MC2 Saint Barth increases email revenue by 73% YoY

---

MC2 Saint Barth is a luxury beachwear brand whose Italian founders took their inspiration from the Caribbean island of the same name. Its stylish swimwear, beach apparel, and accessories use bold prints and bright colours, and are designed for chic travellers who want to stand out. The label has over 70 shops and it’s stocked by high-end boutiques around the world. 

As more luxury brands began to adopt a direct-to-consumer model, the business decided it was time to scale up its ecommerce activity. It moved its store to Shopify Plus and partnered with Klaviyo.

Learn how the luxury beachwear brand used exclusive offers to drive a 28% conversion rate from its welcome email

Challenge

MC2 Saint Barth’s active social channels were helping to build its email subscriber list but the brand wasn’t seeing strong ROI from the email channel. With no marketing automations in place, the brand couldn’t nurture new subscribers or convert shoppers who were browsing the store. The brand doesn’t tend to do big seasonal sales but it was keen to explore using more tactical incentives, such as coupon codes, to build audience engagement.

The small marketing team wanted to fully manage the channel in-house and needed a user-friendly solution that would enable them to build email automations easily.

Solution

MC2 Saint Barth chose Klaviyo’s intelligent automation platform because it offered an extensive range of pre-built automations, forms and email templates, removing the need for any coding or developer time. To get started, the marketing team simply had to customise the elements with the label’s branding, and then link them together using Klaviyo’s drag and drop flow builder. With a little support from Klaviyo’s onboarding team, the brand had pop-up forms and all the main automations live within a couple of weeks. 

Plus, Klaviyo’s integration with Shopify Plus made it easy to embed coupon codes into emails and track their usage. The coupons are very customer friendly: when subscribers click through to the website from an email, the saving is automatically applied at the checkout, so they don’t need to remember to copy and paste a code.

Strategy 

The luxury brand gives subscribers a 5% discount on their first purchase, and since fans of the label know that it never slashes prices, they recognise that this is a rare offer. As a result, the pop-up forms that capture subscriber details have an average submission rate of 15.8%—an exceptional rate considering around 2% is the norm. The welcome email has very high engagement too, with an 86% open rate and a 28% sales conversion rate, which is more than 10x the average in the fashion industry.

We think of our welcome series like a virtual handshake—it not only creates a fantastic first impression but swiftly boosts ROI, fostering lasting brand loyalty and increased conversions.

Savings are used as an incentive in just two other flows. One is the birthday flow, sent to subscribers who provide their date of birth when they sign up. The other is to reward customers who pre-order from a new collection before it’s been released. To thank these eager buyers for their patience, they’re given a coupon code to spend while waiting for their order.

Two more flows perform particularly well. An email sent to subscribers a few hours after they’ve browsed the site reminds them of the colourful beachwear they were perusing and encourages them to come back to the store to take another look. This converts at 2.4%. And those who get as far as adding items to their shopping cart before disappearing receive two reminders that convert at 2.8%. This abandoned cart flow uses a conditional split so that MC2 Saint Barth can vary the message for carts of different values—and offer free shipping as an incentive for high-value orders, for example.

The brand’s high performing flows generate 45% of the revenue attributed to email, and overall, the channel has grown 73% YoY.

Our email channel’s consistent growth highlights its pivotal role in our strategy amplifying the overall success of our brand.