Omnisend vs Klaviyo: Re-stickable Photo Brand Makes 4x More Revenue
When Emma Falk was in high school, she received news that no one ever wants to hear: she had Acute Myeloid Leukemia just five years after she was declared cancer-free from Hodgkin’s Lymphoma.
Emma began treatment and was moved from hospital room to hospital room.
In an effort to make her feel more comfortable, her family surrounded her with pictures of the people, places, and pets that she loved. But every time Emma moved rooms, it became a hassle to take down the pictures and set them up again. And the pictures were damaged or lost in the shuffle.
A year later, Emma got the news that she and her family had been hoping for: she was cancer-free!
Shortly after she got the great news, she was off to college. Much like the hospital room, Emma decorated her room with pictures. But once again, the same issue arose when she tried to take them down or move them around—the pictures stuck together or got ruined.
As Emma progressed in college, her mom, Jodi, ran into the same issue of easily surrounding her father-in-law with pictures to make him more comfortable in constantly changing assisted living spaces. Why wasn’t there a re-stickable photo that could easily be peeled off walls and moved without the photo being damaged? With this idea in mind, the two decided to make a go of building a business around a re-stickable photo.
“My mom had really good business experience. She was a product manager at Ray-Ban and was the Chief Administrative and Information Officer at a publicly-traded company for 13 years,” said Emma.
Despite holding these prestigious jobs, Emma mentioned that her mom always wanted to start a business and felt that her diverse background prepared her.
The launch and growth
After graduating college, Emma took on a job working at an advertising agency. While she was working at the job, Jodi was busy building what would become reStickity.
“She worked on it for between six to 12 months as a side project, just trying to get the idea out there to see if we could get any traction on it. During this time, she developed the name, branding, website, logistics, and the printing,” said Emma.
After Jodi launched the website and the idea gained some traction, Emma left her job at the ad agency and jumped into reStickity full time where she focused on learning and growing the business.
“When you become an entrepreneur, you are wearing so many different hats so you need to teach yourself so many new skills,” she said. In particular, Emma took webinars to teach herself how to run Facebook ads.
As Emma and Jodi each learned new skills, the business started to grow. They attribute their growth to three different factors:
1 | Meeting a need and communicating it through email and social media
“We identified an initial need for re-stickable photos which has grown to include re-stickable prints. People want to display their pictures and images, but not all surfaces are nail-, tape-, and tack-friendly or magnetic,” said Emma.
“Our initial target market was college students interested in decorating their dorms with pictures without losing their security deposit because of wall damage. During the back-to-school season, we targeted this audience using Facebook Ads, email, and organic social media posts. During the school year, we emailed and continued to target purchasers on social media to encourage them to purchase more reStickitys to build out their existing photo collage,” she said.
2 | Creating a high-quality product and memorable brand experience
“One of the keys to our growth has been our ability to deliver a high-quality product and a satisfying, memorable brand experience for our customers. We’ve been able to structure our email flows using Klaviyo to successfully manage customer expectations,” said Emma.
3 | Being receptive to new business opportunities
“We started as a business-to-consumer (B2C) company offering an easy way to display pictures on any surface. As people learned about reStickity, they energetically shared their ideas on other possible uses such as displaying motivational or inspirational quotes, Save The Date notices, employee identification, and more—the list continues to grow,” said Emma.
“Although B2C remains a large part of our business, we ventured into the business-to-business (B2B) space when we recognized re-stickable photos could be a viable alternative to expensive, traditional employee nameplates used in corporate offices and stores,” she said.
One of the keys to our growth has been our ability to deliver a high-quality product and a satisfying, memorable brand experience for our customers. We’ve been able to structure our email flows using Klaviyo to successfully manage customer expectations.
Emma Falk, Founder, reStickity
The email situation
After Shopify and Mailchimp broke-up in the Spring of 2019, Emma and Jodi were forced to look for Mailchimp alternatives, which led them to Omnisend.
They had reStickity on Omnisend for about ten months before Emma began looking for alternatives. Specifically, Emma outlined two of the reasons why they were looking to make a move.
1 | Email design
“I’m not a designer, but guess I’ve become one in this whole journey. Designing emails with Omnisend was so difficult and getting a hold of customer service was impossible.”
2 | Lack of best practices provided by Omnisend
“Our open rates were bad with Omnisend. Flows, segmentation, deliverability, and not just blasting one email out were a huge learning experience and were never recommended to me by Omnisend,” said Emma.
“When I first got on the phone with Klaviyo, they were talking about best practices. There’s nothing like that in Omnisend where flows are set up with recommended delayed times with a set number of emails that should be sent in a flow and what the trigger should be.”
In conducting some research on alternatives, Emma reached out to a mentor of hers who’s co-founders of a brand that also uses Klaviyo. He and various other ecommerce store owners convinced Emma and Jodi to make the switch over to Klaviyo.
The migration from Omnisend to Klaviyo
Emma mentioned that she was worried about the migration since they had just moved to Omnisend ten months earlier.
But she told me that the migration was straightforward. The Klaviyo team walked her through best practices and how to ease into deliverability, “which was never something that was talked about with Omnisend.”
Once Emma was set-up in Klaviyo, she found it easy to build her email lists and clean them for contacts that were no longer engaging. After this was complete, she set-up initial flows, and from there, started sending out weekly emails to engaged subscribers.
“Everything was so easy since all of the templates were already set-up, so you aren’t starting from scratch. The pre-built templates helped to open up bandwidth between my mom and me to figure out the content that’s going to go in the email as opposed to figuring out the structure of the flow and the content,” said Emma.
Klaviyo gave Emma and Jodi their time back. And, as any entrepreneur knows, you can never have enough time.
The pre-built templates helped to open up bandwidth between my mom and me to figure out the content that’s going to go in the email as opposed to figuring out the structure of the flow and the content.
Emma Falk, Founder, reStickity
The results
It didn’t take long for reStickity to start seeing results after they made the move from Omnisend to Klaviyo.
“Since we were able to clean our list and send out emails to those that were more likely to actually act on them, we saw results from these emails fast. With Omnisend, we had poor deliverability rates and very low email attributed revenue,” said Emma.
“Now that we’re on Klaviyo, we’re seeing revenue come in from emails that we were sending. That was impressive to us and it happened within our first month,” she said.
Since making the move, Emma mentioned that they are seeing over four times the amount of revenue attributed to email with Klaviyo compared to what they were seeing with Omnisend.
“We’re seeing very strong results with Klaviyo and love it when we pay for something that’s working for us. We have such limited time between the two of us, so when we spend time on something that works for us, we want to keep running with it,” said Emma.
In addition to seeing an increase in revenue, Emma mentioned that “everything across the board has improved,” including a ten percent jump in open rates and a two percent jump in click rates.
We’re seeing very strong results with Klaviyo and love it when we pay for something that’s working for us. We have such limited time between the two of us, so when we spend time on something that works for us, we want to keep running with it.
Emma Falk, Founder, reStickity
The future
With the help of Klaviyo, Emma and Jodi are starting to pick up significant momentum with reStickity.
“We’re starting to really understand our customers so we can hit them with more relevant information when they order. We’re also getting subscribers who have never purchased to make that first purchase,” said Emma.
We’re starting to really understand our customers so we can hit them with more relevant information when they order. We’re also getting subscribers who have never purchased to make that first purchase.
Emma Falk, Founder, reStickity
Additionally, they’re investing more time and resources into paid Facebook advertising. With the help of Klaviyo, they’re pulling the new subscribers that they’re getting from the advertising through the funnel and converting them.
Going hand-in-hand with this digital investment, they’re spending more time on educating their subscribers and social media followers about what reStickity is.
All of this is a step in the right direction of the mother-daughter team’s business becoming a household name: “You call a tissue a Kleenex. We would love for people to call a re-stickable photo a reStickity.”