What you need to know

• The role of marketers needs to encompass every customer interaction, necessitating a focus on pre-sale, post-sale, retention, and loyalty, says Klaviyo CMO, Jamie Domenici.
• Data suggests loyal customers are significantly more likely to make repeat purchases and recommend brands to others.
• Klaviyo is shifting focus from small entrepreneurs traditionally out of the Shopify ecosystem into midmarket customers while maintaining strong relationships with existing clients.
• Successful brands must ensure seamless connectivity between customer interactions and internal systems, a lesson demonstrated by the spike in demand examples of Rhianna's Fenty Beauty during the Super Bowl, plus July Luggage, with the return of Australian Olympians from the Paris Olympics.
• To do this, brands need to tackle challenges with siloed teams, which complicates communication and optimisation of marketing efforts.
• As budgets tighten, businesses are recognising the need to integrate customer lifecycle management across various marketing channels to improve ROI.

Every single interaction with a customer matters in a digital era where loyalty and return business are a key drivers of top line growth, according to Jamie Domenici, CMO of Klaviyo, a customer data and marketing automation platform who spoke with Mi3 during a recent visit to Australia.

“Anybody who has an idea, who has a store, who has the market, has to really think about how they hone their brand, and the way that customers think about it is they expect more. They're looking for great brands,” she said. But it's not just about marketing campaigns.

“It's every single interaction you have with the customer. So what we're finding more and more is the role of the marketers themselves has changed. In B2C companies they are the ones who have to think about every single interaction," Domenici said. “You can’t just think about sending an email or sending a text.

“You have to think about pre-sale, post-sale, retention, loyalty, every single interaction. You have to think about it with millions of interactions, down to the individual.”

That can get complicated depending on the industry.

“With Fast Fashion, you have so much access at your fingertips, but more and more people are buying online. You can't try your size, so you have to buy multiple. I was talking to another customer, Culture Kings. They were saying the group's return rate is so low, because – in their words – dudes don't like to return," Domenici comments. "They think about how to get customers to buy more at that first sale and more at your second and third sale. Loyal customers are much more likely to buy, 50 per cent more likely to according to Deloitte, and 30 per cent more likely to recommend you to a friend.

“Thinking about that first sale matters. But the more important thing is that ongoing conversation and interaction you have with your customer at every single touch point.”

Accordingly, Domenici said the modern marketer’s role has become more complex, and much more dependent on technology and personalisation through every interaction.

Domenici is a career B2B marketer, although she started in operations at Osisoft. Her shift into marketing began in marketing ops when she moved to Ingres, a company bought by Computer Associates at the height of the relational database wars in the mid-1990s. CA was then sold onto private equity in 2005 as the tide was going out on the centrality of the technology.

She also has a 10-year stint with Salesforce under her belt in both marketing and ultimately in sales as the Global Senior VP of Customer Success. She moved to Klaviyo in mid-2023 after a detour via Goto, a business comms and IT support platform many people probably remember better as LogMeIn.

It’s a serious enterprise B2B pedigree, and that’s important for Klaviyo, which is evolving beyond its base of Shopify entrepreneurs who were its singular focus in the early days and increasingly into the midmarket space, while still commending the loyalty of its core customers.

“SMBs are still our largest in terms of customer count, but over the last year our million dollar plus mid-market customer base has doubled, [maybe] even tripled," Domenici said.

She attributed the success of the transition - at least in part - back to the core areas of focus that made the company successful with entrepreneurs in the small to medium B2C market where Klaviyo cut its teeth.

“The key pillars of our company and product are built on that foundation of entrepreneur ease of use, simplicity, integration, everything in one place, integrations to your external apps. At the heart of what we do is help you make sense of the data. What we do very, very well, is capture, ingest, and integrate all of those data interactions into one place," she explained.

Scaling to brand ambassadorial demand

As the customers scale, so do the demands on Klaviyo’s systems and its support, a point reinforced by executives from July Luggage who spoke on the same panel as Domenici at SXSW.

Recalling these comments she told Mi3, “July luggage was on stage, and has just opened its 10th store. They got a brand pop from the Olympics as the luggage of choice for the Australian Olympians."

Domenici said Athan Didaskalou, July Founder told her later, "The day we went live, our systems were overwhelmed with demand.”

The spike happened when the Australian Athletes arrived home from the Olympics adorned with their meddles, and were met by the Prime Minister carrying their July Luggage.

“They got a ton of demand, and a brand moment that was incredible, hard to replicate. And it's hard to replicate because they didn’t know what they didn’t know," Domenici said.

Onstage, Didaskalou also called it "the coolest marketing moment we never paid for and so for us, that was a signifier of where the brand has come."

Recalling her conversation with Didaskalou, Domenici said the July product line sold out. “They did an email to their whole database and it sold out within three minutes, or something ridiculous. One of the key learnings for them was underestimating the demand from the brand partnership.”

Luckily July's systems and processes stood up to the pressure.

Managing success can be a significant issue for B2C markets – that means ensuring seamless connectivity between the top of the funnel, and the systems and processes underneath that support it. That’s where Klaviyo kicks in, Domenici said. She also gave the example of Rhianna’s beauty brand Fenty Beauty and its experience at the Super Bowl.

“It’s one of the largest beauty brands in the world. When she went on and did the Super Bowl halftime, she didn't tell her team that she was going to pull out her product and put it on," Domenici explained.

What happened next became the stuff of viral marketing legend as consumers almost immediately poured online chasing the $44 Fenty Beauty Invisimatte Instant Setting and Blotting Powder, and Google searches spiked by 833 per cent. Forbes described it as "A US$6M payday in 3 seconds."

Per Domenici,“I met the woman who runs their [Fenty Beauty's] CRM and digital footprint. While they didn't set up for that demand, they had the infrastructure in place to manage it. Because of the amount of people that went to their website that day, and purchased that day, they were able to capture all that information, store it in their database, use it to retarget, offer secondary ads. That’s what Klaviyo does, really well.”

Stuck on silos

Asked about key pressures facing her clients in a tough market, silos emerged once more as a key pain point for Domenici.

“The way they organise their teams. They have somebody who's running their paid media, that's their SEM, SEO, Instagram, Facebook, meta, their TikTok store," she commented. They are also overseeing brands, the commerce store, the CRM as well as the data infrastructure and the communications.

That’s a lot of silos and it's a major pain point for customers. “They want to run very lean organisations, and they're finding more and more that they have to break down those silos. They’ll have one person who does text, one person who does email, and one person who does social. And those people don't talk to each other," Domenici continued.

“They're all doing things great, but as budgets get tighter and tighter they have to optimise. They recognise that customer lifecycle is in every interaction. If they can tie those together through omnichannel architecture and better interactions and taking the next-best step, they can drive higher ROI at a lower cost.

“That’s the goal of every CMO.”