Klaviyo AI for Email Marketing: Highlights from A First-hand Experience

With AI’s stocks rising, MarTech platforms are incorporating artificial intelligence in their applications with gusto. As per Marketing AI Institute:

• 64% of marketers want to leverage AI to draw more actionable insights from marketing bulk data
  
• A whopping 80% need AI to tackle clockwork tasks  

Klaviyo, one of the leading MarTech platforms, launched Klaviyo AI in February this year — built to meet just the needs listed above, and more. 

But, as a business, you might not have time to learn new features, read manuals or attend training sessions. You don’t want to miss out on the opportunity, either. 

Well, you don’t have to. Our experts have done the job. As a Klaviyo partner, we’ve served over a hundred clients, run 1000+ campaigns on Klaviyo, and delivered over a thousand Klaviyo email templates. We know the platform inside-out. 
This post will give you a sneak preview of our experience with Klaviyo AI. Let’s get started then in the following order:

• AI-powered benchmarking 
• Email AI
• Flows AI
• Predictive Analytics
• Segments AI

1. AI-powered benchmarking 

In marketing, benchmarking is one of the most powerful, reliable ways of comparing business performance across your competitive spectrum. 

Without it, your KPIs are like a compass without the needle. 

For example, an e-commerce company can compare its quarterly performance with another e-commerce company within the same vertical. 

Operating within a context, benchmarking can give you reliable, actionable insights. 

Klaviyo’s AI-powered benchmarking not only fast-tracks the process, but updates and refines comparisons in real-time. Through peer-group matching, it identifies businesses similar to yours in size, niche, and scope. 

In the image below, Klaviyo AI compares one of our client’s businesses with similar businesses in the “Apparel & Accessories” industry. 

Not just general business performance, but Klaviyo AI also shows how your email campaigns are performing in comparison to your peers’.

In this example, the system compares our client’s email campaigns, followed by their deliverability performance just after. 

Whereas here, Klaviyo AI shows how our client’s SMS campaigns are performing. 

Next, Klaviyo AI compares our client’s flows with the peers’. 

Lastly, the system compares how our client’s sign-up forms are performing. 

In view of the above features, here are the benefits of Klaviyo’s AI benchmarking: 

• Benchmarking can be long-drawn-out, often stymieing the process of creative strategizing. But with AI, a potentially weeks-long affair is done in seconds.
  
• Klaviyo’s AI offers insights as precise as a Swiss watch. It generates Ford vs. Ferrari comparisons, not apple vs. oranges.
  
• The system gives you an all-round view of your performance. Tremendously granular, it stimulates your interpretive skills, leading to better insights.
  
• Armed with substantial data, you can engage with your stakeholders from a position of greater authority. You won’t just be rattling off numbers as before, but presenting useful narratives to the leadership.  

Note: Klaviyo’s AI-powered benchmarking is a type of external benchmarking.

2. Email AI

Klaviyo employs generative AI to power its Email AI feature. It helps generate email template sections or blocks in no time. Just describe how you would like a particular section to be and email AI will produce a relevant piece of copy for that block. Up to three drafts are generated. Here’s Email AI in action.  

First, describe the email section. Then, click on Generate drafts. Immediately, the drafts will be generated as shown in the following screenshot.

Klaviyo’s email AI also generates CTA buttons as shown above. 

However, it is important to note that email AI is currently in beta. In fact, the entire generative AI suite is in beta. So, you may have to take it up yourself after a point.

Email AI has the following limitations as delineated by Klaviyo:

• As a Klaviyo user, you can generate no more than 99 email sections per day.
  
• Wait for 24 hours before you’re able to generate sections again.
  
• The tool can’t generate product blocks, alt text, images, or URLs for links and buttons. 

In general, we’d recommend fine-tuning all AI-generated outputs, irrespective of a platform’s inherent limitations. Think of gen AI as a launch-pad only. It doesn’t do away with the necessity of having a copywriter in place.

3. Flows AI 

Flows AI also employs generative AI to build campaign flows from scratch. Just like email AI, you need to type out the description of your flow and generate it. 

Suppose you want to set up a “Product Purchase flow” for your email campaign. In the event of a purchase, you need Klaviyo to trigger a Thank You email, followed by a feedback/survey request. Accordingly, you can instruct the tool in this way:

“When someone makes a purchase, thank them and follow up with feedback or a survey email.” Then, click on Generate draft to generate the flow. 

In the following example, Flows AI generates a flow according to this description. 

Now, that’s a basic example of typical prompt engineering. The tool will prompt you to be more detailed in your instructions. 

On that note, here a few tips that might come in handy: 

• Be as specific as possible. Describe where and how the flow starts. Mention the number and length of delays. Explain the logic.
  
• Be super-proficient in the language you’re instructing in. Klaviyo AI is available in English, French, Korean, Italian, Spanish, German, and Brazilian Portuguese.
  
• Leverage any special characters to express your intention in a fuller manner. Break down your commands in bullets, if needed.
  
• Start with a simple flow, then expand as you go. 

If it sounds hard, ask your copywriter to read this and apply it. It’s a piece of cake! 

4. Predictive Analytics 

After turning an email subscriber into a customer, you can use predictive analytics to better upsell and cross-sell, boosting your sales. By tracking what your customers buy, you can recommend products they’re more likely to be interested in.

Klaviyo applies data science and machine learning algorithms to your data in order to come up with actionable insights.

Now, predictive analytics in Klaviyo AI involves understanding a few parameters as shown in the following screenshot. 

Let’s define the parameters: 

• Historic CLV: The total value of all past orders made by a customer. 
• Predicted CLV: A prediction of a customer’s annual spending. 
• Total CLV: The sum of historic and predictive CLV. 
• Churn risk prediction: The probability of a customer stopping placing orders over a period of time. 

Based on these insights, you can adjust your campaigns.

Suppose a customer’s historic CLV is $534. That’s the total value of all orders this customer has placed at your website. But their predicted CLV is $100. In other words, this customer is not likely to make a lot of purchases in the following year. 

The churn risk prediction, boiling at 85%, is naturally high. 

Now, given these numbers, the customer seems to be ripe for a targeted retention campaign. You can set up an email campaign accordingly. 

5. Segments AI

With Klaviyo’s Segments AI, you can describe a customer or customer action you need to find out and the tool will generate a targeted segment for you. 

Suppose you want to find out customers in your existing database with a high churn risk. Type out the following instruction for the AI tool: “Can you provide a list of customers in my existing database who are predicted to be at risk of churn or disengagement based on recent behavioral patterns or engagement metrics?” In the following image, you can catch the above instruction for the tool. 

On clicking Preview segment, you can see the profiles matching your request. 

Following that, Klaviyo will show a preview of the would-be segment. After you’ve reviewed the segment, the tool will go on to generate it. 

“You have the flexibility to modify the segment we’ve created for you at any time on the next screen. You can also search for any segment you’ve created with AI with our new klavio-ai tag,” reveals Jessica Schanzer, Klaviyo’s Product Marketing Lead. But you need to keep the following best practices in mind though:

• Add a consent statement in your instructions to the tool.
• Use Segments AI to create a new segment. You can refine it later on. 
• AI is not foolproof. Double-check all AI-created segments.
• Do manual edits in the segment editor as and when needed. Segments AI is a generative tool, NOT a strategy-builder.  

Note that Segments AI does not generate segmentation criteria for you. The goal of the tool is to guide you to a precise definition of the target segment.

Get started with Klaviyo AI with Mavlers!

Klaviyo AI has a lot of other features as well. In our guide, we wanted to show you how our email pros are leveraging it to help our clients.  

You can get in touch with us if you need help with all things Klaviyo. Our six-step email marketing process can take care of all your business needs. 

Not just email, we’re also using Klaviyo for transactional SMS. Read to find out.