Grind blends smart segmentation with email and SMS to keep customer relationships piping hot

Grind Coffee has brewed up quite the cult following since David Abrahamovitch founded his first cafe in 2011. Today, the brand has 11 London-based cafes, coffee shops, and restaurants, plus 3 coffee trucks.

But the boom in physical stores only tells half of the story. It’s Grind’s online growth—particularly post-pandemic—that has made this brand into an ecommerce powerhouse.

Learn how Grind brews its customer segments into tasty email and SMS experiences 

Challenge

When the pandemic hit, Grind had to pivot their business model to be primarily online, fast. Having switched to Klaviyo from Mailchimp just before COVID struck, Grind’s email revenue between February and the end of March 2020 grew by 3,142%.

But when Bao Tang became Grind’s CRM manager in 2022, he quickly realised that Grind’s online marketing, while effective during the pandemic, needed to become more sophisticated if it was going to match the business’s rapid growth in the longer term.

Grind’s marketing strategy had to support its subscription-based business model—which would require sending smarter communications at each critical moment of the buyer journey to convince someone to subscribe.

“We had to get precise with our segmentation,” Tang says. “When a subscriber makes a one-time purchase, or cancels after they redeem a discount, the messages are different. We have to support and automate those customer journeys with the right communications.”

Solution 

To power personalised email and SMS interactions, Grind uses 53 always-on flows that deliver highly targeted messages to their customers.

“We’ve run RFM analysis to determine what qualifies someone as engaged or unengaged,” Tang says. From this analysis, Grind has created segments based on engagement and propensity to spend, which it then standardised in Klaviyo. 

“We created 4 engaged segments that we regularly share product updates and recommendations with,” Tang explains.

“With Klaviyo, we can see if someone is a one-time purchaser, subscriber, churned subscriber or a never purchased customer,” Tang says. “Another 7 segments are used as a re-engagement piece to recapture previously lapsed customers with sales and new product launches.

“We have a lot of different buying journeys,” Tang adds. “With Klaviyo, it’s easy to analyse customer behaviours and extrapolate the findings into a more personalised strategy that engages each segment.”

Strategy

In addition to responding to patterns in customer buying behaviours with personalised communications and offers, Grind can use their customer data to evaluate success and shift strategy when necessary. Consider a metric like customer acquisition cost (CAC), accessible in Klaviyo through Shopify’s Lifetimely app. 

“With Lifetimely, we can see a buyer’s CAC from when they were acquired. We then use Klaviyo to track this going forward and tailor our messaging approach based on that data,” Tang explains.

With this information, Bao’s team can continuously test and optimise Grind’s messaging to both subscribers and one-time buyers, reducing CAC and increasing customer lifetime value.

Grind also uses pop-ups and embedded forms to incentivise SMS sign-ups. In the first 6 months of 2024, they earned over 81,000 new SMS subscribers, a 35.8% increase on the same time period from the previous year. 

The team has also been experimenting with forms display optimisation—a new Klaviyo AI feature that tests multiple versions of a sign-up form to find the highest-converting display time, then automatically sets the winning version live.

“We use Klaviyo AI to quickly optimise our forms. All we have to do is hit a button and Klaviyo does the rest—it’s saved us a huge amount of time,” Tang says.