How Les Raffineurs saves time with Klaviyo’s PrestaShop integration while managing multiple storefronts
70%
increase in YoY revenue driven by email
375k
email subscribers
2
PrestaShop websites integrated with Klaviyo
Following their struggle with finding interesting and never-before-seen gifts for their friends, Romain Jourdan and Julien Bergis launched their Parisian e-concept store—an online store that sells thoughtfully curated products from different brands and designers—on PrestaShop in 2014. The duo wanted to provide a selection of unique gifts created by artisanal designers and small producers while promoting unknown brands, and so, Les Raffineurs was born.
Today, the company has two dozen employees, five brick-and-mortar stores across France with three more in development, and two brands on PrestaShop: “Les Raffineurs – cadeaux synonymes de plaisirs à offrir et partager” and “Les Petits Raffineurs – chouettes trouvailles pour petites canailles, cadeaux de naissance, décoration de chambre d’enfants”—the latter of which focuses on unique and artisanal gifts for children.
Jean-Baptiste Gauche (usually called JB), ecommerce manager (in French, responsable digital and ecommerce) at Les Raffineurs, recently told us more about the business, why they chose Klaviyo and PrestaShop to help them grow, and how they integrated the two platforms through Klaviyo’s direct integration.
How Les Raffineurs scaled their business with Klaviyo and PrestaShop
Ever since Romain and Julien founded their e-concept store, they used PrestaShop, which JB said had a lot to do with the flexibility that PrestaShop offers their growing ecommerce business.
PrestaShop is open source, which means we can do anything we want with it and change it however we want. We have flexibility. If we want to add a feature, remove a certain component because it’s slowing down the website, and so on, we can. PrestaShop’s community is also really big in French-speaking countries. There are a lot of developers working on PrestaShop who know the solution well, so most of the time, we’ll find straightforward answers online for free, or the developers assist us quickly when needed.
Jean-Baptiste Gauche
, Ecommerce Manager, Les Raffineurs
But while PrestaShop simplified managing Les Raffineurs’ two ecommerce stores (Les Raffineurs – cadeaux de caractère, expériences à vivre and Les Petits Raffineurs – chouettes trouvailles pour petites canailles, cadeaux de naissance, décoration de chambre d’enfants), it hasn’t always been easy finding just one intelligent email marketing platform that integrates well with PrestaShop.
JB recalled that before Klaviyo, the brand used several email providers to handle all their requirements, which doubled and sometimes even tripled their workload.
We were using one email platform for Les Raffineurs, and both Mailjet and ShopiMind for Les Petits Raffineurs because Mailjet was just for campaign marketing and didn’t have automation, so we had to use another tool for that. As you can easily understand, having three different tools for two websites to manage means that each time, we were building templates that weren’t 100 percent compatible with the other tool, and each time we changed a flow, we had to do this on two more tools. This wasn’t practical and made it hard to scale. We wanted one tool to rule them all.
Jean-Baptiste Gauche
, Ecommerce Manager, Les Raffineurs
Enter Klaviyo.
Les Raffineurs went live with Klaviyo’s PrestaShop integration in Q4 2020 and they took just two weeks to set up all their basic automations across the two brands.
The integration was really easy to set up. There are lots of tools on the Klaviyo help centre to show you how to set everything up properly, and the interface is user-friendly, too! You just switch from one brand to the other for the data, so it’s easy-peasy as you say in English!
Jean-Baptiste Gauche
, Ecommerce Manager, Les Raffineurs
How Les Raffineurs saves time using Klaviyo and PrestaShop
Since integrating Klaviyo with their PrestaShop websites, the team at Les Raffineurs have finally achieved what they wanted: “One tool to rule them all.” But they’ve also achieved something else just as coveted—time back to focus on other marketing tasks.
We’ve easily saved over two hours per newsletter. We often send one newsletter per week. We went from around two-and-a-half hours for one person to create the newsletter and another 30 minutes for a second person to validate the newsletter to just 30 minutes total. Klaviyo made that possible.
Jean-Baptiste Gauche
, Ecommerce Manager, Les Raffineurs
Upon digging into how JB and the team save this amount of time, he explained it was mostly down to exactly how Klaviyo integrates with PrestaShop—and in particular, their product catalogue.
One of the main reasons why we wanted to switch to Klaviyo was because of the ‘smart catalogue.’ All the product data from PrestaShop goes straight into Klaviyo, which drastically saves time building newsletters and email automations. Product IDs sync data between PrestaShop and Klaviyo, so if you make a change on PrestaShop, it arrives straight into Klaviyo. This catalogue sync feature didn’t exist in our previous email platform or Mailjet, so it was quite manual. Now, we’ve saved so much time that we can dedicate to other tasks like increasing the efficiency of our flows or analysing our customer data more.
Jean-Baptiste Gauche
, Ecommerce Manager, Les Raffineurs
This also means that Les Raffineurs can now better match their email content with subscribers’ specific needs by showing different product blocks across different emails.
We send two different product catalogues from PrestaShop to Klaviyo—one with just the main variants and one with all the different variants of each product and the stock of each variant. This way, we can display the individual variants or just the main product where needed. Say someone’s looking at a different type of t-shirt and we send them an email to say, ‘Hey, we have more.’ At that moment, we don’t want to display the small, medium, or large sizes in the same email, we just want to show the different types of t-shirts. So, we’ll only display the main product in the email rather than all the variants of every single product. On the other side, if someone is looking at one type of t-shirt and is not sure of what colour to get, the abandoned cart emails will focus on showing the different colours and variants we have.
Jean-Baptiste Gauche
, Ecommerce Manager, Les Raffineurs
How Les Raffineurs builds brand awareness using Klaviyo and PrestaShop
Building relationships with new customers is a priority for Les Raffineurs in growing their business. Using email marketing and several clever digital strategies, Les Raffineurs has achieved six-figure revenue from email marketing alone in the past 90 days.
While Les Raffineurs have signup forms on their websites, which link to their automated welcome series in Klaviyo, JB explained that their challenge is to encourage signups despite not offering discounts or bonuses because of the fair price target they’ve established in collaboration with the artisans and brands they work with.
Instead, they offer their subscribers the chance to enter an enticing giveaway and win up to €600 worth of products.
To prevent us from not having enough new subscribers in our database, we use contests. So every month, we run a contest saying, ‘Here are the products that’ll feed the season. Just enter the contest and you have a chance to win the prize!’ It worked incredibly well—we doubled our database during the last months of 2020!
Jean-Baptiste Gauche
, Ecommerce Manager, Les Raffineurs
While this strategy has the potential to attract subscribers who only want to hear about the contest and don’t engage with any other emails, JB told us that Les Raffineurs haven’t had to worry about this—likely because their giveaways have a direct connection to their brand and the products they choose to stock.
Once subscribers are in their database, Les Raffineurs uses email as a way of sharing news about exciting product launches and their bestsellers.
Our method is to launch a product the first week and then send a newsletter a few weeks later mixing our bestsellers and the new products we just launched. It gives us the opportunity to promote the products we know work well at this period of time and to also promote our latest arrivals to customers who have followed us for a long time. Email is a relatively cheap advertising medium and has a lot of benefits. It’s an easy way of reminding people we exist, or that we have events, new products, and new stuff we want to promote. Plus, our email automations are bringing in easy revenue while helping our customers.
Jean-Baptiste Gauche
, Ecommerce Manager, Les Raffineurs
Les Raffineurs has several out-of-the-box email automations set up in Klaviyo, including their welcome series, abandoned cart flow, and even emails that celebrate subscribers’ birthdays and half-birthdays.
We have subscribers’ birthday data in our accounts, so why not use it? Our half-birthday flow is a good excuse to say something like, ‘What did you buy last time you bought something from us? Maybe these new products will also interest you.
Jean-Baptiste Gauche
, Ecommerce Manager, Les Raffineurs
JB and the team have even increased the open rate of their cart abandonment emails by over 33 percent following just one A/B test to find out how long they should wait before emailing their customers.
We used to wait between two to four hours before sending someone an email when they abandoned their cart. It had an open rate of 12 percent, which is quite low. We now wait for just 30 minutes to one hour and it’s at 16 or 17 percent, which is quite a drastic change. Here, we can see that the less time we wait to send an email, the more conversions we’ll have.
Jean-Baptiste Gauche
, Ecommerce Manager, Les Raffineurs
Predicting the future: What’s next for Les Raffineurs
While the focus for Les Raffineurs in 2020 was on growth, including increasing their customer base, driving more traffic to their websites, and increasing revenue, JB says the focus for 2021 is to dive deeper into their data to learn more about their customers.
Because we grew drastically in 2020, 2021 is a year where we can focus on having a better customer base, optimising our processes and conversion rates, and how we can perform better for every single customer on our websites or in our database. This is where I think Klaviyo’s predictive analytics has a role to play. Reward programmes are another solution we might explore. We also want to work on driving more repeat purchases. We’ve widened our selection to now offer a range of products to please any palate, as well as accessories to enhance individual style, a selection of exceptional spirits, sports gear, decor, and more. We’ll play around more with what we display on our website to promote these new categories.
Jean-Baptiste Gauche
, Ecommerce Manager, Les Raffineurs
JB also concluded our call by sharing a couple of final tips for other PrestaShop entrepreneurs who want to integrate their ecommerce websites with Klaviyo. He said:
Set up your basic flows as quickly as possible. Don’t wait for the perfect setup of everything or the perfect design—just launch your first flows, so that you have data flowing in and then it’ll be time to optimise and do more. And don’t be afraid of asking questions because there are people that know the solution behind the integration. Even if it’s not possible by default, or it’s not possible with your knowledge, it might be possible with Klaviyo’s knowledge.
Jean-Baptiste Gauche
, Ecommerce Manager, Les Raffineurs