategy

With onboarding complete, the Lifestraw team hired an agency to build out their automations—a welcome flow, abandonment flows, and post-purchase flows reminding customers to buy replacement filters.

“The flows are just a workhorse,” Eugenia marvels. “They just work day and night without us doing anything. It’s amazing.”

Her team especially loves the back-in-stock flows—people sign up for alerts on specific products, and it helps their operations team gauge demand and stock accordingly.

After their first quarter with flows, Q4 2022, Lifestraw beat their overall 2022 email revenue goals by more than 2x.

It shifted their perspective on email as a marketing channel, and the value of email automations in particular.

Flows AI just built the flow structure for me. That was pretty amazing.

Today, Eugenia is using Klaviyo’s ecosystem of 350+ pre-built integrations to centralize all Lifestraw’s automated customer messaging in Klaviyo. That includes order confirmation emails (triggered by Shopify), delivery updates (triggered by Wonderment), and subscription updates (triggered by Recharge).

Why? Klaviyo provides more granular email analytics than other platforms, and it’s easier to add visual branding—like a logo—to the sends.

It’s also easier than ever to create a new, integration-triggered Klaviyo flow, thanks to Klaviyo AI. Eugenia recently tried prompting Flows AI to generate a Recharge subscription confirmation flow in Klaviyo.

She input one sentence and “Flows AI just built the flow structure for me,” she says. “That was pretty amazing.”

The tool saved her at least 40 minutes on that flow alone, she estimates—and she plans to use Flows AI to create the rest of Lifestraw’s Recharge flows.

“I’m a Klaviyo salesperson that’s not on payroll at this point,” she says. “Klaviyo is the right combination of a technical tool that prioritizes things like deliverability and load speed, and a platform that’s intuitive to use. That’s what makes a perfect platform for me.”