Not too long after joining Fresh Clean Threads, Brendan Roeschel found something in the brand’s repurchase data that changed the way Brendan would try to manage lifecycle marketing: For every additional t-shirt purchased in a customer’s first order, that customer’s 12-month order frequency dropped 10-15%.

In a world of maximizing 30/60/90-day LTVs, this posed a problem: A great acquisition outcome led to increased complexity in retention. Brendan and his team could either keep those higher-value customers in their everyday retention flows, which they knew didn't fit from a timing perspective, or spend the time to create more personalized lifecycle messaging for various customer types.

Finding a Low-Resource Way to Test Retention Efforts

Doing so, however, would at least require extensive data analysis and complicated Klaviyo flow logic. Both were things Brendan couldn’t justify without knowing the incremental impact.

This tension in doing what’s best for maximizing retention, though, is nothing new. 

Through the lens of revenue, retention falls prey to the law of depreciating returns much faster than acquisition. Because the top-of-funnel is so much smaller for retention, a 4% improvement on a retention effort has far less of a raw-value revenue impact than a 4% improvement on an acquisition effort. Since most brands, despite the move to profitability, still score themselves off top-line revenue, the bias, then, is to play to the lowest common denominator: improve retention for the easiest-to-influence group, and move on.

Fresh Clean Threads, though, had gotten to the point that it needed to find additional wins. 

In outlining his challenges in conversations with the Repeat team, Brendan decided to test Repeat, because Repeat automates the most difficult and time-consuming workaround for returning customer personalization (think: timing of key emails, cross-sell and upsell recommendations, etc.).

He and his team didn’t have the time to test these efforts themselves, he said, but if they could be automated, it’d be worth the test. 

Proving Incremental Value Via Holdout Testing

In setting up the test, Repeat built a holdout test for Fresh Clean Threads, withholding 50% of both the brand’s existing customer base and newly acquired customers to analyze the impact of Repeat on both types of customers. 

Fresh Clean Threads used every aspect of Repeat—personalizing the timing of key Moment messages (cross-sell, replenishment, subscription upsell, and lapse prevention) via flows and merchandising traditional campaign emails to match those Moments across their email and SMS channels. (Though Fresh Clean Threads is no stranger to holdout testing, this was the first time they’d conducted a cross-channel holdout test —a cool milestone for the brand in and of itself.)

Brendan and his team were able to use Repeat templates and the brand’s own creative library to quickly build the necessary assets to launch. 

Originally scheduled as a 90-day holdout test, Repeat’s impact was so significant in the first 30 days that Brendan decided to call the test and roll out Repeat to the entire customer base.

After 30 days, Fresh Clean Threads customers who saw Repeat experiences had a 5.6% higher AOV and a 2% higher order frequency. Combined, the two metrics drove a 7.7% lift in 30-Day LTV, achieving Brendan’s goals of proving meaningful incremental revenue and doing so without overly investing the retention team’s time in the test.

It's becoming increasingly impossible to deny the importance of subscriptions in the ecommerce world. Thanks to high customer acquisition costs and churn rates, subscription models have proven to be a staple retention strategy for brands.

According to Shopify, projections suggest that the global ecommerce subscription market will be worth $246.6 billion by 2025. Customers across the world crave convenience: hassle-free shopping experiences, free delivery, and instant gratification. With an effective subscription model, that's exactly what you can give them.

We already know why subscriptions are so valuable, but the toughest question remains: how do you get subscribers? Better yet, once you get them, how do you keep them? Let's look into some potential solutions.

Sell Customers on the Long-Term

Naturally, when you are promoting a product, you want to highlight the immediate benefits – but you can't sell subscriptions in the same way. Once the initial sale is made, your messaging should focus on convincing customers to come back for more in the future. It requires a completely different approach.

Your returning customers already know about the quick fixes of your product, so instead, highlight the potential benefits of consistent, long-term use. Find a reason for your customers to continue using your product over a long period of time, and once you do, communicate it in your messaging. Promote your subscription offer like it's a long-term solution, and give your customers a journey they can commit to.

Give Your One-Off Customers FOMO

An effective way to acquire new subscribers is to make your one-off customers feel like they're missing out on something. Give your subscribers special perks which only they have access to – and tease those benefits constantly to the prospects who are on the outside looking in.

These special offers can include subscriber-only giveaways, subscriber-only sales, early access to new products, ongoing discounted price on subscription, free surprise gifts at key renewals, and guaranteed inventory on products that frequently go out of stock. Demonstrate to your one-off customers just how good life can be as a subscriber.

Avoid Price Jumps

Few things can convince customers to hop into a subscription quite like discounts. However, if you decide to offer a discount, avoid having the subscription price jump up drastically after the first order. If a customer only subscribes because it was more affordable than your normal prices, the odds of them churning once that discount disappears are extremely high.

Baking the discount or benefit into all subscription orders can help eliminate churn caused by increased prices. Additionally, consider if you are dedicating enough resources to educating new subscribers and getting them to understand what you offer. As soon as they are subscribed, it's time to explain why they should stick around for the long haul.

Create a Unique Customer Experience

The bar for customer experience in ecommerce is low, to say the very least. Most transactions for existing subscribers probably look a little something like this: place order, receive product, get spammed with generic marketing emails, repeat. Having said that, it doesn't take much to create a standout experience for your subscribers – the smallest gestures can create a massive impact.

Think of meaningful gestures that can bring a smile to your customers' faces. Send them a handwritten note, celebrate their important anniversaries, or emphasize the importance of their opinions. When you consistently deliver thoughtful, personalized gestures, you can turn hesitant support into full-fledged loyalty. Always go above and beyond in the small ways.

How Repeat Can Help

It's not easy to gain subscribers, and it's certainly not easy to keep them coming back. While these tactics might strengthen your subscription strategy, implementing them can require an amount of time and effort that you do not have the bandwidth for. That's where Repeat can help.

Repeat's Subscription Playbook contains an arsenal of tools that can be used to solidify customer relationships and establish an unwaveringly loyal subscription base.

The difference between Repeat and other retention data platforms is the way we turn insight into action. These tools make it easy to translate our analysis of your orders into automated, personalized email and SMS messaging that drives subscription purchases.

Read all about how Repeat can revolutionize your subscription strategy here.

The complexity of adding personalized cross-sell recommendations to your Klaviyo campaigns and flows is staggering. The challenge often lies in the tedious segmentation and intricate branching logic required. It can be daunting.

Our latest update extends the Cross-sell Moment to make it easier than ever to merchandise your messages with hyper-personal recommendations:

Starting now, Repeat’s Product Predictions are available on every customer's Klaviyo profile.

The product predictions profile property is your key to effortlessly integrating tailored product suggestions into any Klaviyo campaign or flow.

What Can You Do With Product Predictions?

• Offer Tailored Product Suggestions: Harness the power of Repeat's Product Predictions to showcase products that each customer is most likely to purchase next but hasn't tried yet.
• Versatile Merchandising Blocks: Create dynamic, reusable merchandising blocks and effortlessly add them to your existing email campaigns and flows.
• Enhanced Customer Segmentation: Build specific segments based on the unique products customers are inclined to buy, opening new doors for targeted promotions.

Campaigns with a Personal Touch

Imagine adding a dynamic merchandising block to your routine campaigns—showcasing suggested products that are fine-tuned for each customer. Or, picture building a segment of customers most likely to purchase a specific product you're promoting.

New Play: Suggest Predicted Products Anywhere

Ready to get set it up? Your journey begins with our comprehensive play guide.

It’s is your key to unlocking the full potential of Product Predictions.

Get Started With Repeat

Add new powers of personalization to your campaigns and flows:

Encouraging returning customers to branch out and try new products is one of the most challenging tasks a retention marketer faces. Creating automated cross-sell flows spirals into complexity when you consider the layers of variables like which products a customer has already tried, which products you should suggest to them, dialing in the timing, and making it all match across multiple channels.

The Cross-Sell Moment is your magic wand to make these complexities disappear. When a customer enters this Moment, they’re primed to explore your product catalog beyond their regular favorites. Paired with Repeat’s hyper-personal Product Predictions, you’ll know precisely what they will most likely buy next. It all comes together right inside Klaviyo, Postscript, and Attentive, so you can quickly turn the insights into action with email and SMS.

How to Use the Cross-Sell Moment

The Cross-sell Moment is designed to push a returning customer towards their next favorite product. With it, you could fire up an email or SMS series highlighting customized products to convince them to click the buy button.

To tap into the Cross-sell Moment, you can use the Primed For Cross-Sell event in your integrated marketing channels to kick off a flow at just the right time. The timing is informed by your store’s order history and tailored to each customer based on which products they purchased previously, when they bought them, and the number of orders they’ve placed.

Finally, you’ll find the Recommended Next Products property inside the event and on a customer’s Klaviyo profile. This list of products is fine-tuned to show customers the unique products they’re most likely to buy.

New Play: Primed For Cross-Sell Automation

Looking for the step-by-step guide to get up and running with the Cross-sell Moment? Our latest Play has you covered. This Primed For Cross-sell automation combines optimized timing and data-backed product predictions to help introduce customers to your catalog and drive cross-selling in email or SMS.

Ready to Run This Play?

If cross-selling is on your 2024 punch list, it’s time to unleash the power of Repeat’s Moments and simplify your customer retention strategy. Install the Shopify app now, or book a demo and see even more ways that Repeat can help activate customers during high-leverage retention moments.

Product catalogs are complicated. Brands have different types of products that serve different operational and marketing needs, and that complexity often trickles down through retention marketing and personalization efforts.

Our latest update helps you tame this complexity. Tell us about the relationships between products in your catalog, and we’ll help make your automated email & SMS more relevant. Timing, product recommendations, and personalized content all get more effective than ever before.

HOW IT WORKS

Define relationships

Relationships let you define links between products, like samples and their full-size counterparts, or outdated products and their newer version.

Assign classes

Classes let you label the functional characteristics of specific products—like replenishable products, gifts, and strategic priorities, to name a few.

Sit back

With the new information about your catalog, Repeat helps you level up dynamic personalization in email and SMS. Edge cases that complicate automations, flows, and campaigns start to disappear.

A few ways to use Product Mapping

• Simplify Samples - Link samples and their full-size relatives with the Sample relationship to direct customers who received a sample to the related full-size version.
• Organize Old Versions - A retired product can be linked to its updated version with the Replacement relationship.
• Leverage Loss Leaders - Have products you use for acquisition but don’t want to recommend to returning customers? Classes make it easy.
• Systematize Starter Kits - If you sell a kit containing a mix of replenishable and non-replenishable items (for example, a kit with a razor handle and razor blades), we can help.

JOIN THE BETA

We’re making Product Mapping available to Repeat brands in the beta now, starting with replacements and samples. Others are soon to follow. If you want to use product mapping to level up your retention personalization, join the beta!

Not using Repeat yet?

See how we can help you simplify your retention marketing workflow!

B-F-C-M.

Those four letters are enough to get any ecommerce marketer’s heart pounding. Black Friday/Cyber Monday is a pressure-cooker marathon laden with high expectations, littered with traps, and loaded with time-sensitive tasks.

A lesser marketer might be tempted to take the short-sighted approach when faced with those conditions, focusing on quick sales and acquisition above all else—but not you! You’re reading Repeat’s blog, so we already know you understand retention’s importance.

So, how will you make retention a core part of your BFCM plans? As we gear up for this high season with you, we put together some ideas to consider that will help you reach your existing customers and prepare to turn the incoming wave of first-timers into loyal fans.

This post is your roadmap to leveraging Black Friday for retention. We’ll explore acquisition offers with retention in mind, segmenting offers for returning customers, and identifying gift buyers. We also spotlight important email and SMS flows to encourage customer retention and see how to update them for BFCM.

So, no time to waste! Let’s hop into it.

Design Acquisition Offers with Retention in Mind

As you plan your offers for BFCM, now is the time to think two steps ahead in the customer journey. The best offers don’t just get someone to buy once—they prime them to return for more. Here are three ideas to get you on the road to creating acquisition offers that do just that.

Focus on the Right Products

Consider your product catalog with retention in mind. Which products have the highest returning customer rates? These are the items to build your acquisition offers around because they bring people back. By focusing your BFCM promotions on these products, you set the stage for repeat purchases.

Want a head start? Head into the Repeat app and have a look at these reports:

• Replenishment Intervals: learn how often customers reorder specific products and variants.
• Product Pairs: identify what products customers order next based on their first order.
• Days to Second Order: see how long it takes for someone to place a second order by product/variant.

Build Better Bundle Offers

When putting together bundle offers for BFCM, ensure they include a product that customers usually replenish quickly. This, paired with the right post-purchase communication (like our Replenishment Reminder Play), can create a habit loop for your customers, increasing the likelihood of future purchases.

The best bundles for retention-focused acquisition offers are built with:

• At least one product with a short replenishment cycle.
• Products that are consumed concurrently. For example, a bundle that includes shampoo and conditioner is better than a two-pack of body wash.

Use The Double-Discount Strategy

Everyone loves “BOGO” and “50% off” deals, but how can we make these even more profitable over the long term? Get creative with a double-discount offer: offer an initial discount during BFCM, plus the promise of an even bigger discount on their next purchase. This 2-for-1 deal not only compels an immediate purchase but also encourages buyers to come back again.

When you’re implementing this strategy, update your post-purchase email & SMS messages to remind customers that they can take advantage of the second half of the offer. You might want to:

• Create a segment of the customers who took advantage of the initial discount so you can follow up with them.
• Add a conditional block to your email flows and campaigns to remind this segment that they have another discount waiting.
• Add a branch to your post-purchase SMS flows with messaging made for this segment.

Segment Returning Customers For Personalized Offers

For your customers, BFCM is peak inbox mayhem. They’re getting hit with email after email for weeks on end, so this is the time to pull out all the stops on personalization and segmentation. If your emails are relevant, you’ll give yourself the best shot to cut through the noise.

Target Replenishment-Ready Customers

Customers who are running low on a product they bought before are primed to buy again. So don’t miss the chance to hit them with an offer to do just that. Here’s how we’d approach it:

• Pick out your top products. For most brands, the Pareto principle holds true: 80% of revenue comes from the top 20% of your product catalog.
• Craft email and SMS campaigns for each of them. Highlight the product, remind customers it’s time to replenish, and put the most relevant BFCM offer for that product above the fold.
• Find the customers who are due to replenish. Repeat’s Klaviyo integration makes this part simple: each customer has a custom profile property that tells you exactly which products they’re running low on.

Once you’ve created the segments for your target products, tee it up and get ready for the replenishment orders to roll in. You might want to send this campaign a few times throughout the season—you’ll capture newly ready-to-reorder customers each time.

An Offer For At-Risk Customers

Every store has a segment of customers who are about to lapse, and you’re probably not getting them back once they do. This segment is often overlooked amid BFCM hype, but there’s an opportunity hiding here. Here’s the strategy:

• Identify your at-risk customers. Repeat can help here: you might want to build a segment of customers who received our “About To Lapse” trigger in the last 30 days.
• Make sure they get messaging about your biggest BFCM discounts. Or, better yet, create a discount just for them that’s bigger than your other offers—it’s your last chance to get them to buy again.
• Wait until the sales peak has passed, then hit them with a campaign. If they didn’t bite when they got the rest of your BFCM messaging, it’s time to make them an offer they can’t refuse.

Many customers are just waiting for a compelling reason to return. Sending your best offer to customers who are about to lapse can be the last-minute save. Take advantage of BFCM to make this win-back effort.

Prepare For Post-BFCM Now

Your future self will thank you if you set aside time before the busy season begins to prepare for what’s next. A few things you probably want to put on your to-do list:

Identify the Gift-Givers

You’re going to acquire new customers whose purchases were for someone other than themselves. Bringing them back after the holidays might require a different approach than you usually take. How do you know who is gifting? Ask them.

With an app like Fairing or Kno, you can set up a post-purchase survey that asks, “Who was this order for?” Save the response on their Klaviyo customer profile so you can:

• Vary your post-purchase messaging to sway gift-givers to make a purchase for themselves.
• Customize replenishment flows and ask gifters to forward a discount to the recipient when they’re likely to be running low.
• Create campaigns after BFCM that target this segment.

With a bit of forethought now, you can ensure your future messaging has the best shot at re-converting the most generous of your newly acquired customers.

Get Your Retention Flows Ready

Make sure you have the most essential email and SMS flows set up to encourage customers to return after Black Friday has passed. This is the time to get your flows in order so they can do the heavy lifting on retention for you.

On our punch list? These are the must-have flows for post-BFCM success:

• 2nd Order Cross-Sell
• Replenishment reminders
• About to Lapse

Putting A Bow On It

There you have it. All of our retention-focused Black Friday/Cyber Monday secrets!

The upcoming season presents a unique opportunity to drive quick sales and prioritize customer retention. By designing acquisition offers with retention in mind, segmenting returning customers for personalized offers, and preparing for post-BFCM initiatives, you’ll be a retention hero come next year.

Remember, it’s not just about the short-term gains. Building long-term customer loyalty and turning first-time buyers into repeat customers should be a central focus.

So, embrace the challenges, stay customer-centric, and make retention a core part of your BFCM plans. Happy selling, and best of luck in your BFCM endeavors!

See how Repeat can supercharge your lifecycle marketing:

Customer retention is essential for business growth, but gaining actionable insights into your repeat buyers can be challenging. That's why we're excited to announce a major update to our retention analytics capabilities.

With over 50 new metrics and visualizations, our Insights Hub makes it easier than ever to:

• Identify trends in repeat purchase cycles so you can optimize your re-engagement strategies at each stage.
• Pinpoint periods of churn risk proactively instead of reacting after losing customers.
• Uncover broader changes in retention patterns so you can adapt quickly.
• Compare retention cohorts to determine which customers have the highest lifetime value.

The Insights Hub helps you understand retention in four key areas:

Retention Pulse Check

• Track key retention KPIs on a rolling basis.
• Always have an up-to-date view of returning customer trends.

Long-Term Retention Trends

• Understand longer-term retention trends.
• See how trends are changing over time.

Cohorted Outcomes

• Track outcomes on a first-purchase-month basis.
• Understand how first-time buyers convert to returning customers.
• See how quickly 1st time customers return.

Replenishment Behavior

• Understand replenishment trends in your business at the store level.
• Get insights into product-specific replenishment trends.

READY LEVEL UP YOUR RETENTION?

These reports take the guesswork out of managing and optimizing repeat purchase cycles. You’ll be able to make data-backed decisions to boost retention at scale. The result? Faster business growth driven by loyal, high-value customers.

One of the top tactics in the acquisition game is capturing an email address or phone number when a customer lands on site. But the median submission rate for a Klaviyo popup form is 2.7% for email and 2.9% for SMS.

Put simply: Most brands have a gaping hole in their ability to reach customers. Consider this screenshot from Drew Sanocki of PostPilot:

And this makes sense. Because Klaviyo popups are usually used as an acquisition tool, it means most email addresses acquired are prospects—not customers. So, how do you fix it?

You use Klaviyo popups as part of your retention strategy. In this post, we’ll show you the most underutilized location for a Klaviyo sign-up form, how to build, and what the results look like when you do.

A Case for Klaviyo Popups on the Post-Purchase Confirmation Page

Let’s play out a scenario: Despite your best efforts, you’ve got a customer who has made a purchase without opting into email or SMS marketing.

Think it’s unusual? Check your file. We’re willing to bet you have a sizable list of customers who aren’t subscribed to your retention marketing efforts.

And that makes sense: All it really takes for a customer to miss your email and SMS marketing is to X out of a welcome popup form and use an express checkout option, like ApplePay, PayPal or Shop Pay. If a customer does those two things, they’ve made a purchase without opting into the channels you’ve deemed important for retention.

So, what do you do?

First: Ask yourself why they haven’t.

Popup forms to aid list building and acquisition efforts often make an offer that is acquisition focused. So, they normally offer a percentage off. If your customer isn’t motivated enough by that offer to give you their information, you’ve likely quit on asking them. But there are other offers.

For a customer who has just made a purchase, a Klaviyo popup form can be used to make an offer that’s relevant to making their life easier: You’ll remind them when it’s time to reorder, for instance, or send them personalized recommendations about other products they might like.

And it works: Repeat has been helping brands leverage this tactic to power our Replenishment Reminder play for more than two years. On average, brands convert 20% of customers to their list with this Klaviyo popup location.

How to build a Klaviyo Popup Form for the Post-Purchase Confirmation Page

Setting up a Klaviyo popup form on the post-purchase confirmation page is easy. Here’s a two-minute tutorial on how to do it:

The Value of Klaviyo Popup Forms for Retention Marketing

While you could likely accept capturing 20% more email addresses from customers at face value, there are quantitative benefits to making the ask and capturing the information.

Put simply: Customers who opt into retention-specific offers have higher repeat purchase rates than customers who don’t.

Repeat data shows that brands running popup forms on post-purchase confirmation pages often see roughly 30% higher repeat purchase rates from customers who opt-in.

While you’d likely want to run a holdout test in Klaviyo to see what your incremental lift looks like, a sustained lift of this nature can translate into meaningful LTV gains.

So, it pays to ask again. Just do it with the right offer.

While Klaviyo has built-in support to set up A/B tests for email and SMS, there’s no equivalent for creating a holdout test. You can, however, create them easily—you just need to use operational flows and customer tags.

The effort is worth it. A/B tests may tell you whether a specific aspect of an email proves impactful, but a holdout test can tell you whether even sending an email was impactful.

Therein lies the value of a holdout test: They’ll tell you how exposure to a specific tactic will impact a customer over time, helping you shape your overall retention strategy.

Creating holdout test in Klaviyo requires three steps:

• Structuring your holdout test
• Setting up your test segments
• Running your test with segment filters

Here’s how to do it.

Structuring your holdout test

The first step in creating a holdout test is to design the test.

You’ll need to determine how many test segments you need for your holdout test. The number of variants you’ll need is dependent on the test you’re planning to run. For purposes of these instructions, we’ll assume three segments: a control audience and two variant audiences.

This type of segmentation is helpful, for instance, in understanding whether certain tactics—campaigns versus flows, flow timing, number of emails sent, etc—impact repeat purchase rates.

An example test might be testing whether dedicated replenishment flows and lapsed customer prevention flows deliver incremental revenue via higher repeat purchase rates or higher returning customer AOV.

Here’s an example of how that might look:

Once you’ve set your segments and defined which variant audience receives which variant tactics, it’s time to build the holdout test in Klaviyo.

Setting up your holdout test segmentation

To run a holdout test like the above in Klaviyo, we’re going to tag new customers into one of the variant groups or the control group using Klaviyo’s customer tags via an operational flow.

To set up that flow, we’ll first:

• Start a new flow from scratch
• Trigger the flow when someone has placed an order
• Filter the flow to apply only to customers who have placed one order

Once complete, we can begin randomly sampling customers into the Control, Variant 1, and Variant 2 groups. If we want to equally split customers among the three segments, we’ll need to do the following:

• Use the “random sample” choice on Klaviyo’s conditional split tool
• For the first conditional split, send 33% of traffic to the “Yes” branch and the remaining 66% of traffic to the “No” branch
• Create a second conditional split on the “No” branch, sending 50% of the remaining traffic to the “Yes” branch and the other 50% of the remaining traffic to the “No” branch

(Note: You’ll need to adjust the split volume to ensure each segment gets 33% of the volume.)

The final step is tagging each of the segments.

To do that, you’ll add an “Update Profile Property” action to the end of each conditional split, creating a new profile property and adding your tag naming convention.

It should look like this:

This test structure will apply to all new customers, meaning your holdout test will begin amassing traffic when you turn on the flow, but you won’t see results from this test until your Klaviyo filters (discussed in the next section) begin firing.

Using Klaviyo filters to run a holdout test

While Klaviyo is building your holdout test segments using the operational flow covered above, you’ll also need to use Klaviyo filters to complete the setup of your test.

If we’re using the test design example from above, those filters are used to include/exclude certain segments from flows.

For example:

• Control would be excluded from all flows being tested
• Variant 1 would be included in the replenishment flows being tested, but excluded from the lapsed customer prevention flow being tested
• Variant 2 would be included in all flows being tested

To set these filters, you use Klaviyo’s flow filter functionality on the flow trigger.

Because Klaviyo’s flow filters are inclusive by definition, you’ll want to add both Variant 1 and Variant 2 to the flow filter (make sure to use the “or” operator), but not the Control. It should look like this:

Repeat this process for the remaining flow/segment combinations.

Once done, your test is fully live.

Measuring a Holdout test in Klaviyo

If you want a cohorted view of your segments, measuring a holdout test in Klaviyo requires some spreadsheet work.

An easier, scrappier—though not necessarily ideal—way to understand impact is to create a single metric report from scratch in Klaviyo. You can use this report to look at the Placed Order value stored in Klaviyo and group by your “repeat-test-group” profile property.

Doing so will show you how many orders each segment has placed over your defined time frame, giving you the raw data needed to understand impact.

An easier way to improve your repeat purchase rate

Repeat boosts repeat purchase rates by automatically delivering personalized messaging at high-leverage Moments.

A/B testing emails is the fastest way to learn what resonates with your audience to drive more revenue per recipient, but those tests are often limited to campaigns—and often measured on direct response timelines. What about flows? And what about longer-term impact on customer LTV?

Building a comprehensive email testing program is an underutilized tactic that can have meaningful impact on metrics like repeat purchase rates and customer LTV—metrics that can better change the trajectory of a business, not just the efficiency of a channel. To do that, though, you need to invest in running holdout tests. Yet most testing guides for Klaviyo don’t cover this aspect. They focus on A/B tests for campaigns. So, we’re going to dive in.

In this post, we’ll cover how to build an email testing program Klaviyo that goes beyond traditional A/B tests.

The value of a comprehensive email testing program for Klaviyo

Building holdout tests into any email testing program is an underutilized tactic that can have meaningful impact on LTV-focused metrics, but are often overlooked because of the perceived complexity and the time it takes to develop learnings.

These learnings, though, can help you understand what an optimum lifecycle marketing program looks like, how many of your emails can be automated into Klaviyo flows, and which products you should be recommending to customers to improve cross-sell rates.

The result isn’t just potential revenue gains, it’s efficiency gains, too: If your email tests show your retention program can be optimized for timing, you can automate many of those touchpoints, reducing creative needs and resources.

Types of A/B tests to run in Klaviyo

With some ingenuity, you can test just about anything you’d like in Klaviyo. Klaviyo, though, makes it easy to A/B the following aspects of an email (or SMS message):

Email A/B tests in Klaviyo by goal

Email Open Rate Tests

To understand impact on email open rates, you can A/B test a number of variables outside of the email body, including:

• Subject line styles
• Preview text styles
• Sender name
• Send time

For these tests, you’ll want to use Klaviyo’s built-in A/B test functionality and limit the variables you’re testing per metric to understand the impact of each change.

Email Click-Through Rate Tests

To understand impact on click-through rates in your emails, you can A/B test a number of variables inside the email body, including:

• Main creative treatments (think UGC versus branded; lifestyle versus product; etc)
• Secondary offers (think cross sell, product recommendations, subscription/membership upsells)
• Value proposition themes (think product attributes versus solution value, including educational information)
• Design choices (think template structures, brand assets, etc)

Email Placed Order Rate Tests

To understand impact on placed order rates for your emails, you can A/B test a number of variables inside and outside the email body, including:

• Landing page experience (think homepage versus category page versus product page)
• Secondary offers (think cross sell, product recommendations, subscription/membership upsells)

In order to run these tests at the individual email level, you can use Klaviyo’s A/B testing tool to gain insights on the above (and other tests). If, however, you want to learn how changing these components impact customers over a longer period of time than a single email, you need to adjust your test structure to account for that. Enter the holdout test.

Creating a holdout test in Klaviyo

While a traditional A/B test tells you how a specific change within an email impacts performance of that particular email, a holdout test essentially lives a level above that: it can tell you whether sending that email is impactful at all.

Holdout tests are a specific type of email test that will tell you how exposure to a specific variable will impact a customer over time. This becomes valuable in setting your email strategy.

Klaviyo does not offer holdout test structures out of the box, but they are easy to set up. To do so, you start by:

• Tagging customers into variant and control groups
• Using customer tags to show/include variant treatments to variant groups and hide/exclude variant content from control group
• Reporting at the tag level on whether variant treatments impacted variant groups different than control groups

Need more help? Check out these comprehensive instructions (plus video) here.

This setup for a holdout test in Klaviyo is simple, but effective. And once it’s built, it is flexible as a template to help you begin testing a variety of dynamics in your email program.

One note, however: Much in the same way A/B testing requires certainly levels of email volume to understand impact, holdout tests require the same. And if you’re running them over time (on a longitudinal basis), you’ll likely need more time than you’re accustomed to.

Types of holdout tests to run in Klaviyo

Some of the same tests you can run as straightforward A/B tests can also be run as holdout tests to measure other variables that may not be as easily captured in one of the A/B tests outlined above.

For instance, you may find through particular A/B tests that a certain subject line styles positively improve open rates. This, of course, will have a positive impact on your email deliverability. But does prolonged exposure to a specific email subject line style negate the initial impact you see within an A/B test? In other words, might customers tire of that winning subject line style and, if so, how quickly does that happen?

Answering this question is not possible in a straightforward A/B test. But neither is looking at impact on things like repeat purchase rate, cross-selling rate, or LTV. This is why holdout tests are valuable.

Let’s look at some possible holdout tests to run in Klaviyo:

Holdout tests in Klaviyo by goal

Repeat Purchase Rate Tests

One of the keys to any business is converting one-time buyers into repeat customers. To understand your email program’s impact on repeat purchase rates, you can use holdout tests to learn:

• How many incremental repeat sales sending emails generates
• What the optimum timing is for sending emails that drive a second purchase
• Which products or product attributes most effectively drive repeat purchases

Cross-Sell Rate Tests

From a merchandising perspective, a tried-and-true way to improve repeat purchase rates and purchase frequency is to offer more products, so your customers have more to buy. But how do you know whether your email program is effective at cross-selling those additional products? You can use holdout tests to learn:

• Whether emails dedicated to specific products improve adoption of said products
• Which products—and which product combinations—are more effective at adding to cross-selling efforts
• When it is the best time to push specific products to drive cross-selling initiatives

Measuring holdout test performance for your email program

For many tests, you’ll be able to pull your data directly from Klaviyo to measure holdout test performance. A little Excel (or Google Sheets) knowledge will get you a long way.

For more complicated tests, you can use some of the newer business intelligence and attribution tools on the market, so long as they give you access to the datapoints you need. The most critical data points are the ones you structured the test around: the tag denoting whether a customer falls into the variant or control group and data you identified as needing to prove or disprove your test hypothesis.

An easier way to improve your repeat purchase rate

Repeat boosts repeat purchase rates by automatically delivering personalized messaging at high-leverage Moments. Learn more here.

Cross-sell flows are such a valuable part of retention marketing, Klaviyo has a template to get you started. While using that template is a start, leveraging Klaviyo’s cross-sell flow template alone leaves room for improving LTV.

Like any other aspect of marketing, repeating the cross-sell message increases the message’s impact. But focusing your cross-sell efforts to single flow means that impact is limited to the flow’s length and frequency.

Traditional cross-sell flows are often timed to trigger within 10 to 14 days of a fulfilled order, and usually last about three emails. They often highlight a set of recommended products, either manually built by a marketing team or leveraging a best sellers feed.

While the performance numbers often look good on these flows, they may not, in fact, be delivering incremental sales. That’s because they’re capturing new customers in their most motivated moment. (If you were to run a holdout test, you might find that these customers would still buy again quickly.)

How, then, do you know whether a cross-sell flow is impactful?

Measuring performance of a Klaviyo cross-sell flow

In order to improve LTV with cross-sell flows, you need to first zoom out as traditional Klaviyo-level reporting on flow performance doesn’t frame the flow through a lens that will help  you with answering the question. So, first, define your goal.

Are you looking to:

• Increase cross-sell rates?
• Increase repeat purchase rates more generally?
• Reduce the amount of time to a 2nd purchase?

These are retention strategy questions that might seem easy (your inclination may be to respond: “all of the above!”), but harder to answer when you begin thinking about which lever is the most important.

Let’s say for the sake of illustration, however, that you’ve done some work to understand your customer. You’ve determined that customers who buy more products from your catalog have higher LTV than customers who simply repurchase from you faster. (In other words, catalog penetration is a greater indicator of LTV than time between purchases.) You might, then, answer the above question by saying: “I want to increase cross-sell rates.”

If you were to say that, you’d likely want to set up reporting outside of Klaviyo to measure the flow’s performance, since Klaviyo-level reporting is not going to provide insight into cross-rates.

You’ll also want to rethink your flow to meet that goal.

Building a cross-sell flow to meet your goals

Speaking of your flow, let’s go back to those questions about goals.

You have, roughly, three levers to pull in terms of flow design and flow structure:

• Timing
• Offer
• Merchandising

You can adjust these levers to better meet your goals.

Timing, for instance, might be a stronger lever to pull as it relates to reducing time to a second purchase. Offer might be a stronger lever to pull to improve repeat purchase rates. Merchandising might be a stronger lever to pull to increase cross-sell rates.

As such, your flow’s design might weight certain levers differently to best meet your goals.

In most cross-sell flow emails, you’ll see a primary product featured above a grid of recommended products. Those primary products are sometimes rotated or abandoned quickly altogether, focusing instead on lifestyle imagery and brand reinforcement.

If the goal, though, is to improve cross-sell rates, you may find that focusing more on merchandising specific products for longer periods of time works best. This, of course, increases the complexity of a cross-sell flow—and maybe even requires carrying those efforts into campaign sends, too.

The challenge becomes managing such complexity and doing so at a per-customer level.

Using predictive analytics to power cross-sell initiatives

Instead of battling that complexity, most cross-sell flows optimize for the least common denominator and wrap after a few sends, tossing some best sellers at the customer and hoping something hits.

That limits impact.

The solution here is predictive analytics.

Tools like Repeat, which predicts which products a customer is most likely to order next by analyzing what they ordered first, come into play. Pair that with Repeat’s understanding of when a customer enters a specific Moment in the customer lifecycle, and you can begin building cross-sell flows that integrate with traditional campaign sends and create a more holistic cross-sell effort that is woven throughout the retention marketing stack.

The products put in front of the customer in your Klaviyo cross-sell flow can also be woven into personalized recommendation blocks in campaign emails and highlighted in SMS sends—whether you use Klaviyo, Postscript or Attentive.

Reinforcing those merchandising efforts—through higher frequency and additional channels—creates a different type of cross-sell flow that lives outside the norm and stands out from a customer experience perspective.

Build a better cross-sell flow

Repeat boosts repeat purchase rates by automatically delivering personalized messaging at high-leverage Moments. Learn more here.

We know that bringing more one-time customers back for a 2nd order is one of the best ways to improve your LTV. So, we’re introducing a new way to do exactly that.

A new Moment in Repeat’s repertoire, Discovery, will help you target customers who are primed to explore your product catalog. There are multiple times in a customer’s lifecycle when product discovery is relevant, but today we’re focusing on one significant opportunity: after the first order.

Using a brand new Play, we’ll show you how to automatically reach first-time customers in the Discovery Moment with Repeat-powered Product Predictions.

HOW IT WORKS

To help you tap into this Moment, we’re introducing a new trigger for Klaviyo, Postscript, and Attentive. We built this trigger to drive more 2nd orders by introducing customers to more of your product catalog at the right time. Because the optimal time is a little different for each customer (depending on what they bought in their first order), we’ll personalize the timing so you don’t have to worry about it.

This new trigger also includes a first for Repeat: Product Predictions. You can use our Product Predictions to show each customer the products they will most likely buy next. We’ll analyze your order history and identify the products each customer will most likely buy on their second purchase based on what they bought in the first order.

NEW PLAY: PRODUCT DISCOVERY WITH PREDICTED PRODUCTS FLOW

This play uses our new trigger and Product Predictions to drive customers to their 2nd order at the ideal time with email or SMS. A list of the products they’re most likely to buy helps cross-sell to more of your product catalog.

READY TO RUN THIS PLAY?

Want to set up Discovery plays to help your brand drive more 2nd orders? Book a demo and see even more ways that Repeat can help activate customers during high-leverage retention moments:

• Moments Covered: Replenishment
• Plays Used: Send Replenishment Reminder Postcards (via PostPilot)
• Business Impact: Efficiency, Improved 90-Day repeat purchase rate

You might think, when you’re a brand the size of Dr. Squatch, that life gets easier: the email list grows, the SMS list grows. But there’s a flip side to that, too: the list of people who don’t opt-in or don’t engage via email and SMS grows, too.

There’s money—a lot of it when you get to a certain scale—left on the table there. How, then, do you reach them?

Direct mail.

A New Channel For a New(er) Brand

While Dr. Squatch is older and larger than most DTC brands, it’s still relatively new and relatively small in terms of team size when you measure against the incumbents the brand is disrupting. That means less headcount to explore and test new programs, creating a need for prioritization and rigor in methodology.

When the team turned to PostPilot to begin testing direct mail, they needed to answer a key question: Could the channel be “automated” while improving repeat purchase rates?

While this might seem straightforward, think about your Klaviyo replenishment flow or your own consumer behavior: There are a variety of inputs that need to be weighed—especially when you consider the fact that Dr. Squatch sells across categories: soap, deodorant, lotion, etc.

“The trigger moment is really important,” said Dejan Rankovic, Sr. Director of Growth at Dr. Squatch. “As you might expect, what the customer orders determines the optimum timeline.”

The Right Moment, Delivered Every Time

Repeat is the event generator for lifecycle marketers who want an easy way to activate customers during high leverage retention moments. For Dr. Squatch, this meant ensuring timing was right for re-engaging customers during their Replenishment Moment.

Because Dr. Squatch was already using Repeat to power replenishment SMS via Postscript, it had proven that Repeat’s ability to understand when a customer is in a high-leverage retention Moment delivers an LTV lift for customers opted in to SMS. Bringing that timing intelligence and Moment recognition into direct mail was easy.

Repeat customers who also use PostPilot can leverage Repeat’s “Due to Replenish” profile property in Klaviyo to automatically deliver direct mail to customers when they’re most likely to reorder specific products they previously purchased. (Directions are here, if you want to try it yourself.)

Armed with this confidence, Dr. Squatch kicked off its direct mail test with Repeat data.

A Faster Test, And Strong Results

Without needing to run analysis around repeat purchase behavior, Dr. Squatch was able to get to market with their test faster—and test different considerations.

In their test design, Dr. Squatch used Repeat-powered Replenishment Moment data to time direct mail sends, but also looked at other timing. The result? Repeat-provided timing data led to a 10% lift in 90-day repeat purchase rate, a main KPI for the Dr. Squatch team.

“Clearly, time matters,” Rankovic said. “Sending at the right time based on what the customer first purchased is one of the most important variables we can deliver against here.”

When Black Girl Vitamins Co-Founder Nnamdi Ugwu talks about retention, he does so in a way that’s similar to the team that famously reignited Yum! Brands: "Sales Overnight, Brands Overtime."

The SOBO system, as it’s called, is designed to remove constant discounting and a heavy reliance on performance marketing, instead using marketing touchpoints to reinforce the brand.

"We are not the most unique product in the market,?" Ugwu said. "And if we become a product that people are buying on price, you know they're going to go somewhere else, and buy it,?"

While that sounds good in theory, it’s more difficult in practice.

One-Size-Fits-All Timing Fails to Deliver

To pull it off, Ugwu and the Black Girl Vitamins team decided to focus on activating sales at key Moments of the customer’s lifecycle—and using the remainder of its retention marketing calendar to focus on community and brand building efforts.

The challenge was identifying when specific customers entered specific Moments. Because the team is lean, there wasn’t time to analyze the timing around key Moments like Replenishment or Lapsed Customer, leaving the team with the task of optimizing around a single timeframe—45 days—for all customers, regardless of what they purchased.

"I think we looked at a conversion rate. It was not very impactful," Ugwu said. "I think we might have learned that down the road, but what we were doing was not working."

So, they partnered with Repeat.

Personalizing Moments for Every Customer

Repeat is the event generator for lifecycle marketers who want an easy way to activate customers during high leverage retention moments. For Black Girl Vitamins, this meant monitoring when customers were most likely to be in key Moments, like replenishment and lapsed customer prevention, and personalize email efforts during those Moments to help the brand meet its "sales overnight, brand overtime" goals.

Using Repeat, Ugwu and team not only better timed key emails, they also streamlined their processes for doing so and personalized the contents using Repeat’s dynamic content blocks.

To do it, Ugwu and team leveraged Repeat’s triggers for Replenishment and Lapsed Customer Moments, personalizing the timing of each email to the customer, based on their past purchase history. They also streamlined flows for these Moments by using Repeat’s dynamic content blocks, which allows Black Girl Vitamins to show their customers products they’re due to replenish or products they previously purchased. All with little work from the Black Girl Vitamins team.

"The product works," Ugwu said. "It does what it's supposed to do with minimal effort from our team."

The results weren’t just better personalization, but better business performance, too.

Repeat’s Better Personalization Allows for Less Discounting

The personalized approach to key Moments in the customer lifecycle allowed Black Girl Vitamins to pull back on discounts for returning customers. And the results are drastic: In Q1 2022, discounts accounted for nearly 30% of returning customer gross sales. In Q1 2023, that figure dropped to just 6.5%.

The result is a massive difference to LTV and margins.

"Once you've purchased from us, it's more about keeping you in the community with education , because I know Repeat is coming behind with, ‘It’s time,’" Ugwu said. "So, I don't want to be like here's 30 percent off. I've sort of delegated all that work to Repeat and I'm just focusing on product launches, interviews, and all of that. So, I think we're on brand building and Repeat is on the sales side of it, and I don't worry about it."