CaseMate & Magento Marketing Automation

Case·Mate is an Atlanta, GA-based global leader of stylish phone cases and mobile accessories. Founded in 2005, this multi-million dollar brand has increased its direct-to-consumer revenue over 35% since last year, primarily due to Magento and Klaviyo, and is growing more quickly than ever.  Specifically, the company wanted to create a communication strategy that could help them reach new customer segments and deliver relevant, well-crafted messages.

Its life-time guarantee and creative collaborations with Kodak, McLaren, and fashion designer Prabal Gurung have set Case·Mate apart from other phone accessory brands. Along with high-quality and sleekly designed products, an easy to navigate website, and creative content, it’s easy to see why customers find this brand so appealing.

Case·Mate sells its products through its own ecommerce site, and through various telecommunication retailers, including AT&T and Verizon. About 10% of its total revenue is from online orders.

After moving from Shopify to Magento, Case·Mate realized they needed a marketing automation platform that would integrate more extensively and provide broader access to purchasing and event data to inform their segmentation strategy.

On their wishlist: a marketing automation platform with features like predictive analytics to understand future customer behavior, and custom property fields to collect unique data points from customers to segment their email list further.

Keith A. Neely, Vice President of Ecommerce, Digital Marketing, Customer Support, and IT at Case·Mate spoke about why the brand partnered with Klaviyo to solve this challenge.

Why Case·Mate outgrew its former marketing automation platform and chose Klaviyo

Keith Neely joined Case·Mate as Vice President in January 2019 to help the brand continue to scale and build out its direct-to-consumer business. His predecessor had reviewed Case·Mate’s tech stack and realized the brand needed a new marketing automation platform that could better fit the needs of a rapidly-growing business. This meant they needed a platform that would integrate better with Magento, its ecommerce platform.

What stood out in particular was that Klaviyo had a native integration with Magento 2 that was very solid and very fast to set up.  Klaviyo also adapted what we’ve put on GitHub. The entire set up process from start to finish was a couple of weeks.

Keith Neely, Vice President at Case·Mate

In Keith’s experience, choosing the right technology partner is essential for a successful long-term growth plan.

He says, “At my former company, we had Responsys and huge enterprise systems. They were extremely complex and difficult to use.  My team found it hard to get in and do segmentation campaigns easily. I love the flexibility found in Klaviyo.  I am super excited by some of the CRM features including new ones like customer LTV (Lifetime Value).  These will go a long way towards helping us grow the brand and overall customer loyalty.”

After Case·Mate integrated with Klaviyo, Keith says they were thrilled to have a best-in-class marketing automation platform that was easy to use.

How Klaviyo helps Case·Mate drive its vision and look ahead toward the future

“Our products are very trendy and fashionable – they are an extension of your own personality and we believe that we develop fashion that functions. We are really focused on creating a case that you can match to your outfit everyday if you wanted to. “– Case·Mate’s vision

Case·Mate understands how important it is to have a reliable tech stack, including Magento and Klaviyo, to help them continue to drive their mission forward.

Technology companies should do what they do best – build world-class technology.  We look to them to innovate.  As the retailer, we rely on them to stay current.  Our focus should be on developing new and exciting products, not integrating and developing technologies.  That’s why we have partners.  It’s why we also love Klaviyo because you continue to release new features relevant to the marketplace and relevant to what our customers need and want.  Features like LTV help us to understand who our most important customers are and how they behave.  Zeroing in on LTV allows us to treat them like the VIPS that they truly are.

Keith Neely, Vice President at Case·Mate

One way Case·Mate builds strong relationships with its customers is by being mindful of their interests, and by only sending them messages that are personalized and relevant to their needs. For example, their online shopper tends to be more female oriented than a shopper in store. The online product mix is therefore more female oriented and the messaging to that specific segment is as well.

Keith says, “The more we segment, the more success we see in general. Personalized elements make our communication more credible. Another example of segmentation – we can update custom properties to collect information like, are you interested in an iPhone, Samsung, or other personal device…and then provide them content related to their manufacturer of choice.”

The brand also creates segments such as:  someone who opened an email but didn’t order and then syncs that list with Facebook to retarget them, or someone who has ordered a specific product and then up-sells them with an accessory that matches it like an iridescent phone case with a matching ring.

How meaningful conversations with customers catapulted Case·Mate’s financial success

By continuing to collect data points about its customers through website pop-up forms, onsite browsing activity, and analyzing purchase history, Case·Mate’s eCommerce team has been able to use segmentation and personalization strategies to develop a variety of creative email campaigns and automated marketing flows that engage their customers more deeply.

Since we started with Klaviyo, our email open rates have increased 50%, our revenue per recipient has increased 22%, our total direct-to-consumer revenue as a company is up 35% year over year, and our email has 50% revenue growth year over year. Furthermore, with the iPhone launch last month – email was the primary driver and also doubled what it did last year which has helped us to offset other channels that were in decline.

Keith Neely, Vice President at Case·Mate

Email is one of the highest converting channels that Case·Mate has.  Some of it is coming from branded product launch emails that come from Klaviyo and also a lot can be attributed to automated flows like abandoned carts.

According to Keith, Klaviyo is also helping them to map more extensive customer journeys. Keith says, “It is helping us create new touch-points that haven’t existed before.”

Keith goes on to further say, “It’s why feature enhancements in the software are really important to us like LTV, and who should buy more than one case and what’s the frequency between those purchases.  We believe that Klaviyo has helped us and will continue to help us determine those touch-points to extend the life of a customer.”

Despite a lifetime guarantee on its products, Case·Mate is tackling the challenge of increasing repeat purchases.

Keith says, “We’re going to continue to use Klaviyo to increase the number of purchases per customer. There’s a misconception that you buy a case and you’re done, but really there should be no reason not to buy multiple cases. We already have a die-hard core consumer segment who is making repeat purchases and we are trying to encourage other segments to follow suit. So, we’re trying to figure out campaign messaging around that. For example: ‘find a case that matches your dress or outfit.’ We’ll perform AB testing to prove that messaging of that sort can actually convert.”

Repeat purchases aren’t the only focus for this successful and growing brand.

What’s ahead for Case·Mate

The company plans to begin segmenting by gender.

Keith says, “We believe that there is a rather large but silent population of men who are purchasing our products. We have specific products that are ideal for these guys, but it’s difficult for them to find it on our website.

Rolled out this past summer, Klaviyo’s predictive attributes can be used to identify if there are groups of people more likely than others to prefer specific types of products or categories. Predicted gender is an example of a predictive attribute that uses customer data to learn and predict characteristics and behaviors.

Case·Mate plans to take full advantage of this feature and will continue to focus its efforts on building stronger connections with customers both online and instore via even more robust personalized communications directly with customers to keep building relationships.