Weee! launches flows 2x faster after switching from Mailchimp to Klaviyo

Weee! Is the largest online Asian grocery store in the US, with a catalog of 10K+ hard-to-find products from around the world.

CEO Larry Liu founded the store in 2015, to tackle a problem that had plagued him ever since he moved from Wuhan, China to California: the dearth of Chinese groceries in his area. He’d drive for hours, looking for his favorite foods from home.

Today, Weee! solves for exactly that, delivering Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, and Filipino groceries to doorsteps nationwide.

Learn why Weee! wanted to build “the whole stack of lifecycle marketing” in Klaviyo

Challenge

The growth leaders at Weee!, used to work at a startup that used Klaviyo. But when he joined Weee!, they had to switch to Weee!’s email marketing platform at the time, Mailchimp.

The switch felt like a loss.

Sure, the Weee! growth team could still easily send email campaigns. But to scale the rapidly-growing grocery store, “we wanted to keep the whole stack of lifecycle marketing inside of our email platform,” growth marketing specialist Erica Leon explains.

They wanted to build out scalable, hyper-personalized ecommerce automations to make emails more useful and “delightful” for customers, Leon says—but in Mailchimp, the more branches in a flow’s decision tree, the more it cost.

“The pricing in Mailchimp made it difficult to scale the necessary automations,” says Leon. “The dealbreaker was the flows. Every automation decision becomes a financial decision. It was never going to work.”

The pricing in Mailchimp made it difficult to scale the necessary automations. The dealbreaker was the flows. Every automation decision becomes a financial decision. It was never going to work.

Weee! had their engineering team build their flows outside Mailchimp as a workaround, but it caused friction, too: A/B testing one image or subject line against another required extensive custom coding, and the team struggled to manage their email frequency. Their spam rate was high: 10%, Leon estimates.

Solution

Growth leaders started pitching Klaviyo internally at Weee! To build momentum, they highlighted a few key differences between Klaviyo and Mailchimp:

• Klaviyo flows are much more scalable, and priced by profiles and sends — not per logic branch.
• Klaviyo A/B testing and flow set-up can be handled quickly by marketing, without support from their dev team.
• Klaviyo’s Smart Sending feature would make it easier to manage email frequency and improve deliverability.

Once the switch was complete, the Weee! growth team saw immediate time savings. The time to launch a simple A/B test dropped from 3 days to about an hour, Leon estimates. The time to launch a flow dropped from a week to 1 day.

Strategy

Within the brand’s first year on Klaviyo, Weee!’s revenue from email hit all-time highs.

That’s thanks in part to evergreen automations, tailored to customers’ engagement level, preferred language, and region. In Q1 2024, Weee!’s revenue from automations was up 88% YoY.

Going forward, the team plans to launch 6+ new automations to support a re-launch of their loyalty program. The new flows will encourage customers to redeem deals and hit key spending thresholds to access new tiers of the program.

Klaviyo makes it easy for our marketing teams to understand our customers and send personalized communications.

Another Klaviyo channel Weee! is testing in 2024: Klaviyo push notifications.

Weee! has a native grocery app, and historically used a separate platform to manage push messaging. But “we really needed the same audience-building features that we use for emails on the push notifications, just for the communication to be consistent,” Leon says.

Consolidating push and email in the same platform has so far improved the customer experience, and simplified internal workflows.

“Klaviyo makes it easy for our marketing teams to understand our customers and send personalized communications,” Leon says. “Before Klaviyo, if the Vietnamese marketing team wanted to know how many of their customers have shopped in the last 15 days, they would have to ask our engineers to do a query on the database, which takes much longer.”

“Now,” Leon says, “they can just go in and segment and send those customers a special email. It makes all the difference.”