Boat Outfitters grows email and SMS revenue 71% after switching both to Klaviyo

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Boat Outfitters, a family-owned business based in Florida, has been serving the boating community with quality parts and accessories for 40+ years. Their expert team has built more than 100,000 custom boat parts for more than 3,500 boat models, and they also have a robust inventory of replacement boat parts and extras, from anchors to tackle boxes. The team makes customer service a top priority, happily answering customer questions via phone, and managing email and SMS communication with Klaviyo.

Learn why Boat Outfitters left their email and SMS point solutions to consolidate in Klaviyo B2C CRM

Challenge

When Boat Outfitters ran email and SMS out of two separate platforms—DotDigital and Attentive, respectively—the siloed, murky performance data made it hard to optimize their marketing funnel.

Email and SMS often both took credit for the same transactions, leading to double-counted revenue and fuzzy attribution.

Even when the team focused on their agency-managed email channel, they couldn’t tell at a glance what was working and what wasn’t. Aggregated engagement and deliverability metrics were hard to find.

“I am not managing email on a daily basis, and getting a sense of what was going on from a manager standpoint was a lot harder with DotDigital,” recalls JB Schneider, director of marketing at Boat Outfitters.

Getting a sense of what was going on from a manager standpoint was a lot harder with DotDigital.

It was only in talks with a prospective new digital growth agency, Marketech, that Boat Outfitters realized all their automations had been going to spam for a long time. They had been leaving a huge chunk of CRM revenue on the table.

It was time for some new martech that made their channels easier to monitor and grow.

Solution

Klaviyo stood out as a natural choice. Schneider had worked with the B2C CRM before, and found it more user-friendly and analytics-forward than DotDigital. Boat Outfitters hired Marketech, and the agency recommended Klaviyo, too.

But Boat Outfitters had originally chosen DotDigital due to its superior integration with their Adobe Commerce storefront. Could Klaviyo’s integration compete?

“We vetted Klaviyo’s integration with Adobe Commerce, and it had really improved,” Schneider recalls. “It wasn’t an issue at all.”

Boat Outfitters and Marketech were able to evaluate Klaviyo and migrate over quickly, with support from Klaviyo sales—and just before they had to renew with DotDigital.

We have clarity on our data in Klaviyo and we can see what’s working. That makes it easier to get the brand to put more resources behind email and SMS marketing.

“It was a week from, ‘Hey, there’s an opportunity here’ to ‘DotDigital is turned off and Klaviyo is turned on,” recalls Justin Cowperthwaite, founder and CEO at Marketech.

Immediately, Boat Outfitters had clearer visibility into email performance and deliverability. Their flows started delivering, too: in H1 2025, automations drove 63% of their total Klaviyo revenue.

Boat Outfitters decided to move their SMS marketing from Attentive into Klaviyo, too, which meant clearer attribution for both channels.

“We have clarity on our data in Klaviyo and we can see what’s working,” Schneider says. “That makes it easier to get the brand to put more resources behind email and SMS marketing.”

Strategy

Now that Boat Outfitters has email and SMS consolidated in Klaviyo, they’re working with Marketech to keep customers engaged with a few key tactics, like:

• A/B testing expanded SMS usage: Boat Outfitters is slowly growing SMS usage beyond transactional messaging. They rely on Klaviyo A/B testing to assess new efforts because their audience skews older, and they don’t want to overdo it. “Our approach is very methodical, and as we see successes, we expand,” Schneider says. “We’re seeing more and more productivity from SMS.”
• Coordinating automations across channels: For people who subscribe to both email and SMS, Klaviyo makes it easier to avoid redundant welcome flow messaging. “We are maximizing our opportunity to speak to our audience in a way that they interact with and that drives them back to the site,” Schneider says.
• Making dynamic product recommendations: Boat Outfitters has thousands of unique SKUs, and uses Klaviyo’s dynamic product feeds to show the right product to the right customer at the right time—whether it’s the SKU they just abandoned in their cart, or the product category they keep browsing. “We’re excited that Klaviyo can help us understand the clusters of products that get purchased together,” says Cowperthwaite.

“We’re glad we switched our email and SMS to Klaviyo,” Schneider says. “Now we can speak to our customers in one organized voice, and get a really integrated look at email and SMS performance.”

We’re glad we switched our email and SMS to Klaviyo. Now we can speak to our customers in one organized voice, and get a really integrated look at email and SMS performance