Toots Design uses Klaviyo to drive 50% of revenue from email

After 10 years of working as a ski instructor, Lorna Gibson decided to swap her ski poles for pencils and turn her passion for illustration and storytelling into a business. She set up Toots Design in 2019 with the goal of sharing whimsical characters and heartwarming stories with readers young and old. Many of Lorna’s stories touch on emotive subjects such as fear, friendship and kindness, and her best-selling book is a tender story about grief. Toots Design adopted Klaviyo in 2020.

Learn how an artistic entrepreneur uses email automation to create a personal connection with subscribers

Challenge

As an artist, Lorna wants to be able to focus her time and energy on creative pursuits instead of the technical aspects of sales and marketing. Nevertheless, building and nurturing a subscriber list is vital to the business as it relies on owned media channels to drive growth. Initially Lorna ran online ads very successfully, but Apple’s 2021 iOS update stopped cookies from working, which made the activity cease to be viable. 

When Lorna first started gathering subscribers she would often send people a free pack of postcards in the mail as a welcome gift, but as her list grew this became unsustainable. Now, she looks to email to build a personal connection with her readers.

Solution

Lorna adopted Klaviyo as her email marketing partner after one of her peers recommended it. She found its integration with Shopify very straightforward – even for an ecommerce novice. Klaviyo’s customer onboarding team showed her how to use the email builder, create segments and automations, and embed a sign-up form on the website, and this meant that within a few weeks Lorna’s customer contact programme was up and running.

The Klaviyo email setup was really easy to adjust to and in a very short space of time it felt like second nature creating my emails. I was able to save key templates which helped me create emails with consistent design and branding elements.

Lorna Gibson, Owner, Toots Design

Strategy

Toots Design’s website uses a Klaviyo pop-up form to gather subscribers and it offers a discount code as a sign-up incentive. The code is valid for one month and during that period, a welcome series comprising four weekly emails introduces some of the characters and stories Lorna has created. Subscribers to Toots Design continue to receive a beautiful weekly newsletter that showcases Lorna’s talent. This authentic content has resulted in the brand having a highly engaged audience.

In addition to her book about grief, Lorna has designed a range of comforting greeting cards that are sensitive to the subject. Using the data in Klaviyo, she has created a segment for customers who have bought products from this range so she can send them personalised messages post-purchase.

Being able to connect with my customers with care and consideration means a lot, especially when they have purchased a product such as Love Never Dies. Being able to tailor my messaging thanks to available data has been a great benefit of using Klaviyo.

Lorna Gibson, Owner, Toots Design