Time for a change: Citizen Watch triples online orders from email after switching to Klaviyo

Citizen Watch is a pioneering watchmaker founded in 1918 that has become a multi-billion dollar global brand. With strong design principles and a respect for craftsmanship, Citizen watches have a very high build quality. The business is totally vertically integrated so that it controls every aspect of production and makes most of the components in-house in Japan. Citizen has recently taken steps to accelerate the brand’s online presence and enhance its ecommerce strategy.

Learn how Citizen dialled up email subscriptions and created a personalized welcome series that converts 11.5%

Challenge

Wind the clock back a year and Citizen’s UK online store was underperforming. Sales were stagnant and subscriber engagement was low. With DotDigital as its email platform the watchmaker wasn’t using any marketing automation, and subscriber sign-up forms had to be hard coded into the website. Anyone lucky enough to find the form and subscribe was welcomed with a basic notification triggered by the store. 

Without the data insights necessary to identify browser interest and intent, the brand had no way to retarget customers or recover sales that were otherwise being lost to shopping cart abandonment. Citizen recognised that it needed to up its game. It appointed digital agency Foundation Commerce to rebuild the ecommerce store and create a new CRM strategy for the brand.

Solution

Foundation Commerce advised Citizen to switch from DotDigital to Klaviyo because the platform integrates with Adobe Commerce (Magento) to provide a highly scalable marketing solution fit for a global brand. Klaviyo’s pre-built automations, sign-up forms, segments and data insights are powerful yet very accessible, with user-friendly functionality that’s allowed the Citizen team to quickly get up to speed.

We’ve seen huge success using Klaviyo across our managed accounts portfolio so when Citizen sought our advice, we didn’t hesitate. Since migrating to Klaviyo, Citizen has not only managed to increase engagement and nurture better relationships with customers, the brand also seen a significant boost in conversions and sales.

Klaviyo forms replace the native Adobe Commerce forms, which were previously hidden behind a link. The multi-step flyout and embedded forms are easy for the team to edit and test, and they have a completion rate of between 1% and 6%.

Klaviyo’s integration with Adobe Commerce also allows Citizen to automatically generate, and insert into email, unique discount codes for subscribers. This personalized approach has proven to be more effective than using generic offer codes. To do this the brand simply sets up an offer in the Adobe Commerce store, and Klaviyo does the rest.

Strategy

While some customers are collectors, most people don’t buy a new watch very often, so Citizen’s strategy is heavily focused on new customer acquisition – namely, collecting and converting subscribers. 

New subscribers are nurtured towards making a purchase with a welcome email series that offers them a time-limited discount. The automated flow also educates subscribers about the brand’s heritage and introduces its new Eco-Drive battery-free watches as well as the best-sellers. With subscribers’ gender collected at sign-up, the brand can dynamically insert popular watches from the men’s and women’s collections into emails. This ensures the content is more relevant. The approach is phenomenally successful: 82% of recipients open the first email and 11.5% place an order from it. Overall, the email series generates a whopping 46% of online revenue.

Klaviyo’s abandoned cart flow means the brand can finally recover some of the potential revenue left behind by distracted shoppers. With a typical watch costing hundreds of dollars, converting 8.3% of abandoned carts makes a significant contribution to the bottom line. And, with subscribers’ date of birth being collected, the brand’s automated ‘happy birthday’ email is generating revenue too. 

In 12 months Foundation Commerce has tripled Citizen’s online revenue from email, and about 80% of that has come from automated email flows. This underlines how important it is to have the right technology in place.

Buying a watch is a considered purchase and so keeping subscribers engaged with the brand is important. Citizen uses the data in Klaviyo to build segments based on what people have been browsing, their profile data, and purchase history. This means that when the latest watch from the Marvel, Disney or Star Wars franchise comes out, the brand knows exactly who to target.

Klaviyo has been a game-changer for Citizen and revolutionised the way we communicate with customers; the ability to automate personalized emails based on customer behavior has improved engagement and conversion 10-fold. The insight and analytics tools provided by the platform have been invaluable; allowing us to make data-driven decisions to improve our marketing strategy. Furthermore the intuitive and user-friendly interface allowed our team to jump straight in with little training. I highly recommend Klaviyo to any business looking to improve and streamline their email marketing strategy.