Stone Brewing grows revenue from flows 62.8% YoY with help from Klaviyo’s GoTab integration

Stone Brewing began in San Marcos, California 25+ years ago, with two founders—Greg Koch and Steve Wagner—and one dream: to disrupt the industrialized beer scene of the ’90s with independent craft beers.

Their efforts turned into an empire with an iconic gargoyle logo. Today, Stone Brewing has 7 taprooms and breweries, 6 in California. They also sell their beer through an online store, and a network of retailers spanning all 50 states and 40+ countries.

That’s a lot of different sales channels—and they use Klaviyo to grow them all.

Learn how Klaviyo’s ecosystem helps Stone Brewing cross-sell, reward fans, and plan events

Challenge

Stone Brewing’s online beer and merch store wasn’t hitting revenue goals.

And their tech stack wasn’t quite gelling—which made it hard to pinpoint the issue.

The team used Mailchimp for email marketing, but couldn’t reliably attribute ecommerce revenue (or shortfalls) to specific sends.

Kelsey Vonk, their email marketing lead, also spent about 4 hours per month uploading new email marketing subscribers into Mailchimp. The team hadn’t found a way to connect it to two key external tools:

• GoTab, the restaurant commerce platform Stone Brewing used in its 8 brick-and-mortar locations
• Eventbrite, the ticketing tool they used for major events, like their 27th anniversary celebration

It was time for a more integrated software stack.

Solution

The brewery migrated to Shopify for ecommerce, and Klaviyo for marketing and customer data consolidation.

Why Klaviyo over Mailchimp? The team loved Klaviyo’s tech ecosystem and robust attribution.

Now, Vonk spends 0 hours per month on manual contact uploading. Thanks to pre-built integrations, new email sign-ups from GoTab and Eventbrite, as well as associated purchase data, import into Klaviyo automatically.

And with Klaviyo’s seamless Shopify integration and customizable last-click attribution, Vonk can easily see the specific items users buy after clicking an email link.

“It’s been great being able to see more actionable email metrics with Klaviyo,” she says.

It’s been great being able to see more actionable email metrics with Klaviyo.

Strategy

With much of Stone Brewing’s tech stack connected to Klaviyo, Vonk can leverage their centralized customer data in fresh, impactful ways.

Even though she has been an email marketing team of one at times, Vonk has still recently used Klaviyo to:

• Launch a welcome flow just for in-person diners: When in-person guests sign up for marketing emails in GoTab, it triggers a Klaviyo welcome flow that offers a discount on online merch. This popular cross-sell offer has helped drive 62.8% YoY growth in revenue from flows YTD.
• Compile robust invite lists: When Stone Brewing hosts an event, Vonk promotes it to everyone likely to go by building a segment in Klaviyo of people who previously dined at the venue, DTC shoppers living nearby, and previous Eventbrite ticket buyers. In summer 2023, 25.8% of Stone Brewing’s total Eventbrite revenue came from Klaviyo.
• Pinpoint ultra-superfans: Every 2 weeks, Stone Brewing releases a small-batch of archival beer to email subscribers that sells out within the day. Vonk can use Klaviyo and GoTab data to create a segment of guests who both engage regularly with the beer drops and visit the breweries—and target them with unique rewards.

“The ability to integrate other platforms with Klaviyo is just fantastic,” Vonk says. “That’s really my favorite part about Klaviyo—all the integrations vs. all the manual uploading and segmentation we had to do back in the day.”

The ability to integrate other platforms with Klaviyo is just fantastic. That’s really my favorite part about Klaviyo.