How Travel Cat increased email revenue by 49% switching from Mailchimp to Klaviyo

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The lives of Emily Miethner and her husband changed when they unexpectedly rescued a few week old kitten in a family member’s backyard. They instantly fell in love with the kitten despite neither of them ever having cats as pets before.

As Emily and her husband began learning how to take care of their kitten, Emily quickly noticed a lot of misinformation about caring for cats. People suggested her cat should just sleep all day and didn’t need much stimulation or activity. Emily decided it was time to become a voice that shifted the narrative around cat care, and provide quality products that encourage cat owners to safely take their cats to explore beyond the great indoors.

Learn how Travel Cat uses first party data to increase customer engagement

Challenge

Travel Cat’s mission is to build a community around encouraging cat owners to safely bring their cats on outdoor adventures. Their success relies on their ability to understand individual customer behaviors and connect with them based on their cat needs.

After Mailchimp removed their Shopify integration in 2019, Travel Cat needed to find a new marketing solution that focused on customer first data and offered a strong integration with Shopify.

We switched to Klaviyo pretty early on and have been just blown away with how powerful it is, and how much you can do with it. As we’re growing, knowing that we can do a lot more with first party data and then sending custom messages and content to folks based on that information we got from them directly, that’s really exciting for us.

Emily Miethner, Co-founder of Travel Cat

Solution

Emily knew Klaviyo was the platform Travel Cat needed to continue their mission when she learned about Klaviyo’s robust integrations with Shopify and Yotpo. These integrations enable Travel Cat to view and segment by detailed customer purchase behavior and loyalty program activity in Klaviyo.

Strategy

Travel Cat uses Klaviyo to unite first party customer data in one place. When customers sign up to attend Travel Cat’s renowned virtual events about cats, Emily can segment customers in Klaviyo based on whether or not they signed up for the event and their attendance status. She can also send messages to customers based on geographic location, what products they have viewed or purchased, and their experience level with cats.

If a customer is buying an extra small harness, Emily can safely assume they’re buying for a kitten, which will need a larger size harness in the future when it grows bigger. This kind of segmenting and analysis empowers Travel Cat to send more relevant messages that result in more conversions.

We are global. We’ve shipped to over 75 countries. So we’re also using Klaviyo from a location perspective to be able to target people in different locations for reasons ranging from being able to announce to certain zip code that our product is now carried in a store near you, to letting people know when we’re going to be going back to in-person events.

Emily Miethner, Co-founder of Travel Cat