Wild West Pool Supplies’ revenue from email jumps 82% YoY after switching to Klaviyo

Wild West Pool Supplies is a DTC pool and spa parts retailer headquartered, fittingly, in the US city most dense with residential pools: Phoenix, Arizona. For the past decade, Wild West has sold pumps, heater parts, and cleaning chemicals, growing from a side hustle into co-founder Mark Zalewski’s full-time job. Email has been a key channel fueling that growth.

Why Wild West Pool Supplies switched to Klaviyo—and regrets not doing it sooner

Challenge

Zalewski worked at Keap when he founded Wild West Pool Supplies, and it seemed like a no-brainer to use the small-business marketing automation platform for his start-up. He knew Keap inside and out, and, as an employee, he had a free account. But Keap didn’t offer a BigCommerce integration or revenue reporting out of the box.

Zalewski relied on a complex web of third-party automations to make Keap work for him. Sort of.

Solution

In summer 2022, friends in ecommerce bet Zalewski that if he tested Klaviyo for 90 days, he’d never go back. So he tried it, and committed to fully switching over by the end of Klaviyo onboarding—after just 30 days.

Klaviyo was built for ecommerce businesses like his. With one click, he synced Wild West Pool Supplies’ BigCommerce store and his Klaviyo account, porting in 8 years of customer data and sales activity, plus his product catalog of 45,000+ SKUS.

He was never going back to Keap.

“If you are an ecommerce business owner doing over $100K a month, you are making a mistake if you are not using Klaviyo,” Zalewski says. “We should have switched 12 months before we did—our business would be in a better position today if we had.”

If you are an ecommerce business owner doing over $100K a month, you are making a mistake if you are not using Klaviyo. We should have switched 12 months before we did—our business would be in a better position today if we had.

Strategy

Wild West Pool Supplies unlocked a new level of data-driven email strategy with Klaviyo. The platform made it easy to see relevant business analytics.

For example, in BigCommerce, orders get tagged with a series of 3 post-purchase statuses: “Awaiting fulfillment,” “Awaiting shipment,” and “Shipped.”

That’s great for managing the supply chain in BigCommerce’s back-end, but using three separate order statuses in email made figuring out big-picture cash flow fussy.

Luckily, in Klaviyo he can group all those store-side statuses into one catch-all status, “Fulfilled.”

Paired with Klaviyo’s out-of-the-box dashboards, attribution, and integrations, this gives Zalewski easy, real-time visibility into revenue—especially revenue per recipient and revenue by flow.

So as soon as he started with Klaviyo, Zalewski learned that his abandoned cart flow was a top revenue driver worth A/B testing and optimizing. In the past 30 days, it’s driven more revenue than any other Wild West flow.

“I have a for-life free Keap account,” Zalewski says. “I do not use that to manage Wild West anymore. I am paying $1K a month for Klaviyo. Klaviyo is that much better.”

I have a for-life free Keap account. I do not use that to manage Wild West anymore. I am paying $1K a month for Klaviyo. Klaviyo is that much better.