Buoy grows SMS revenue 5x YoY with Klaviyo B2C CRM

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Buoy makes unflavored, unsweetened liquid electrolytes that go with any beverage. Each formula is made with restorative minerals and supports a different health goal—from hydration to digestion. Buoy sells their product a la carte and via recurring subscriptions through an ecommerce store, and the brand has stayed in touch with customers using Klaviyo since inception.

Learn how turning on Klaviyo SMS unexpectedly transformed Buoy’s business

Challenge

Buoy’s challenge was counterintuitive: their funnel was a well-oiled machine. Their business was growing rapidly. Could they grow even faster?

They were using Klaviyo’s Meta and TikTok integrations to efficiently drive traffic to their site and grow their subscriber list.

They used Klaviyo for email marketing, and the channel, supported by performance marketing agency Kulin and their director of retention, Marika Tselonis, was “outperforming expectations,” says Eddie Zelenak, Buoy CMO.

When we first tried SMS, it was just not worth our time.

Buoy had tried an SMS platform years prior, but with email and SMS on separate platforms, they had worried about oversending to dual subscribers. Plus, their SMS provider hadn’t offered reliable enough support for a true channel kickoff.

“When we first tried SMS, it was just not worth our time,” says Zelenak.

But Buoy wanted to maximize their success. Was there more they could do?

Solution

As a test, Buoy turned on Klaviyo SMS.

“We thought Klaviyo SMS was going to catch a halo effect from our other owned channels,” says Zelenak. “We didn’t realize it was going to unlock a new level of revenue for Buoy.”

But once they had spent about a year building out the channel, it started to do exactly that. Klaviyo SMS worked in tandem with email, unlocking coordinated messaging, better targeting, and ultimately, breakthrough performance.

We thought Klaviyo SMS was going to catch a halo effect from our other owned channels. We didn’t realize it was going to unlock a new level of revenue for Buoy.

On Black Friday 2024, SMS marketing drove more than half of Buoy’s Klaviyo-attributed revenue—and Klaviyo revenue jumped 10x+ YoY, while total ecommerce revenue grew 9x.

Since then, they’ve added Klaviyo Marketing Analytics to their stack for even deeper insights into how different channels and segments convert, and how customer behavior is evolving.

“With email and SMS talking to each other in Klaviyo, we have better visibility into subscriber behavior than we ever could with the channels on separate platforms,” Zelenak says. “The data’s cleaner, and it’s easier to make strategic decisions.”

Strategy

With email and SMS in Klaviyo B2C CRM—along with ecommerce, shipping, and subscription data pulled in via integrations—Buoy can use segments and automations to powerfully personalize their SMS messaging. They use tactics like:

• SMS follow-ups in automations: Buoy sees strong results from multi-channel abandonment, shipping, and loyalty reminder flows—especially from the one-two punch of an email followed by a text for email recipients who engaged but didn’t convert. This is only feasible with email and SMS in the same platform, and YTD, their flow revenue is up 181% YoY. “Anytime we’re suggesting a new flow, we now have SMS touchpoints baked into it,” Zelenak says.
• Personalized SMS CTAs for product subscribers: To make SMS campaign conversions intuitive, Buoy often segments by product subscriber status, and sends different CTAs to different groups. Active product subscribers get a link to their account so they add to their subscription, whereas non-subscribers get a link to Buoy’s Shopify site.
• Real-time segmentation for SMS campaigns: During BFCM, Buoy wanted to send an unplanned SMS campaign—but only to people who had engaged with messaging or visited the website in the past few hours. With email and SMS together in Klaviyo, they were able to pull off this real-time segmentation confidently, without worrying about data syncing delays and errors.

Overall, it’s impossible to extricate the success of Buoy’s SMS program from the consolidated Klaviyo stack that makes their SMS strategy possible.

“Our SMS experience is relevant to who subscribers are and what they’ve done,” says Zelenak. “With Klaviyo, we can talk to them in the way that’s going to relate to them the most. That has gone a long way to nurture people.”

Our SMS experience is relevant to who subscribers are and what they’ve done. With Klaviyo, we can talk to them in the way that’s going to relate to them the most. That has gone a long way to nurture people.