Hint Water unlocks ROI and time savings by consolidating email and SMS
$61K
saved per year by consolidating email and SMS in Klaviyo
83x
Klaviyo platform ROI in first 3 months with Klaviyo SMS
39x
SMS ROI in first 3 months with Klaviyo SMS
Hint Water makes water people actually want to drink, flavored with natural fruit essences. The growing brand offers sparkling and still water in 25 hydrating flavors, all with zero sugar and zero calories. Sold through major retailers like Kroger, Sprouts, Walmart, and Amazon, Hint also sells through a growing DTC channel, and manages their digital customer relationships with Klaviyo.
Learn how Hint Water uses Klaviyo B2C CRM for efficient, strategic omnichannel orchestration
Challenge: Losing time, insight, and money to a fragmented CRM stack
When Stephanie Johnson, lifecycle marketing manager at Hint Water, started in her role, she was a one-woman team outnumbered by two disjointed marketing solutions: Klaviyo for email, Attentive for SMS.
Hint was losing a lot of value in the gap between the platforms.
On an execution level, imperfect syncing between the platforms made it hard to understand customers.
Had a customer engaged with a message recently? It was hard to know in real time, which cut Hint off from basic “Recently engaged” segments.
Price was a big factor.
Did a multi-channel subscriber prefer one channel for a certain type of message? Johnson didn’t have the bandwidth to dig into channel affinity.
One major drag on her bandwidth: performance reporting. Manually reconciling data from two platforms with different attribution models was a timesuck.
Even worse, on a business level, two platforms cost substantially more than one. It was time for a more consolidated solution.
“Price was a big factor,” Johnson recalls.
Solution: Consolidating email and SMS in one autonomous B2C CRM
Hint decided to consolidate SMS with email in Klaviyo, and reclaim the time, insight, and money that had been leaking out of their CRM program.
Initially, they chose Attentive over Klaviyo SMS for its “fun, shiny” AI tools, but “Klaviyo has done a really great job with AI,” Johnson says.
Klaviyo has done a really great job with AI.
Klaviyo’s channel affinity AI, for instance, helps Hint factor dual subscribers’ channel preferences into their targeting.
With Klaviyo, Johnson can also easily create real-time segments of customers who recently engaged with email or SMS. The platform’s consolidated, multi-channel reporting saves time.
“Now we can look at a customer holistically,” Johnson says. “It’s not ‘This is how this customer behaves on email’ and ‘This is how this customer behaves on SMS.’ It’s just, ‘This customer behaves in this way.’"
Hint’s total cost of ownership for email and SMS has also dropped: they’re saving more than $60,000 per year on email and SMS.
Strategy: Cultivating long-term, omnichannel customer relationships
Johnson uses CRM to nurture not only high-value loyalists, but customers earlier in their journey. Now that email and SMS live in one platform, it’s easier than ever for her to turn a new sign-up into an omnichannel, lasting relationship with tactics like:
- Encouraging dual sign-ups on-site and in flows: With email and SMS in Klaviyo, Hint can convert web visitors to dual subscribers with a two-step Klaviyo pop-up. If someone chooses to only sign up for email, Hint’s welcome automation logic sends them targeted messaging, encouraging an SMS sign-up. Their prior stack couldn’t support this.
- Targeting campaigns based on channel affinity: Hint uses Klaviyo’s channel affinity AI to suppress customers from email campaigns who are more likely to engage with SMS next, and vice versa. This reduces redundant sends for dual subscribers, and creates a more responsive, engaging customer experience. In their first 3 months using SMS, this strategy helped boost email campaign engagement: click rate jumped 18% PoP, and revenue per recipient climbed 14%.
- Cross-channel nurture automations: Since consolidation, Hint has been able to address leads and one-time purchasers in a new way: with cross-channel nurture and post-purchase flows highlighting new products, instead of over-indexing on long-term customers. It’s helping to lift performance: Hint’s revenue from flows jumped 133% PoP in their first 3 months with Klaviyo SMS.
It’s not just Klaviyo’s sophisticated, omnichannel capabilities making all this possible. Hint’s new consolidated Klaviyo instance also frees up Johnson’s time, so she can think more holistically about the customer journey.
“I used to do a lot of duplicate work when we used separate platforms for email and SMS,” says Johnson. “With both channels in Klaviyo, the time savings are just huge, and I can use all the data at my fingertips more strategically.”
I used to do a lot of duplicate work when we used separate platforms for email and SMS. With both channels in Klaviyo, the time savings are just huge, and I can use all the data at my fingertips more strategically.
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