Switching to Klaviyo for email & SMS powers KURU Footwear’s best BFCM ever

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KURU Footwear’s mission isn’t to sell shoes—it’s to fight foot pain, and it’s succeeding. Self recently named the Kuru Pivot one of the best walking shoes for people with plantar fasciitis, or heel pain.

That’s thanks to the DTC retailer’s patented sole technology, which molds to the wearer’s foot and cradles the fat pad under the heel: KURUSOLE. It’s in every KURU shoe style, whether it’s a design for working on your feet, running, or supporting flat feet. The patented innovation is key to the business — and so is the way KURU communicates its benefits.

Learn why KURU Footwear consolidated email and SMS in Klaviyo

Challenge

In 2022, KURU Footwear ditched their messaging and ecommerce tech stack—Listrak for email, Attentive for SMS, and Magento for ecommerce—for Klaviyo and Shopify.

Why? Splitting email and SMS across two platforms posed reporting challenges, and limited cross-channel functionality. Plus, email was tied up in glitchy, clunky Listrak, where flows were hard to set up, let alone optimize.

“I straight up didn’t A/B test our flows in Listrak, because it was so complicated to set it up and it was glitchy and the reporting wasn’t reliable,” says Stacey Bishop, Kuru Footwear’s email marketing manager.

I straight up didn’t A/B test our flows in Listrak, because it was so complicated to set it up and it was glitchy and the reporting wasn’t reliable.

Solution

The full tech stack migration took 6 months, and Bishop worked on it for 3.5, focusing on transitioning email to Klaviyo piece by piece. She started by pulling daily campaigns into Klaviyo, and running them with links to KURU’s Magento storefront.

Meanwhile, in a test Klaviyo account, she integrated Klaviyo with KURU’s new Shopify store and apps like Okendo, Loyalty Lion, and Fairing—exploring how the new tech would work in a private sandbox.

Finally, the big day arrived: KURU turned the old tech off, and the new tech on. Klaviyo allowed Stacey to clone her test account into KURU’s main live account, which helped make the day a success.

“With the amount of technology that we were migrating at the same time, I was pretty happy to turn everything off and back on and not break everything,” Bishop says. “I was able to send out my regular daily campaign that day and have it convert.”

Strategy

Bishop has unlocked three major new email capabilities with Klaviyo:

• Survey-based personalization: In 2023, Bishop plans to launch custom retention journeys based on a simple “Pain Pulse” survey: Has your pain gotten better since buying KURU? A yes will lead to an upsell flow; a no to educational content about foot health.
• Flow optimization: Now that KURU can A/B test flows in an intuitive way, Bishop has hired DTC digital marketing agency Structured to lead the optimization charge.
• Hybrid email-and-SMS campaigns: For Black Friday 2022, this looked like an email that drove to an SMS signup landing page. The CTA: Sign up for first dibs on the sale. It drove KURU’s best BFCM of all time.

Leveraging the power of SMS and then backing it up with email in the same platform, it’s made it really easy to strategize.

“Leveraging the power of SMS and then backing it up with email in the same platform, it’s made it really easy to strategize,” Bishop says. “It makes it easier for me to coordinate big launches.”