Dollar Shave Club sees 30%+ reduction in TCO by consolidating CRM stack in Klaviyo

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Dollar Shave Club sells razors, shave accessories, and skincare products that are “f***ing great,” according to their viral launch YouTube clip from 2012 (current view count: over 28 million). They transformed their industry by offering high quality razors directly to consumers at a fraction of the usual price.

Over the past decade, this subscription-focused, digitally-native brand has disrupted the shaving and grooming category grown massively, and expanded from DTC sales into major brick-and-mortar retail chains. To manage their customer data, they rely on Klaviyo.

Learn how Dollar Shave Club uses Klaviyo B2C CRM to personalize the customer experience at scale

Challenge

Dollar Shave Club was growing fast and diversifying their product catalog—and their tech stack made it hard to personalize their customer experience at scale.

They used separate, complex SaaS platforms for email marketing and customer data, plus custom-built solutions for subscriptions and their ecommerce store—and getting even basic marketing activities done with this siloed stack took time and technical support.

Every email needed to be built with HTML. Pulling new customer data for segmentation could take a month or more.

“We had to get our developers involved in every single part of the email process,” recalls Melanie Fox, director of lifecycle marketing at Dollar Shave Club. “We’re a small and scrappy team, and we didn’t have the resources we needed to scale.”

We had to get our developers involved in every single part of the email process. We’re a small and scrappy team, and we didn’t have the resources we needed to scale.

That was especially true when it came to the data transformation and activation required to personalize their customer experience based on factors like tenure, frequency and purchase activity—It would take a prohibitive amount of manual work.

“With our prior tech stack, we had to use a lot of muscle,” says Bill Hudak, VP of acquisition and retention at Dollar Shave Club. “There was a lot of brute force and ad-hoc, manual work.”

To manage change smoothly and adapt to the market in real time, they needed a more usable, integrated tech stack.

Solution

Dollar Shave Club decided to migrate from their homegrown, high-maintenance systems to a modern SaaS stack: Shopify for ecommerce, Klaviyo for CRM, and Ordergroove for subscription management.

Why Klaviyo? “The interoperability and native integrations that Klaviyo brought to both Ordergroove and Shopify were best in class,” Hudak says. “Integrations can result in a reduction of TCO and dev resources required.”

The switch to Klaviyo alone reduced their TCO by more than 30%. Dollar Shave Club used Klaviyo to replace 3 tools: an email marketing platform; a standalone CDP, replaced with Klaviyo Data Platform (KDP); and a pop-up tool, replaced with Klaviyo forms.

After the digital transformation, they could run most CRM activities—and lean into personalizing their messaging—with minimal developer support. The lifecycle team used to work with 4 developers, and now they work with at most one.

Recently, Dollar Shave Club has added Klaviyo SMS and Advanced KDP, further cementing Klaviyo as their B2C CRM.

“Klaviyo SMS was a very easy choice,” says Hudak. “The biggest thing was having all our data in one platform, stored in cohesive customer profiles.”

Meanwhile, Advanced KDP makes it easier for Dollar Shave Club to transform and activate their centralized customer data—from email, SMS, their prior CDP, pre-built integrations with Ordergroove, Digioh, Gorgias, and more.

“The biggest unlock from Klaviyo has been personalization at scale,” says Fox. “We can do things we’ve never been able to do before because everything is under one roof. We can find our best customers and treat them like our best customers.”

The biggest unlock from Klaviyo has been personalization at scale. We can do things we’ve never been able to do before because everything is under one roof. We can find our best customers and treat them like our best customers.

Strategy

Now that Dollar Shave Club has email, SMS, and Advanced KDP live in Klaviyo, they’ve unlocked new levels of personalization across their customer experience. For example, they can now:

• Send a shipment alert flow with personalized up-sell offers: Dollar Shave Club alerts product subscribers whenever a new order is about to ship, and that email automation used to drive a lot of cancellations. With Klaviyo and its Ordergroove integration, though, they’ve been able to enhance the message with personalized add-on recommendations and enable one-click ordering. That way, customers can add a product to their upcoming shipment—once or as a subscription—without leaving their inbox. “Not only did that increase average order value, but it also decreased cancel,” Hudak says.
• Target their SMS sign-up pop-ups: Dollar Shave Club drives SMS sign-ups with targeted Klaviyo forms—so they can show only browsers without a Klaviyo profile a stellar SMS intro offer. “We surface SMS to drive incrementality, not to discount everybody,” Hudak explains. “The filtering we can do in Klaviyo for the pop-ups is really beneficial.”
• Target automations based on RFM segment: With Advanced KDP, Dollar Shave Club switched on easy, out-of-the-box RFM segmentation. Now, they send customers automated offers and rewards as they transition between groups—so their most loyal, champion customers get non-monetary rewards, and they can focus discounts on newly at-risk customers.

All of this is easier for Dollar Shave Club than ever—the consolidated B2C CRM makes more dynamic, personalized messaging possible, and saves the team time. They’ve seen a 60%+ reduction in campaign set-up time since the switch to Klaviyo.

Going forward, the Dollar Shave Club is committed to Klaviyo—they see the platform as a long-term, invaluable piece of the brand’s new, modernized stack.

“We look at Klaviyo as our B2C CRM—I know we have our best, most continuous customer record in Klaviyo, and I have a high level of confidence that the roadmap is anticipating all our needs,” Hudak says. “You’re going to have to pry Klaviyo from my cold dead hands.”

We look at Klaviyo as our B2C CRM—I know we have our best, most continuous customer record in Klaviyo, and I have a high level of confidence that the roadmap is anticipating all our needs. You’re going to have to pry Klaviyo from my cold dead hands.