Klaviyo drives 30% of ecomm revenue for My Community Made—after Mailchimp made $0

My Community Made is an online marketplace where artisans can sell handcrafted art, jewelry, home decor, and more. Bonus: no transaction fees. My Community Made generates revenue via ads and paid subscriptions, which let vendors add extra products to their free storefronts.

Co-owners Edward Fisher Jr., a WordPress developer, and his wife Emma Fisher, an artist, believe this makes their newly-profitable site a more interesting place to shop, and a healthier place to sell.

Learn how Klaviyo’s segmentation and WooCommerce integration simplify operations for My Community Made

Challenge

Email marketing is the “trickiest part” of My Community Made’s marketing mix, Fisher explains. The marketplace needs to send different messaging to vendors—who might buy subscriptions, and care about new platform functionality—and shoppers interested in new crafts.

That was hard to do with Mailchimp.

For one, Mailchimp’s rigid platform and confusing documentation made it difficult to pull in API events. Fisher could only target on a limited number of parameters.

Even that was hard, because Mailchimp was poorly maintained. It was technically possible to create a segment of people who bought subscriptions, but each subscription product had to be selected from a glitchy, hard-to-use menu.

In a year with Mailchimp, the glitch never got fixed, Fisher recalls.

Mailchimp’s recommendation engine couldn’t understand My Community Made’s two-sided audience, either. Their automated product recommendation emails never drove a sale for My Community Made.

Fisher suspects that customers and vendors alike got subscription recommendations, which were only relevant for vendors.

By the end of a year with Mailchimp, My Community Made had made $0 from email marketing.

The final straw: Mailchimp’s WooCommerce integration couldn’t ingest their product images in the popular, lightweight WebP format. In their final days on the platform, email automations showed broken images.

Mailchimp support had no timeline for resolving the issue.

Solution

Fisher saw Klaviyo recommended in an article, and discovered it would cost 37% less per month than their Mailchimp plan. Bonus: Klaviyo’s flexible platform supported WebP images.

Fisher was also drawn to Klaviyo CDP. Though My Community Made doesn’t use it yet, “if we scale to a certain size, not only can we use Klaviyo as a CRM, but we can add on CDP and keep growing with it,” he says.

Klaviyo’s API documentation is a market edge. Mailchimp is so closed off.

Switching over was easy. Fisher used Klaviyo’s self-serve Mailchimp integration to import his data into Klaviyo. It only took about 2 hours, and he saw no site downtime during the switch.

In their first week with Klaviyo, My Community Made drove their first email-attributed revenue.

Now, filtering by purchase history is more user-friendly, and Fisher can easily work with the Klaviyo API to create custom events. Exhibit A: he was able to code a custom Yith wishlist plug-in in an hour, mainly by copy and pasting from online documentation.

That wouldn’t have been possible with Mailchimp.

“Klaviyo’s API documentation is a market edge,” Fisher says. “Mailchimp is so closed off. They didn’t really tell us how the code worked.”

Strategy

In less than a year with Klaviyo, My Community Made has launched a more sophisticated targeting strategy, using Klaviyo segmentation and flow filters. Already, they can target subscribers based on:

• Vendor vs. shopper status: This is easy to build into flow triggers.For instance, My Community Made’s product-focused abandoned cart flow only goes to customers who didn’t abandon a cart with a vendor subscription in it.
• Home state: Fisher now segments My Community Made’s audience by billing state—a data point automatically pulled in via Klaviyo’s WooCommerce integration. This lets him regularly email shoppers about craft fairs in their area.
• Product category preferences: In Klaviyo, Fisher can segment customers based on whether they’ve recently viewed a product in a certain category, added it to their wishlist or cart, or bought it outright. Then, he can target them with category-specific campaigns.

These personalized touches have helped grow the slice of My Community’s total ecommerce revenue from email from 0% with Mailchimp to 30% in the last 3 months with Klaviyo.

Fisher now recommends Klaviyo to every ecommerce team he encounters. It’s an impressively developer-friendly platform, and it makes life easy for less technical teams with its 350+ pre-built integrations.

“Klaviyo’s WooCommerce integration means you don’t need to pay a developer in the beginning,” Fisher says. “You get the CRM set up, you install Klaviyo, maybe you need help placing the short code for the email sign-up, and then the rest of it you can just do from the Klaviyo dashboard.”

Klaviyo’s WooCommerce integration means you don’t need to pay a developer in the beginning.