Why Brava Fabrics says email is their most profitable marketing channel

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In 2015, Ivan Monells and Ramón Barbero founded Brava Fabrics in Barcelona after they realised that direct-to-consumer (DTC) brands were gaining traction in the United States. Before the term ‘digitally native vertical brand’ became popular, Brava Fabrics brought the concept to Spain, specifically for men looking for fair-trade fashion.

Brava Fabrics grew and began creating more diverse designs to appeal to a wider audience. They also adopted sustainable practices that have resonated with European consumers, particularly in Germany, the UK, and Scandinavia.

Just last year, the small, entrepreneurial team at Brava Fabrics grew their customer base by 74% and doubled their online sales.

Ivan, co-founder, and Ilia Laliashvili, marketplaces and performance executive, recently shared why they see email as their most effective marketing resource, and why they made the move to Klaviyo.

Why Brava Fabrics switched from Mailchimp to Klaviyo

As Brava Fabrics grew, they needed to upgrade their email service provider (ESP), which was too limited for their needs.

Mailchimp offered super basic email services. With Klaviyo, we can customise emails, automate flows, integrate with Shopify, and build excellent deliverability. The amount of emails that don’t go to spam is so important to us and Klaviyo handles this much better than other providers.

Ivan Monells, co-founder, Brava Fabrics

Investing in email marketing made sense to the Brava Fabrics team. While they’ve used paid advertising, like Google or Facebook ads, to find customers, those third-party channels often fall short — they don’t offer the control and data that owned channels give brands to create long-lasting connections with customers and higher customer lifetime value (CLV).

Plus, those channels have also become increasingly costly and difficult to yield a profitable return on investment. That’s why Ivan says Brava Fabrics sees email as the brand’s best digital marketing channel.

It’s common to invest a lot in paid media and use the cheapest plan for email. That makes no sense. Email marketing is the most profitable digital marketing channel, so it’s important to have a powerful platform.

Ivan Monells, co-founder, Brava Fabrics

How Brava Fabrics uses Klaviyo

Ashley also added that email segmentation allows her to introduce new products and collections. Brava Fabrics uses Klaviyo to create a memorable experience across the entire customer lifecycle without excessive time and resources.

Klaviyo gives us the opportunity to automate the entire customer journey — from when people visit the website, add something to their cart, and purchase something, to post purchase with reviews and advocacy.

Ilia Laliashvili, marketplaces and performance executive, Brava Fabrics

With Klaviyo, the Brava Fabrics team has created automated emails (flows) that trigger based on a customer’s behaviour. Every time someone takes the defined action (e.g., adds something to their cart), they get an email that’s personalised to their behaviour (e.g., an abandoned cart email).

We were really excited about flows. We only have to do the job once, optimise it, and then it works on its own. This was very appealing, and it works. We get more sales from our automated emails than from other campaigns.

Ivan Monells, co-founder, Brava Fabrics

These automated email campaigns account for 60 percent of Brava Fabrics’ total revenue from email.

Another key to Brava Fabrics’ success with email is how they use data to inform their marketing campaigns and strategy.

Klaviyo helps us to A/B test everything — flows, campaigns, pop-ups. We have analytics to see how everything performs.

Ilia Laliashvili, marketplaces and performance executive, Brava Fabrics

Brava Fabrics’ top automated email series

1. Back-in-stock email

One of Brava Fabrics’ highest performing automated email series is their back-in-stock flow.

Because they ethically source all of their products, when something goes out of stock, it typically takes time to come back. While Brava Fabrics want to notify interested customers when the product is available, they can only support as many additional purchases as their stock allows.

In Klaviyo, we can create small batches of customers — for example, 10 people — to send a back-in-stock email to. If the product is still unsold after a while, then the flow automatically sends to the next 10 people.

Ivan Monells, co-founder, Brava Fabrics

This helps Brava Fabrics promote their products without worrying about creating a poor customer experience.

I love this feature — it eliminates the customer’s frustration of receiving an email that the product is in stock again, checking it seconds after receiving the email, and the product is already out of stock because somebody else bought it.

Ivan Monells, co-founder, Brava Fabrics

2. Review followup email 

Brava Fabrics creates personalised flows based on product reviews.

Along with inspiring previous customers to purchase again, Brava Fabrics uses this email to give their advocates a discount code they can share with their friends.

When you give something a five-star review, you’re likely to recommend it to a friend. So if we know our happy customer is going to share our brand, why not make it easier?

Ivan Monells, co-founder, Brava Fabrics

For customers who give three stars or fewer, Brava Fabrics tries to turn the customer experience around in two key ways: by reaching out to them and by testing different discounts to entice them to shop again.

We’re running an A/B test right now to see what’s more impactful — a 10 or 30 percent discount to people who give a negative review.

Ilia Laliashvili, marketplaces and performance executive, Brava Fabrics

An A/B test that surprised (and helped) the Brava Fabrics team

Without data to guide your marketing decisions, you make a lot of assumptions about what your customers think, feel, and want.

And take it from the Brava Fabrics team — sometimes you can’t be sure of an idea until you test it.

In fact, they shared an example of an A/B test that truly surprised them and cemented the importance of A/B testing in their marketing strategy.

We used to offer a 10 percent discount if people subscribed. But when we tested a contest where people could win 300 euros in free products for signing up, we discovered the two offers performed identically.

Ivan Monells, co-founder, Brava Fabrics

This finding was surprising and beneficial to their bottom line. Giving only one customer a prize rather than a universal discount helped Brava Fabrics protect their marketing budget.

And the surprises didn’t stop there.

We even tested going from 300 to 1,000 euros and found that increasing the prize didn’t increase the conversion rate. So our current signup form is the best, and it’s all because of the A/B testing we could do in Klaviyo.

Ilia Laliashvili, marketplaces and performance executive, Brava Fabrics

How Brava Fabrics uses Klaviyo to benchmark their performance

Along with testing, Brava Fabrics use Klaviyo’s benchmarking feature to determine what areas of their email marketing perform well and what areas they could improve.

With the benchmarks we get in Klaviyo, we can see how we compare to other brands in our industry. This helps us understand exactly where we need to improve and when there’s a lot of room for improvement.

Ivan Monells, co-founder, Brava Fabrics

Brava Fabrics uses this data, which Klaviyo aggregates and anonymises for 100 similarly sized brands in related industries, to put their metrics into perspective. This gives them a more accurate comparison than just a generic average across all industries and business sizes so the data is more relevant to their business business.

Our lowest-performing metric right now is our unsubscribe rate. We’re finding a solution to that now. But we only realised it was an issue because of the benchmarks Klaviyo gives us, which we can use to create a roadmap for improvements.

Ivan Monells, co-founder, Brava Fabrics

What’s next?

As Brava Fabrics looks ahead, they want to decrease reliance on paid advertising. Email will play a big role in that strategic change, but they’re also experimenting with other channels.

Facebook is becoming more and more expensive, and we’re a little scared of that. So, we diversified our marketing, especially in terms of how we find new customers. We’re using search engine optimisation (SEO) and we’re also working with influencers instead of paid media.

Ivan Monells, co-founder, Brava Fabrics

They also plan to further refine their email marketing strategy to create even better returns on their investment.

Email marketing already makes up almost a quarter of our revenue, but we want to always be improving it. It’s a continuous process — sending new flows, optimising and testing — it’s a project that never ends. But it’s the most profitable digital marketing you can do, so it’s worth dedicating the time.

Ivan Monells, co-founder, Brava Fabrics