Klaviyo unlocks data for their entire organization with Heap

Klaviyo is a marketing automation platform that helps eCommerce companies grow as fast as possible by making it easy for them to send targeted and personalized email and Facebook campaigns. Klaviyo is built on the premise that using user data to power better marketing decisions and campaigns is the only way to be successful in a highly competitive industry like eCommerce. When it came time to select a web analytics provider, the Klaviyo team was committed to working with someone who brought the same competitive edge to them that they bring to their customers.

Moving beyond the basics

Before Heap, Klaviyo used Google Analytics for basic reporting, but Brian Whalley, Director of Product Marketing and Operations, felt that the insights they were getting were limited to “vanity metrics.” His team could answer simple questions like How many signups did we have last week? or How many visitors did this marketing page have? but struggled to understand more specific trends over time, like attribution, or the highest performing lead sources down the funnel. Setting up funnels was a challenge because Brian found that he often lacked the data he needed and it took a lot of manual work to get it, making it frequently out of date.

Klaviyo, Brian Whalley

Brian Whalley, Director of Product Marketing and Operations

Brian knew his team needed an event-based analytics solution, but from previous experience he also knew that significant time and effort would be involved in getting the level of detailed tracking necessary for full analysis. Maintenance would be ongoing, and Brian wanted something that could keep pace with his growing team and evolving product. A colleague mentioned Heap’s automatic data collection and retroactive analysis, and Brian was immediately interested.

As Brian put it, “One of the problems with a tool like Mixpanel for early stage companies is that you don’t know what kinds of questions you’re going to be asking next month, or what you’ll be interested in. It’s pretty rare to have that much forethought or insight into your future, so the idea of a virtualized analytics platform that lets me come in three months later to re-define our deployment and have backfilled data for every possible event was immediately appealing.”

The Marketing team’s mandate

Adoption of Heap started with a mandate to find out where people were coming from, what those people were doing and how they progressed through the product. The advantages of Heap’s retroactive analytics were immediately felt.

“Having a tool where all the data is always available and verified, like Heap, gives us a lot of confidence that we’re coming to the right conclusions and understanding our problems in the right way.”

Something that was important to the Marketing team was to understand which eCommerce platforms their potential customers were using, and which of those platforms signaled a likelihood to convert to paying customers. By understanding these trends, the Marketing team can better focus campaigns around those platforms.

The Marketing team has also integrated data from their A/B testing platform in Heap, so they can correlate product behavior data with the experiment a user was subjected to. This has helped them identify which tests are producing leads that are the most engaged and most successful with their platform. By using this data to iterate on their testing they’ve tripled conversion on some pages.

Once the Marketing team started to see success answering questions and performing more sophisticated analysis than had previously been possible, the Product, Sales and CS teams all wanted to adopt Heap as well. Brian was surprised at how comfortable his colleagues were using the tool. Even the less technical users at Klaviyo were quick to get up to speed, and as Brian says, Heap “encourages experimentation and new ways to look at things and ask questions in a self-service manner.”

Supercharging analysis with Salesforce

Klaviyo uses Salesforce as their CRM and quickly ran into a problem where the source of their sales data wasn’t available in their analytics tool. Brian wanted a way to perform analysis in Heap using data that lived in Salesforce, such as their customers’ revenue data, company size, or lead and opportunity status. “We’ve started to match product behavioral usage against Salesforce fields, which is really useful for both the product and the Sales team,” says Brian. By taking advantage of Heap’s integration with Salesforce, Brian’s team was able cut down manual work of joining several datasets that would usually take hours to just a few clicks in Heap where Salesforce data is now available automatically alongside behavioral data.

One of the most valuable insights this has enabled is understanding which Klaviyo product behavior trends lead to an increase in revenue for their customers. Since they integrate with eCommerce platforms and have their customers’ performance data in Salesforce, they’re able to bring that data into Heap to correlate success with product behavior. By understanding how usage of their product leads to greater success for their customers, Klaviyo can quantify the revenue lift that their product brings to their customers, making it very sticky. This data also helps the Product team inform which features to focus on and helps Sales and CS to ensure success for trial users and paying customers alike.

Klaviyo SFDC

Heap as a central resource

Heap was initially introduced to help the Marketing team become more sophisticated with their analysis and better understand how to attract the best customers, but its use has spread throughout the company making Heap a crucial resource for the organization. While Heap immediately became the primary method for determining attribution, the platform now also allows Brian and his team to accurately predict what sources produce leads that end up being the most successful Klaviyo customers.

They’ve also incorporated A/B testing to understand which experiments lead to the best product engagement and the Sales and Customer Success teams use product behavior data in Heap to increase sales and support efficiency. Product managers use Heap to plan their roadmap and build features they know their customers will love. Klaviyo’s company-wide success is a testament to the power of unlocking data for the whole organization.

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