Over $30,000 in yearly savings: How switching to Klaviyo from SMS point-solutions leads to better value and fewer costs

Two marketers embarked on a mission of SMS discovery, hoping to find a different platform to meet their business needs and deliver tangible, measurable results. This is their story.

The challenge with stand-alone SMS platforms

When discussing the major obstacles of managing email and texts in two different platforms, Tyler Osborne and Jacob Sappington separately lamented on the same struggle: inaccurate attribution and wildly inflated calculations of SMS revenue. 

The issue arose because their SMS tool wasn’t speaking with their email platform, so they didn’t have access to the full picture of their customers’ data. And while they thought their texts drove a large chunk of their sales, this turned out to be incorrect.

SMS-only software doesn’t know what’s happening on the email front. You’ll hear people say, ‘I’m seeing an excellent SMS return-on-investment (ROI),’ when in reality, it’s because their attribution is really convoluted.

Jacob Sappington, Partner at Homestead Email & SMS

Beyond the faulty reporting, Tyler, who previously used Emotive, expressed his disappointment in the customer experience that resulted from sending messages from two disjointed communication tools—not to mention, which also prevented his data from syncing in real-time.

Say I send an email to my entire list from one platform and then send the same content in a follow up text message from another, without considering if people have already converted on the email. It’s wasteful—both for the business and its customers. It feels like overkill to them.

Tyler Osborne, Lifecycle Marketing Manager at Beauty Industry Group

Jacob, once a Postscript user, agreed.

It’s bothersome to your subscribers if you send a text and an email to them at the same time. Plus, when you do that you’re only giving yourself one opportunity to make a sale.

Jacob Sappington, Partner at Homestead Email & SMS

Bringing email and text messages under one roof

Tyler and Jacob decided to move to Klaviyo and consolidate the management of their email and text outreach into a single platform. By making the switch, they were able to make smarter decisions that positively affected the entire customer journey and keep money in their pockets. 

Tyler specifically commented on how the switch improved his day-to-day processes. He shared that Klaviyo was instrumental in helping him keep data from multiple brands organized in one location.

He also described the benefits of Klaviyo’s attribution model: A last-touch attribution paired with a realistic one-day window allows him to capture results that’re directly in-line with his clients’ final revenue numbers. Now, there’s no need for guessing games. 

Jacob touched on the new ability of his email and SMS channels to function as a cohesive unit within Klaviyo, rather than two conflicting entities.

Because their customer data lives in a single source of truth, they can map out campaigns and flows that combine email and text to share their messages in a way that’s considerate and relevant to their audience.

With Klaviyo, we’re able to easily see when emails and texts are going out, all from the same system. This lets us space out our texts and emails so we don’t bug or annoy our subscribers. We get more value for every message we send now, which ultimately leads to more revenue for our business.

Jacob Sappington, Partner at Homestead Email & SMS

Quality over quantity is what truly produces results

With access to both his email and SMS lists, plus unlimited data about his audience’s interests, Jacob and his team could build smarter segments in a flash—ones based on: 

• Customer profile data
• Events from third-party integrations
• Predictive analytics
• Custom-built content

And others only possible through Klaviyo. It was a breeze teaching his team how to apply their segments to text automations (or flows), since Klaviyo’s features are standardized across email and text. 

Instead of blasting one message to his entire SMS list, he can create unique groupings of his subscribers based on what he knows will be meaningful to them and consequently provide more value in a fewer amount of messages.

Plus, he was able to cut his SMS costs down by about $1,000 per month when he switched, since Klaviyo’s pricing structure is a flat rate, rather than a per-send model. 

Jacob wasn’t the only one celebrating savings. Tyler projected he’ll retain over $20,000 in 2021 compared to 2020 because he decided to partner with Klaviyo. That’s a lot of extra change Tyler can now pour back into other areas of his business.

The accuracy of the data we have access to in Klaviyo is unmatched, which means we can send the right messages without wasting what adds up to thousands of dollars. And the best part? Even though we’re spending less on SMS, our revenue from text messages has significantly increased compared to last year.

Tyler Osborne, Lifecycle Marketing Manager at Beauty Industry Group