Red Clay Hot Sauce began in a restaurant kitchen. Working on R&D for an esteemed Charleston restaurant, chef Geoff Rhyne created a fresh take on his family’s old hot sauce recipe: a Fresno chili hot sauce that became a cult favorite. Rhyne partnered with Molly Fienning to turn it into a standalone culinary brand, named after the red clay fields of his home state, Georgia.

Today, Red Clay Hot Sauce makes a wide array of restaurant-caliber spicy condiments, from hot sauces to spicy salts. Customers can buy them in major grocery stores like Whole Foods and Publix—or through the brand’s Shopify storefront.

Learn why Red Clay Hot Sauce left Mailchimp for Klaviyo, and never looked back

Challenge

Email is an important revenue driver for Red Clay Hot Sauce. It helps the team drive DTC conversions from fresh leads and loyalists alike—and DTC is their highest-margin channel.

“Email raises the lifetime value of our customers,” says Red Clay co-founder and CEO Molly Fienning.

At least, it can. But with Mailchimp, it was hard to get email marketing to live up to its potential, Fienning recalls.

For one, Red Clay ran into issues integrating their Mailchimp account with their Shopify store, which made basic email marketing activities a challenge.

Mailchimp wasn’t easy to use, either. Fienning is a tech-savvy founder—she was a computer science major in college—but it still wasn’t a very intuitive process for her to audit the logic behind Mailchimp automations, or segment a Mailchimp audience.

Solution

Fienning’s network recommended Klaviyo for its “beautiful UX” and robust Shopify integration, Fienning says, and she and her team decided to try it.

The migration was “efficient” and “super easy,” she remembers—and she knew she had made the right call when she started using Klaviyo’s flow editor.

“Seeing a flow mapped out visually in Klaviyo was very different from what I had experienced with Mailchimp,” Fienning says. “That was a really cool value add that I was not getting before.”

Strategy

Since switching, Red Clay has used Klaviyo in a few creative ways to maximize their DTC revenue, with more optimizations on the horizon. Highlights include:

• Double-sending campaigns: Fienning likes to send campaigns twice—the second time to non-openers of the first campaign, with a fresh subject line. It drives incremental revenue, and “we get a long-tail effect from the creative assets,” she explains.
• Leaning into back-in-stock messaging: Red Clay has a back-in-stock flow for customers who request updates on a specific SKU, but Fienning also likes sending back-in-stock (and low-in-stock) campaigns to broader audiences. These branded sends, including quotes and recipes, create FOMO around bestsellers that drives conversions.
• Next up—flow optimization: The brand has flows live, of course. But in 2024, Fienning wants to refresh the creative and optimize the logic and timing through more A/B testing. The ultimate goal: to drive more revenue.

Overall, Fienning is glad Red Clay switched to Klaviyo. The platform has helped her create a sustainable foundation for Red Clay’s recent growth.

“I would 100% recommend Klaviyo,” she says. “It’s our highest-return marketing technology. It’s a way for us to expand the lifetime value of our customers without much cost, and it gives us an opportunity to grow our ecommerce store, which is our highest-margin sales channel. Klaviyo supports us in building a strong, sustainable business.”