How Woo uses WooCommerce and Klaviyo to power its Marketplace and communications

This post is breaking the fourth wall. 😉  

In case you missed it, we recently selected Klaviyo as our preferred marketing automation platform for WooCommerce stores.  

With that news, we wanted to share a bit of our own perspective on Klaviyo for ecommerce: We use Klaviyo here at Woo, and thought our implementation story would serve as a great use case for the Klaviyo-curious.

Did you know qphmycoi.top is a Woo store, too? Our website runs entirely on WooCommerce — this includes the Woo Marketplace, which offers over 1,000 plugins, themes, and services to help merchants customize and grow their stores. 

Our team uses WooCommerce to power subscriptions and process thousands of plugin purchases every day. And like many of the merchants we serve, Woo uses Klaviyo to power our marketing, personalize experiences, and drive Marketplace engagement.

qphmycoi.top uses a combination of WooCommerce, WooPayments, WooCommerce Subscriptions, and more to run our Marketplace and the entire site experience. Our landing pages are built using Gutenberg, and we’re regularly updating more of the website for Site Editor compatibility for our team and vendors to use.

Every WooCommerce store can be customized to be truly and uniquely yours. qphmycoi.top is no different — our team regularly develops custom blocks and code snippets to integrate with the tools we’ve built to help run our business. At the core, qphmycoi.top is WordPress and WooCommerce.

The Woo team uses qphmycoi.top as a place to test WooCommerce at scale. We run every WooCommerce release candidate on qphmycoi.top weeks before public release. 

With an average of three checkouts per minute on a standard business day, qphmycoi.top is a high-traffic store running WooCommerce at scale in addition to all of the systems that provide product updates, product information inside a customer’s WordPress, and more.

As our marketing team grew over the past few years, so did the complexity of our audience and the need for smarter, more personalized communication. Our subscribers range from store owners and developers to agency builders and partners. We needed a platform that could flex with our business model, support detailed segmentation, and connect seamlessly to our store.

We were looking to solve challenges across:

• Data structure: As we evolved, we needed to reset our data model and align our email platform to our business model.
• Personalization: We lacked personalization functionality and when we wanted to personalize, it took our teams too much manual work to deliver.
• Integrations: We were restricted in how we could integrate datasets from both marketplace purchases and in-app actions.
• Testing: We couldn’t A/B test automated flows to improve engagement.
• Scalable: We needed a platform that could handle larger sets of data in a cost-effective way as our database continues to grow.

We also wanted to reset how we worked with data: to send more timely, relevant emails based on user behavior — not just static lists — and to gain better insight into what works and what doesn’t. Klaviyo’s ecommerce-first design, fast performance, and integration options made it the right fit for our team.

Why Klaviyo?

Klaviyo was at the top of our consideration mix, and we engaged the Klaviyo team to test their platform against other options. 

• Performance: Klaviyo’s schema-less database model makes querying data fast and  reduces the administrative burden of data syncing. After testing a large dataset, we were confident it could handle our volume of records and the platform itself was fast and slick.
• Reporting: Rich reporting on campaigns, automated flows, and metrics with event-level data allow us to report on the true success of our campaigns and we can A/B test to our hearts’ content!
• Integrations: We’ve built in both native and custom integrations to send the right data to Klaviyo, exactly where and when we need it for personalized campaigns. We’ve integrated with our data warehouse so we can utilize more datasets and build even more reporting in our BI tool.
• Built for ecommerce: Klaviyo has been built for B2C and its product feeds and dynamic content features enable us to create personalized, relevant, and timely campaigns for our audience.
• Ease of use: After testing, it was a win from our email, creative, marketing operations, and data teams!

Klaviyo connects directly to WooCommerce, syncing real-time purchase and usage data to trigger automated flows and targeted campaigns. This includes:

WooCommerce onboarding emails

We send onboarding and activation emails to our new platform users. If you’re new to Woo, we’ll send you timely tips and tricks to set up your store and start making your first sale. 

New product instructions

If you’re just starting out with a new extension, we’ll send you detailed instructions on how to set it up and we use additional targeting to send recommendations for other add-ons that could benefit your store.

Creating these product flows in Klaviyo allowed us to reduce the number of emails to maintain — made easier with the use of personalized blocks and content. We can now recommend the plugins available in each region and localize content in different languages. 

Updates and newsletters

Periodic emails like What’s New with Woo and Staff Picks are personalized by region and customer type (such as store owners or developers). Advanced segmentation helps us ensure that only the most relevant information makes its way to subscribers’ inboxes.

For each of these email flows, we use Klaviyo’s built-in reporting and A/B testing to optimize content and better understand campaign performance over time.

Switching to Klaviyo came with a learning curve like any software — new tools, deeper segmentation, and more possibilities. We invested time in testing, internal training, and building integrations that align with our data structure. 

During implementation, we worked with Klaviyo’s internal email deliverability team to make sure our emails would be delivered from a new dedicated IP and have seen consistent deliverability ever since. The only real challenge we faced during implementation was the breadth of new features available to us.

The upside? We’re now able to deliver campaigns that are more targeted, timely, and effective.

Since the switch, we’ve seen:

• An 8% increase in open rates and a 42% lift in clicks across all campaigns.
• A 56% boost in open rates and 11% increase in clicks for BFCM emails year-over-year.
• A 24% increase in clicks for our regular newsletters.

We’ve also gained the ability to localize content, optimize send times by region, and reduce maintenance with smarter automation flows.

Based on my learnings in this and previous roles when selecting and implementing martech, here are some recommendations:

• Pre-define requirements: When choosing a new platform, get your list of requirements ready: what are your must-haves vs. nice-to-haves, and how do they stack up against different platforms? Also think about how your requirements will change in the future as you grow.
• Plan your migration by priority: If you have a large database or account to migrate, it can’t all switch over in one day. Start by identifying the campaigns to launch with and plan a phased roll-out of all your other assets and campaigns.
• Test new tools in a staging account: You can have multiple accounts within Klaviyo and can convert one to a staging account. This can be your playground for new templates, flows, and integrations. 
• Maintain your lists: Keep your lists up-to-date with the most engaged user profiles. Not only is this cost-effective — it’s good for your email deliverability, too.
• Although a schema-less database is flexible and easy to integrate to, it requires more guardrails in place to make sure your data remains consistent and clean.
• Experiment strategically: Build a roadmap to prioritize all the new cool things you can now do against your business goals and objectives. This will help prevent overwhelm and ensure new functionality is used effectively.

We’re continuing to invest in improving the WooCommerce Marketplace experience — from adding test result data for every plugin, to working on more personalized product discovery. 

Klaviyo will play a key role in these efforts as we tailor content and communications to help merchants find the right tools at the right time.

If you’re running your own WooCommerce store and considering your email platform options, we hope this behind-the-scenes look offers some ideas — and inspiration — for building a smarter, more connected customer journey.

About

Nicola Hodd

Nicola leads Marketing Operations at Woo, helping make the Klaviyo magic happen amongst other things! Outside of work she’s busy running around after a toddler and a Alaskan Klee Kai with a long list of crafting hobbies that never happen.