Parts Avatar earns 84% of Klaviyo revenue from flows after switching from Mailchimp

Parts Avatar, Canada’s largest online auto parts store, supports the right to repair movement: The team believes everyone should have affordable access to the information and parts they need to repair a car.

In that spirit, the retailer simplifies car repair for DIYers and mechanics, shipping affordable parts quickly all across Canada. The retailer also has two brick-and-mortar pick-up locations, with more coming soon.

To stay in touch with their car-loving customers—keeping them up to date on deals, new locations, and more—they rely on Klaviyo.

Learn how Klaviyo’s flexible data architecture and real-time automations help Parts Avatar win

Challenge

When Parts Avatar used Mailchimp to send marketing emails, they ran into two technical difficulties: clunky channel-level reporting and time-consuming segmentation.

Mailchimp only offered transactional emails through a slow, separate app, Mandrill. To avoid delays, Parts Avatar ran their transactional emails on AWS—but channel-level reporting was still a challenge.

And audience segmentation was tedious. The Parts Avatar team needed to manually refresh their Mailchimp segments before every usage—and each refresh took 5-10 minutes.

This made it tough to send post-purchase product recommendations targeting specific segments, or to even see which of their 20+ segments a customer fell into at a given time.

“We wanted a full overview of the customer, but that wasn’t available in Mailchimp at all,” says Sandip Chaudhuri, VP of product marketing.

We wanted a full overview of the customer, but that wasn’t available in Mailchimp at all.

Solution

On a data level, “the event-driven model drew us to Klaviyo,” says Chaudhuri.

They could centralize engagement events from all emails, plus events from their custom-coded site. Then they could see all that data in channel-level dashboards and individual customer profiles.

It took only 2 months to fully migrate to Klaviyo, warm their IP, and pull in 4 years of purchase history. Chaudhuri was impressed.

“I’ve done migrations before, and I expected it to be a lot tougher,” he says. “Whenever we had questions, we would get responses from Klaviyo technical support in less than 24 hours.”

Strategy

An early win with Klaviyo: Parts Avatar was able to set up a personalized flow of post-purchase product recommendations that goes out on a rolling, automated basis.

They could only send this type of email once a month in Mailchimp.

Now that these emails are sent more frequently, click-through rates have jumped roughly 3x, and open rates have held steady.

Klaviyo’s AI-powered predictive analytics also opened up new segmentation opportunities for Parts Avatar. The team can now:

• Flag their highest-value customers to support: Parts Avatar created a segment of customers with highest order frequency and forecasted total CLV, and shared it with customer support to ensure their tickets get priority.
• Better distinguish B2B and B2C shoppers: Parts Avatar actually realized the size of their B2B custom base by using Klaviyo predictive analytics. Their segment of self-identified mechanics and customers with high total CLV—beyond the reach of most DIYers—was so substantial, they decided to launch a distinct B2B marketing strategy.

“All of the predictions and personalizations are helping us tremendously,” says Chaudhuri. “Without Klaviyo, we would struggle to offer our customers up-to-date, relevant information, and our pace would slow.”

All of the predictions and personalizations are helping us tremendously. Without Klaviyo, we would struggle to offer our customers up-to-date, relevant information, and our pace would slow.